THE LIGHTNING AND THE EARTHQUAKE: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ANFECHTUNG OF LUTHER

By focusing discussion through Søren Kierkegaard's view of Martin Luther's initiation into the monastery (the lightning strike), it is suggested that an analogy can be discerned for Kierkegaard's own sense of divine vocation (the portentous ‘earthquake’ which he makes enigmatic reference to) and the ensuing self‐mortification of melancholy and religious scrupulosity which commentators have suspected in both figures. Kierkegaard's often ambivalent critique of Luther's Anfechtung is thus read as bearing ironic significance for his own struggles with ‘spiritual trial’ [Anfægtelse]. In this reading, Luther's Anfechtung is taken to signify for Kierkegaard both the anguish inherent to the authentic God‐relationship and also the dangerous possibility of the individual imagination's [Phantasi] capitulation into the precariously embellished realm of ‘the fantastic’ [Phantastiske]. It is here that Kierkegaard's emphasis upon individual responsibility – contrasted with Luther's concentration upon the role of the devil – demonstrates the fundamental differentiation between Kierkegaard's anatomy of Anfægtelse and Luther's Anfechtung.     

THE HOLY & WHOLLY OTHER: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ALTERITY OF GOD

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other.     

Kierkegaard's anti-ecclesiology: the attack on ‘Christendom’, 1854–1855

Abstract

This article examines Kierkegaard's attack on the Danish state church in 1854–1855, beginning with Kierkegaard's rejection of Martensen's application of the term ‘witness to the truth’ to the recently deceased primate of the Danish church, J. P. Mynster. For Kierkegaard a witness to the truth is the person who emulates Christ's life of suffering and lives in poverty and abasement. It is an insult to the memory of the ‘glorious ones’ of the past to apply this term to the worldly, self-serving Mynster. The article goes on to consider Kierkegaard's conception of the heterogeneity of Christianity with the world, before considering Kierkegaard's rejection of the state church as a confusion of church and state which eliminates the Imitatio Christi essential for genuine Christian existence. The failure of the state church and its clergy to live according to the New Testament means that they are an abomination, and public worship is a blasphemous insult to God. The paper concludes by considering what lessons can be learned from Kierkegaard's radical anti-ecclesiology.     

The Sacrifice of Silence: Fear and Trembling and the Secret of Faith

This article examines the important hermeneutical and theological relation between silence and sacrifice in Søren Kierkegaard's (1813–55) divisively enigmatic Fear and Trembling. I contend that this relation becomes clearest when the silence of Abraham is explicated in relation to his esoteric proclamation that ‘God himself will provide a lamb for the burnt offering’. In Abraham's reply to Isaac, the secret of Abraham's faith is concomitantly revealed (as a trust in the notion that ‘with God all things are possible’) and concealed (as a paradoxically ‘impossible’ possibility which cannot be adequately conveyed to ‘the other’). This thereby proposes a qualitative distinction between Abraham's reverent silence before God and his aporetic silence before the other.     

Immediacy ‐ subjectivity ‐ revelation

Kierkegaard's fundamental view of life was negative and Gnostic. It was through his interpretation of life that his vision of the nothingness of existence became positive. What formed the material of Kierkegaard's interpretation was the common experience of existence, what ‘all’ men know. His concept of existence has a threefold content : immediacy, subjectivity, and the Christian Revelation. Immediate reality that is not made content of subjectivity becomes empty changeableness, and subjectivity that does not appropriate immediacy deprives itself of the concrete (as with the mystic). Immediacy's ‘text’ first acquires a qualitative transcendent content through the ‘repetition’ of subjective choice. Kierkegaard takes this appropriation of the immediate to be also the self‐development of subjectivity. Consciousness of guilt is an expression of a God‐relationship. Implicated with this consciousness is the consciousness of the nothingness of everything — echoed in man as dread. Yet even when subjectivity is conscious of guilt the truth remains immanent in subjectivity. In the Christian Revelation truth is outside man: subjectivity is untruth (sin).     

