Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship:
A New Perspective
by Vernard Eller
(continued)
PART II: THE DUNKERS AND THE DANE
I. The Decisive Christian Category
“The individual”–that is the decisive Christian category, and it will be decisive for the future of Christianity.1
“Den Enkelte” (“the individual”–in contrast
to “the public”) [is] a thought in which is contained
an entire philosophy of life and of the world.2
This category is the point at which and
across which God can come to seize hold of the race.
To remove that point is to dethrone God.3
Kierkegaard claimed “the individual” as “his category,”4 and there is nowhere else to begin a presentation of his thought. This is not to suggest that S.K.’s procedure was that of a systematic philosopher and this is the fundamental presupposition that must come first. It is to say, rather, that this is where S.K. chose to start and that we can best understand him by following his route.
In so doing we have put ourselves at something of an embarrassment in that Brethren literature provides nothing that parallels S.K.’s technical conception of den Enkelte. The conclusion to be drawn is, however, not that S.K.’s category is unsectarian. It is rather that S.K. started “farther back,” based his thought on a more fundamental proposition than did the Brethren or sectaries generally. Nonetheless, we will discover that the first characteristics S.K. derived from den Enkelte are rather precisely paralleled in Brethrenism. The suggestion, then, is strong that some sort of “individualism” is also the unspoken assumption of the sectaries and that what S.K. has accomplished is to give formulation to the “metaphysics” of sectarianism.
But it might be objected that Martin Luther himself had a strong conception of individualistic religion and that this in itself, therefore, dare not be classified a sectarian trait. Here is raised a broader issue which should be considered. Not only as regards “individualism,” but in connection with any number of other Kierkegaardian motifs as well, Luther could be quoted in support. But this fact does not invalidate the contention that the motif is also truly sectarian in character. For one thing, it cannot simply be taken for granted that because he was the founder Martin Luther symbolizes only “churchly” Protestantism; in some respects this decidedly is not the case. We noted earlier that scholars have found sectarian as well as churchly traits in him.
But indeed we should not even expect sectarianism to be completely different from “churchism”; both are Protestant and thus will show many affinities. However, in some cases, such as the strong critique of infant baptism, the Kierkegaard-sectarian view will run diametrically counter to Luther. In some cases, such as Gemeinschaft being central in the doctrine of the church, the emphasis would be largely absent in Luther although not necessarily opposed by him. In cases such as “individualism” Luther could be cited in agreement, but the motif is much more central and emphatic in sectarianism. In cases, such as the equality of all men before God, Luther and sectarianism would be in full agreement, but the sectaries would prove more radical and sweeping in applying the doctrine to the life and structure of the church. And finally, in some cases the sectarian motif, although not greatly dissimilar to churchly teaching, nevertheless appears as part of a somewhat different pattern, is approached out of a somewhat different context.
In short, the uniqueness of the sectarian point of view does not depend on the uniqueness of every one of its motifs–nor even of any one of those motifs. It is rather the pattern as a whole, the consistent recurrence of differences in emphasis, the developing of an angle of vision, that in the end will distinguish Protestant sectarianism from its churchly counterpart.
As we begin with S.K.’s category of den Enkelte, we find that the very act of beginning is complicated by confusion and disagreement on how to translate the term that identifies the category. We are going to suggest that the best secondary exposition of S.K.’s conception is that by Martin Buber; and the English translator of that exposition is the person who has forced the question. He notes: “The German which I have rendered by the cumbrous and none too clear phrase ‘the Single One’ is der Einzelne, which is a fairly precise rendering of Kierkegaard’s hiin Enkelte. It is a pity that in the English translations of Kierkegaard no effort seems to have been made by the translators to avoid the use of the word ‘individual,’ which is highly misleading. For every man is individuum, but not everyone is an Einzelner or Entelte.”5 Even so, Smith’s decision must be questioned. Der Einzelne, the German term used by Buber, is the customary German translation of the Danish original, and thus Buber is not responsible for any innovation. However, this translation itself begins to distort the meaning of S.K.’s Danish–and in the direction that Buber will go in criticizing Kierkegaard. Smith’s “the Single One,” then, though a close enough rendition of the German, distorts the meaning just one step further in the same direction.
