What was Kierkegaard thinking?

What was he thinking? What made him tick, and what about his experience made him come to the conclusions he did? I mentioned some things about his biography initially, then followed his ideas forward. It's time to back up a little.

One thing about heresies is that they have a hint of truth in them. Marx thought that everything in life is determined by economic factors. He was wrong. That ignores that fact that God has a purpose in history, and he's the one in control. Economic factors might not be as important to Him, or might be irrelevant to His purposes. God is usually more concerned with what kind of stewards we are with what He has provided for us, how we develop our minds, how that affects our actions, and our love for others, and our place in eternity, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that some things in life are determined by economic factors. Ask any parent getting ready to send their kids to college, missionaries trying to raise support, a Christian charity, or anyone who is out of a job. Economics matter. But economic factores are not the only factors.

So, where's the hint of truth in Kierkegaard? Remember back when I proposed we follow Alasdair MacIntyre and broke history up into three time periods? There's the Judeo-Christian period, followed by the modern and postmodern. Kierkegaard agreed with me that the modern world had gone wrong. The Enlightenment had created an atmosphere that elevated human reason so high that they thought they could do anything, and they were in control of their own destiny. Newton's laws had come to be interpreted to mean the universe could survive on it's own, and as LaPlace famously stated, "I have no need of that [God] hypothesis." The result on the church was a dead, lifeless, mechanical church, as we have discussed.

One of the philosophers responsible for the decay of the church was Hegel, and Kierkegaard probably reacted against him more than anything else. But Hegel was just working out the ideas of those before him, such as Kant. Human reason was elevated to the highest good in the universe, and what was good could actually be determined by human reason. Kierkegaard saw the results of that in the church, and he reacted. He didn't want the mechanical, meaningless church. He wanted passionate and authentic people in the church, people who really lived out what they said they believed.

He was right in his recognition of a problem, and partially right in his diagnosis, but totally wrong in his solution. Where his diagnosis started to go wrong was in not reaassesing the role of human reason. He found that human reason couldn't take you to a vibrant, passionate faith. So he proposed a leap of faith, to get him beyond reason.

That's the problem. Human reason by itself is not enough, that is true. But the Christian response through the centuries had always involved an interplay between reason of faith, not the abandonment of reason to leap into the absurd. Aquinas had started to separate faith and reason many centuries before, to be sure, but the distinction wasn't so stark until the Enlightenment. The Christian response prior to the Enlightenment had been captured in the phrase, "Faith seeking understanding," or "I believe in order to understand." They realized human reason wasn't enough. But faith informed reason and reason informed faith. At some point there may have to be a leap, but as Pascal said, it's a leap in the light, not a leap in the dark.

In Surprised by Joy CS Lewis talked about a fellow student, an atheist, who announced to his friends that after looking into it, it appeared to him that the Christian story of God becoming a man really happened. With his reason he had found the truth, but he never combined that with faith. That student went mad. If I remember the story correctly he died (suicide?) soon after discovering the truth, but never became a Christian. Contrast that with Lewis. He had similar experiences in what he discovered about the historical truth, but this eventually informed his faith. His faith then led him to a better understanding of what his reason was telling him. It wasn't just a one way street, or a one way leap. What resulted was a set of coherent thoughts. In contrast, existentialism leads you to statments like Barth's, "It isn't true as a matter of history, but it is true as a matter of doctrine." In reality that is very incoherent.

The incoherence isn't necessary. It is possible to humble human reason without having to free yourself from it altogether. In fact, you can't. It is after all part of how God made us, "In His image." It also allows us to maintain some mystery in our faith, but helps us locate those mysteries more appropriately. God's ways are inscrutable (Isaiah). His ways are higher than our ways (Psalms). It only makes sense that God's ways are not going to be easy for us to grasp, and at times impossible to fully grasp. But usually we can at least say we know that something (like the resurrection) is true, even if we can't explain exactly how it happened.

The bottom line is that the existential turn is not necessary. You don't have to follow Kierkegaard to have passion or authenticity. But more importantly, he didn't provide a foundation for a strong faith.

Remember the meaning of logos. It is more than just "word". "In the beginning was the Reason, and the Reason was with God, and the Reason was God."

Finally, many Christians have recognized as their walk with God matures that faith isn't something they do. It is something that happens to them. Whatever you think about predestination, you have to admit that left on your own you never would have come to faith. C.S. Lewis' account of his conversion demonstrates this. Over a period of time he had encounters with something outside of himself that penetrated his heart. He recalls sitting on a bus and having the feeling that something, or someone, was stripping away the facades of his personage, layer by layer, and getting down to his heart. This was before he was a Christian. Later, he and his brother took a trip to the zoo. Lewis was riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle. He says he doesn't remember making a conscious decision to trust the Lord, he just knows that on the way to the zoo he was not a Christian, but on the way back he was. His life had been given over to Christ, and he was committed to the truth. He says this was the freest thing he had ever done, and yet he could do no other. He elsewhere says that the idea of truth 'seekers' is really false. As sinners, seeking for God is like the mouse seeking the cat. Without God stirring the heart no one will seek.

What we see in Lewis' life is contrary to what Kierkegaard told us. Lewis didn't make a 'leap of faith' in which he abandoned the rational and embraced the absurd. There was an interplay between what was happening in his mind, intellectually, and his faith. And what happened to Lewis was, in a significant way, done to him. The existential catch-phrase, "reality viewed from the perspective of the actor," does not come close to explaining how we live our lives in reality. True faith is not a matter of us conjuring up our own feelings, and establishing meaning and purpose for ourselves. We have to come to rely on God. We don't do the work ourselves.

The connections between existentialism and postmodernism become clear at this point. One of the marks of postmodernism is a distrust of metanarratives. Postmoderns love narratives. Everyone has their own story. Everyone has their own adventure. But they disbelieve in any over-arching story that controls all of reality. They have no use for the meaning and purpose God designed into the universe, or for God's story of creation-fall-redemption. If everything is always about 'the actor', they'll never be able to submit to God.