The doubled movement of infinity in Kierkegaard and in Sūfism

S?ren Kierkegaard was a very rigorous critic of traditional philosophical thinking and speculative systems. According to his theory it is possible that there is a logic system, but not a system of life. If such a system exists, it can be known only to God. Man can attain the meaning of life only by his own relationship to God. However, this relationship cannot be explained by philosophy because it has to do with a transcendent ‘double movement of infinity’ which takes place between God and the individual. Like philosophy, mysticism cannot explain one's relationship to God. The difference is that philosophy neglects God as the absolute starting point, while mysticism forgets that an individual—after he has experienced divinity—may return to the real world. The self need not disappear in divinity. The dialectic of the relationship between God and man implies that both poles (God and man) are present, thus ‘the infinite difference between God and man’ does not disappear. Since Sūfism is a type of Islamic mysticism, it may be said that a Sūfi cannot witness God's truth if he remains in his union with God. It is therefore relevant to draw some parallels between Kierkegaard's view and a comparable Sūfi view about the human relationship to God.     

Do You Have the Heart to Come to Faith? A Look at Anti‐Climacus' Reading of Matthew 11.6

In Practice in Christianity, Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Anti‐Climacus enters into an extended engagement with Matthew 11.6, ‘Blessed is he who takes no offense at me’. In so doing, he comes to an understanding that ‘the possibility of offense’ characterises the ‘crossroad’ at which one either comes to faith in Christ's revelation or rejects it. Such a choice, as he is well aware, cannot be made from a neutral standpoint, and so he is led to propose that it is ‘the thoughts of the heart’ (i.e. a person's disposition) that constitute the pivotal factor in determining whether or not God will reconcile a person into the Christian faith. In this paper, I discuss Anti‐Climacus' interpretation of Mt. 11.6 and consider his reasons for interpreting a person's predisposition as being so decisive for faith.     

Toward a ‘Catholic’ Reading of Kierkegaard

Historically, some Catholic readers have been suspicious of Kierkegaard's writings; viewing him as an irrational Protestant irreconcilably at odds with Catholic thought. Nevertheless, the unexpected yet favorable mention of Kierkegaard in John Paul II's Fides et Ratio is an indication that Kierkegaard's writings are not so easily dismissed. One may be justified in asking: what account can be given to explain such a shift in how the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard changes from a polemical rejection to a papal endorsement during the 20th century? In this review essay, I will explore some recent Kierkegaard research that provides – or at least, provides some of the groundwork for – a positive ‘Catholic’ reading of Kierkegaard. Space does not permit an exhaustive exposition of each book, so I will highlight the salient features of each to underscore a new trend that is emerging in Kierkegaard studies.     

Art and the ‘Morality System’: The Case of Don Giovanni

Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, poses a number of significant philosophical and aesthetic challenges, and yet it remains, for the most part, little discussed by contemporary philosophers. A notable exception to this is Bernard Williams's important paper, ‘Don Juan as an Idea’, which contains an illuminating discussion of Kierkegaard's ground‐breaking interpretation of the opera, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical‐Erotic’, in Either/Or. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author's (A) approach here is, in some respects, reminiscent of a currently rather fashionable narrative‐inspired moral philosophy, of which Williams himself is perhaps the most impressive recent exponent. In the light of this apparent methodological confluence, Williams's disagreement with A about the meaning of Don Giovanni's final two scenes seems particularly significant. By offering an interpretation of Don Giovanni that both retains A's fundamental ideas and manages to get round the problems in Williams's account, I will show that the greatness of Mozart's opera is largely a function of the challenge it presents to the ‘morality system’.     