Perhaps the problem best can be approached by starting with the German, moving back to the Danish, and then going to the English. The basic German root einzeln means single, sole, solitary, individual, isolated, detached. And there is a closely related German root that can clarify the matter by way of contrast; it is einfach, meaning simple, single, not complex or mixed, indivisible. The difference is a subtle one but quite significant. Einzeln defines the “one” in terms of his relation (more accurately, lack of relation) to “others,” comes at the “one” by cutting him out of the herd, setting him apart. Einfach, on the other hand, defines the “one” in terms of his own essential “integrity,” focusing on that which makes him a true integer, without regard to the presence or absence of others.
Danish allows the same sort of distinction. In Danish ene means alone, by oneself; eneboer is a hermit or recluse; enebarn is an only child; ener means one, unit; and eneste means only, single, sole. These clearly belong with einzeln. But enkel means plain, simple; enkelhed is simplicity; enkelt is single, simple, individual, the opposite of dobbelt. Enkelt is closer to einfach than to einzeln.
“The Single One,” i.e. Smith’s English translation, compounds the einzeln propensity by using two words that stress “apartness.”6 Much better would be “the Simple One” (although that has other connotations which would never do), or simply, the One” (which is too awkward to be feasible). But from the standpoint of etymology alone, “the individual” is a very acceptable rendering. “Individual” means one in substance or essence; existing as a separate indivisible entity; an object which is determined by properties peculiar to itself and cannot be subdivided into others of the same kind.
And particularly if “individual” be read not so much as that which can not be divided but rather as that which is not divided, then it is a very close equivalent of S.K.’s den Enkelte. Smith’s objection that a man necessarily is individuum and therefore cannot be thought of as becoming such is a complete misunderstanding. Clearly, S.K. was saying precisely that a person needs to become individuum, undivided, at one with himself, and not that he should cut himself off from the race. If, as S.K. very emphatically did say, “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” than as he very well might have said, “Purity of existence is to be one thing”–“for he who is not himself a unity is never really anything wholly and decisively.”7 We support the customary translation of den Enkelte as “the individual,” although to do this immediately creates difficulties of another order.
Martin Buber has pointed out that in current usage “individualism” carries two major types of implication:
- what we might call selfcenteredness, or autonomy (of which he explicitly absolves S.K.’s den Enktelte) and
- atomism, einzeiln-ness, solitariness–of which he explicitly accuses S.K.8
As regards the first category, individualism implies self-assertion, self-reliance, self-realization, self-development, improving one’s self, finding one’s self, creating one’s self.9 But Buber sees that these have nothing to do with S.K.’s den Enkelte. 10 Indeed, S.K. himself had taken pains to repel such “heroic-aesthetic individualism” in a very significant statement:
In every one of the pseudonymous works this theme of ‘the individual’ comes to evidence in one way or another; but there the individual is predominantly the pre-eminent individual in the aesthetic sense, the distinguished person, etc. In every one of my edifying works the theme of ‘the individual’ comes to evidence, and as officially as possible; but there the individual is what every man is or can be…. But I believe that people have for the most part paid attention only to ‘the individual’ of the pseudonyms and have confounded me as a matter of course with the pseudonyms.11
S.K. may be the father of existentialism, but obviously one must be cautious about identifying his den Enkelte with the “existentialist hero” of his present-day disciples.
In a later chapter we shall attempt to defend den Enkelte against Buber’s charge that it entails isolation and atomism; here our concern is to establish only that “the individual” is as good a translation of the Danish as has been proposed–if one is careful not to allow the implications of “individualism” and “individuality” that are current in much of modern philosophy and psychology and even in common parlance. Actually, S.K.’s den Enkelte is very close to the “I” of Buber’s primary word “I-Thou”12 and thus to the concept “person”13 as it is used by a number of contemporary theologians.14
But how all-important the idea of den Enkelte was to S.K. is indicated by his statement: “I live, and with God’s help I shall die in the belief that when death has carried me away … He will place the imprint of providence upon my life so that it will help men to become aware of God and to see how thoughtlessly they hinder themselves from leading the highest life, a life in communion with God.”15 As shall become apparent, den Enkelte is for all intents and purposes a synonym for “a life in communion with God,” but unfortunately it cannot be said that S.K.’s prayer has been answered, that his life has borne this imprint in the eyes of most men. S.K. has yet to be truly appreciated for the witness he was most concerned to make; and that appreciation must begin with a profound understanding of what he meant by den Enkelte.
