How Kierkegaard Can Help Us

Today

A Presentation for Soulstice

by Kyle A. RobertsBethel Seminary

My First Encounter With Kierkegaard

How Kierkegaard Can Help Us We Need a New Model for Living Our Christianity

Our Increasingly Pluralist, Post-Constantinian,Post-Christian Context

We Need to Change What We Emphasize Truth as Transformational Faith as Passionate Conviction Sin and Salvation as Relational and Holistic Church as Community of Love Christianity as Suffering Witness

Kierkegaard Speaks a Prophetic Word A prophetic consciousness seeks to “evoke a consciousness and

perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”

— Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 13.

Kierkegaard’s Bio 1813 Religious upbringing: Lutheran pietism, strict,

dominating father 1817-1834 A “cursed family” (death of mother, two brothers,

and three sisters)

1835 To find the “Idea” 1835 The “Great Earthquake” 1838 Indescribable joy! 1841 A Broken Engagement 1851-1855 Attack Upon Christendom

“There is an indescribable joy that is kindled in us just as inexplicably as the apostle's unmotivated exclamation: 'Rejoice and again I say, Rejoice'. —Not a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul 'with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart': 'I rejoice in my joy, of, with, at, for, through, and with my joy' —a heavenly refrain which suddenly interrupts our other songs, a joy which like a breath of air cools and refreshes, a puff from the trade winds which blows across the plains of Mamre to the eternal mansions.” (Pap. II A 228).

Truth as Transformational and Personal

Truth is Subjectivity“To become subjective should be the highest task assigned to every human being, just as the highest reward, an eternal happiness, exists only for the subjective person or, more correctly, comes into existence for the one who becomes subjective.” — Concluding Unscientific Postcript

“Not for a single moment is it forgotten that the subject is an existing individual, that existence is a process of becoming”

“Everyone who lives in Christendom ordinarily has received more than enough information about Christianity (even the government sees to that); many perhaps have received all too much. What is lacking is certainly something entirely different, is the inner transformation of the whole mind, by which a person in life-peril of the spirit comes in earnest, in true inwardness, to believe at least something — of the considerable Christianity that he knows.”

— CD, 245-46.

Faith as Passionate Conviction From Certainty (Descartes) to Conviction /

Confidence “An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-

process of the most passionate inwardness is truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing Individual”

- Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“[F]rom the demonstration nothing follows for me; from faith everything follows for me.”

- Christian Discourses, p. 191.

“Laying Out”

Sin and Salvation as Relational and Holistic Kierkegaard defines sin as “misrelation”; between a person and

God, a person and him/herself, and a person and others The Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death

Despair, Anxiety, and the “Broken Heart of Modernity”

Salvation as Embracing Forgiveness “That a person wants to sit and brood and stare at his sin and is

unwilling to have faith that it is forgiven: [this is] also guilt in that it is a minimizing of what Christ has done.” (JP, §4036)

Church as Community of Love “Neighbor Love” and God as the “Middle Term” An Open, Embracing Community 1 Cor. 13

Christianity as Suffering Witness A Kenotic Community that is willing to bear the sufferings of others,

to “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings,” in service of the healing/salvation of others.

This is a Non-Ideological Witness, based not in economies of power, but in the call to restore and reclaim the world under the Kingdom of God

The “Restlessness of Faith” “Faith is a restless thing. To what end has faith, which you say you

have, made you restless, where have you witnessed for the truth, where against untruth, what sacrifices have you made, what persecution have you suffered for your Christianity, and at home in your domestic life where have your self-denial and renunciation been noticeable?”

— For Self-Examination

A Final Warning “You will also lose the friendship of people, perhaps even stir up

persecution by them–indeed, no wonder, because how could the living, who cling with all their souls to this life and all that belongs to it, calmly put up with the presence of someone who has died?”