Kierkegaard's Phenomenology of Spirit

Kierkegaard's preoccupation with a separation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ runs through his work and is widely thought to belong to his rejection of Hegel's idealist monism. Focusing on The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, I argue that although Kierkegaard believes in various metaphysical distinctions between inside and outside (the inwardness of faith and the outwardness of ethics and language; the inwardness of emotion and the outwardness of behavior), he nonetheless understands the task of the philosopher as that of making outside and inside converge in a representation. Drawing on Hegel's philosophy of art, I show that Kierkegaard's project in both of these books is the aesthetic project of revealing the inner essence of something in its outward appearance. Kierkegaard's portrait of Socrates in The Concept of Irony is a phenomenology of the spirit of irony. My interpretation adds a new dimension to our understanding of Kierkegaard's aesthetics and his relation to Hegel; it presents him as a follower of Plato, whom he is usually thought to have dismissed; and it uncovers a deep connection between Kierkegaard's first two books, which are never read in conjunction.     

BEING AS THE GROUND OF TRUTH IN AQUINAS

Although St. Thomas Aquinas holds that the transcendentals are convertible with being, one may question whether they all follow upon the metaphysical principles of a creature in the same way. Aquinas raises the question when he says that creatures are one by essence but good only by being. This paper examines the ground of truth according to Aquinas, considering his distinction between types of truth as well as his distinguishing kinds of knowers. To advance this investigation the essay compares truth and goodness; it also includes a discussion of unity. Clearly there is a close parallel between goodness and ‘the truth of a thing’, but must the truth of the intellect – truth in the primary sense – be grounded in the extramental being of a creature? This paper argues that, for Aquinas, human knowledge of composite beings is attained through encounters with their real instances and is reflected in necessarily true yet nonanalytic statements about these creatures, statements that can be explained by St.Thomas's theory of predication, to which the theory of an influential contemporary thinker is strikingly similar. God's knowledge of finite essences, and hence truth concerning them, does not assume the actual existence of their instantiations from all eternity, but it does assume their real existence at some time. The requirement of real existence for the human mode of knowing, and, as explained, for divine knowing, underscores the value of finite being and thus harmonizes with Aquinas's claims that composite beings, as what they are, possess being more truly in themselves than as in the mind of God, and they are known properly by God only when grasped as actually existent particulars.     

A Search for the Body: Is there Space for Christ's Body in Pannenberg's Eschatology?

Pannenberg's thought makes a constant appeal to ‘anticipation’, and this concept depends on a metaphysical proposal, temporalized essentialism, which includes an account of eternity as simultaneity of all history in God. This view of eternity has been both applauded and criticized. This article considers Pannenberg's account of the body of the exalted Christ who is in eternity. Pannenberg affirms the resurrection of Jesus, but has no account of the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. He emphasizes the church as the body of the exalted Christ, but describes this body as lacking particularity. His account of the Eucharist does not have any place for Christ's corporeal presence or for participation in Christ's exalted body. His account of the return of Christ is oriented to the revelation of the glorified unity of all reality in Christ. The reason that Pannenberg has no account of the body of Christ is due to his conception of eternity, a conception which differs markedly from that of Paul. The Pauline heavenly realm is part of the creation, and thus has a spatio‐temporal relationship to the earthly realm as well as having a spatio‐temporal dimension in itself. Pannenberg's conception of eternity is that it is outside of the created realm and has no spatial dimension. Douglas Farrow argues that a theology that lacks an account of the exalted body of Christ fails to have a proper account of the redemption of humanity and creation, and it seems Pannenberg's view is open to this criticism.     

Eternity’s Death in Modernity: A Case of Murder? Of Resurrection?

ABSTRACT

The death of God and the death of eternity stand at the portals of modernity. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Kojève called the modern counterpart to the Bible, concludes with the death of God. Despite Hegel having shown that everything, even God, has a time nucleus, at the level of ‘Absolute Knowing’, he takes eternity back into play, conceiving it as a structure of time, rather than a realm outside time. Thus, he wrenches a concept of eternity from time itself. Even though Hegel and Nietzsche are philosophical antipodes in many senses, we notice an ambivalent relation in Nietzsche’s works towards eternity as well. Nietzsche, the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the other ‘anti-Bible’ of modernity, proclaims eternity to be dead, while at the same time conceiving of an eternal recurrence, that of a dynamic eternity. First, it is argued that for both, eternity is essentially related to action and deed. Second, both highlight the importance of the past in reaching an adequate understanding of time and with it of eternity. Consequently, it is argued that modernity does not offer a vision of the future but a vibrant and often painful consciousness of the past.     