The primary point–and one that Buber notes well, although too few other scholars do–is that den Enkelte is first and last, through and through, an absolutely religious conception. Buber calls it “a theological anthropology,”16 and indeed S.K. himself spoke of “the theological self, the self directly in the sight of God–and what an infinite reality this self acquires by being before God!17 Buber puts den Enkelte into the sharpest possible antithesis to the anthropology of existentialist philosophy, noting that this anthropology has been made possible only by “renouncing” (more accurately, by simply ignoring) S.K.’s basic presupposition.18
It is not because SK. failed to make that presupposition explicit; he made such plain and pointed statements as:
Every human life is planned religiously. To deny this is to throw everything into confusion and to annul the concept of individual, race, immortality.”19
“Essentially it is the God-relationship that makes a man a man.”20
“The fatalist … has lost God and therefore himself as well; for if he has no God, neither has he a self.”21
“That man’s life is wasted who … never became eternally and decisively conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or (what is the same thing) never became aware and in the deepest sense received an impression of the fact that there is a God, and that he, he himself, his self, exists before God.”22
It was in The Sickness unto Death that S.K. indulged in his most abstract and philosophical discussion of “the self,” calling it the relationship which the self has to itself. He seems to mean that basically I am the person I understand myself to be; my own image of my role and purpose determines who I am. Yet even here S.K. specified that such self-understanding is correct, eventuating in a true self, only when it is the understanding that first was held by God and hence revealed to me through my relationship with him. Thus “the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relationship [of the self to itself]”23
The constitutive principle of den Enkelte is that he exists “before God.” The Danish word for–here translated “before”–can mean “for the sake of” as well as “in the sight of,” and undoubtedly both meanings were part of S.K.’s intention. And “before God” is not a late, “religious” modifier attached to an earlier, philosophic concept; in point of fact, existence “before God” was a Kierkegaardian theme prior to the development of den Enkelte as a technical term.24
“Before God to be oneself–for the accent rests upon ‘before God,’ since this is the source and origin of all individuality.”25 In as strong terms as possible, S.K. made it plain that “authentic existence” is found solely and exclusively before God:
There is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is. The man who is not before God is not himself, for this a man can be only by being before Him who is in and for Himself. If one is oneself by being in Him who is in and for Himself, one can be in others and before others, but one cannot by being merely before others be oneself.26
If, as is the common understanding, existentialism is a philosophy that starts with the givenness of man’s existence, his Geworfenheit, his “being-what-he-is”; and if, starting from this premise, some existentialists come to a theistic conclusion and others to a nontheistic one–if this is existentialism, then S.K. was not an existentialist, and den Enkelte has little if anything in common with existentialist individualism.
S.K. begins with God, not arrives at God as a conclusion derived from human existence. It is not too much to say that den Enkelte is an affirmation about the intention and strategy of God before it is an affirmation about the nature of man. Buber points in this direction but does not go as far as he could or should; he says of S.K.’s den Enkelte: “Not before a man can say I in perfect reality–that is, finding himself–can he in perfect reality say Thou–that is, to God.”27 But it is not that man on his own initiative chooses to be den Enkelte in order to address God; rather, God first has addressed man as den Enkelte, and man must then get into that role if he is to hear and respond. Den Enkelte is first of all the character of God’s address and only then the nature of man’s response.
The “singleness” of den Enkelte comes about, then, because God chooses to address men singly, individually, one by one enkeltvis, as the Danish language so appropriately puts it. Although S.K. did not so use it, the golden text for his den Enkelte could well be Isa. 40:26.
Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
Calling them all by name;
Because he is great in strength,
Mighty in power,
Not one is missing.
The text he did use was Mt. 10:29. “What is there said about the sparrows is yet completely the literal truth about mankind, that God knows each individual–indeed, that to be man is simply to belong to the genus which has the distinction that each individual is known qua individual by God and can know him.”28
The entire motive of becoming den Enkelte, then, is not so much a matter of a man realizing his nature, finding his authenticity, as it is a matter of response. S.K. did not develop “responsibility” as a formal concept–this has been the work of our own day–but Buber properly derives and defines the term as a part of his exposition of S.K.29 Briefly put, den Enkelte is a man who has become single (single-minded, single-willed, single-hearted, single-eyed) in response to and in order to respond to the individual summons of God’s requirement and the individual chrism of his grace.