The Life of Spirit: The Self and Sanctification in Søren Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death

Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often overlooked as an author in the Christian spiritual tradition. This paper answers Christopher Barnett's call to investigate themes of Christian spirituality in Kierkegaard's writing. In this paper, I argue that we can construct of vision of sanctification from Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death. While Kierkegaard does not directly deal with themes of sanctification in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus does demonstrate the ‘spiritless’ life of despair. The ‘spiritless’ life, as Anti-Climacus defines it, is a life that is not truly a ‘self’. Anti-Climacus systematically demonstrates four categories of despair, and all people not living in faith, whether they realise it or not, fit into one of these categories of ‘spiritless’ existence. I argue that by constructing the opposites of Kierkegaard's categories of despair I demonstrate that a ‘spirit-filled’ life exemplifies a vibrant Christian life of sanctification.     

Kierkegaard's Social Theory

Despite recent attention on the social implications of his work, little has been done to articulate a substantive Kierkegaardian social theory. In this paper, I argue that Kierkegaard's A Literary Review describes four principles of social analysis. Together they reveal the social character of Kierkegaard's thought while presenting significant challenges for more traditional ‘social readings’ of his work.     

Proclaiming and cultivating ‘childlikeness’: a subversive thread in Christian anthropology

If contemporary public discourse struggles with truncated notions of what it means to be human, nowhere is this more obvious than in our discussion and treatment of children. By and large, in our public discourse, we treat children as ‘little adults’ – as consumers, objects of beauty and fashion, career aspirants and sometimes even as sexual beings. By contrast, Jesus put children – as children – at the centre of his project in proclaiming the kingdom of God. He preserved a special place for children in his ministry, and in all three synoptics, he called his followers to ‘childlikeness’. This paper examines a subversive thread in historic theological anthropology. The nature of ‘childlikeness’ is explored and possible ways to cultivate childlikeness for adults are discussed. The notion of childlikeness has been rediscovered in recent times by the ‘Child Theology Movement’, but, in this paper, I wish to examine three linked authors who wrote on ‘childlikeness’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, predating the Child Theology Movement by some decades: George MacDonald, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Gwendolen Greene.     

An Assessment of Robert Jenson's Hermeneutics on Divine Im/Passibility and the Emotions of God

The term apatheia, ‘impassibility’, has had varied meanings in Christian history. While some theologians have dismissed this attribute due to its Greek origins – as Paul Gavrilyuk states, a classic case of committing the genetic fallacy – Robert Jenson has prudently noted that for some of the church Fathers impassibility did not mean God was affectionless as the Greeks proposed; rather, it meant eternal faithfulness. This essay examines whether Jenson's appropriation of the early church's understanding of apatheia is true to the Fathers' original intentions. I first identify Jenson's assumptions regarding his interpretation of Scripture that causes him to conclude that God is im/passible. I then assess the validity of Jenson's claim that his own view is the same as the early church Fathers.     

God's Attributes as God's Clarities: Wolf Krötke's Doctrine of the Divine Attributes

Abstract: For the Berlin systematic theologian Wolf Krötke, the doctrine of the divine attributes presents God as, first, one who is clear and luminous in himself, and, second, as one who communicates his clarity in the eventfulness of Jesus Christ. Krötke modifies the traditional approach to the doctrine by redescribing God's attributes in terms of clarities which, in turn, are indicative of the glory of God. In this article, I expound and analyse Krötke's understanding of the clarities of truth, love, power and eternity as proper to God in his relationally rich reality shining forth, with an eye to the character of the renewal of human life thereby effected. Critical comments are also raised in relation to Krötke's proposal, particularly with respect to his lack of a robust doctrine of the immanent Trinity and the necessity of maintaining such.