That this is a rather different concept of individuality, S.K. was quite aware. He made so bold as to say that in one sense Christ was a greater thief than Barrabas, because Christ stole from the human race its “very notion of what it is to he a man!”30 And the extent of that theft nowhere becomes more evident than when we consider the character of den Enke1te’s consciousness of his individuality. Because that consciousness is achieved before God, it is not with respect to his talents but with regard to his guilt.”31 S.K. approached this thought in several ways, but the core explanation as to why the self-understanding of den Enkelte must be of this sort is quite simple: “Christianity is God’s thought. To be a man was, for God, an ideal which we can hardly even imagine; the fall was a guilt which involved a degradation, and in order to feel the painfulness of it one must have an impression of the ideal which went before.”32 When a man puts what he is alongside what God intends and calls him to be, guilt is the only possible resultant: “When thou art alone, … alone in individuality, or as a single individual, and face to face with God’s holiness–then the cry [“God be merciful to me a sinner”] issues of itself…. From [the Pharisee] no cry was heard. What is the meaning of this? … It means that he was not before God.”33
“Repentance” is the counterpart of guilt, and it appears as an essential aspect of individuality amazingly early in S.K.’s authorship and, even more amazingly, in the mouth of Judge William, the ethicist of Either/Or. When S.K. finds himself impelled to attribute a thoroughly religious concept to a nonreligious pseudonym we can be sure that we are dealing with something crucial and basic: “There is also a love by which I love God and there is only one word in the language which expresses it … it is repentance…. For only when I choose myself as guilty do I choose myself absolutely, if my absolute choice of myself is to be made in such a way that it is not identical with creating myself?”34 With this concept of repentance S.K. set an absolute distinction between den Enkelte and all existentialist thought about creating oneself. The distinction was pressed even harder when, toward the end of his career, S.K. made an extended analysis of the following thematic statement: “To become sober is to come to oneself in self-knowledge, before God, as nothing hefore Him, yet infinitely, absolutely, under obligation…. Only by being before God can a man entirely come to himself in the transparency of sobriety…. Christianity thinks that precisely to become nothing–before God–is the way, and that if it could occur to anyone to wish to be something before God, this is drunkenness.”35
It does not follow that this repentance, or becoming nothing, is a negative act, a degradation, for it is actually the glory of the human spirit.36 Indeed, den Enkelte eventuates as the most positive of conceptions, for his becoming nothing is but the counterpart on man’s side of the forgiveness forthcoming from God’s side: “Believing that his sins have been forgiven is the decisive crisis through which a human being becomes spirit; he who does not believe that is not spirit.”37 In the final analysis, then, den Enkelte is one who has become single in repentance in order to find the grace and forgiveness of God which is bestowed upon and can be received by only those who are single.
Because one becomes den Enkelte via self-abasement rather thin self-aggrandizement, a very important implication follows: God justly can demand that every man become den Enkelte; it is equally possible for every man to become den Enkelte.38 We shall later identify as one of his sectarian characteristics S.K.’s radical and emphatic affirmation of the equality of all men before God; we see here that it is an inevitable corollary of his concept of den Enkelte.
Den Enkelte is fundamentally a religious idea, but the matter can be put even more exactly. S.K. did not consider himself to be developing any new category but simply delineating the Christian gospel; den Enkelte is nothing more nor less than the Christian man. S.K. said it in so many words: “The formula for being a Christian is to be related to, to turn to, God personally, as a single person, quite literally as a single person.”39 He developed the conception not as a philosopher but as a Christian evangelist, and thus at points could go so far as to read “before God” as meaning, specifically, “before Christ.”
In the first place, Christ was himself den Enkelte par excellence. 40 But he is much more than just an example from man’s side; he is also the term of address from God’s:
The potentiation in consciousness of the self is in this instance knowledge of Christ, being a self face to face with Christ…. A self face to face with Christ is a self potentiated by the prodigious concession of God, potentiated by the prodigious emphasis which falls upon it for the fact that God also for the sake of this self let Himself to be born, became man, suffered, died. As was said in the foregoing, ‘the more conception of God, the more of self,’ so here it is true that the more conception of Christ, the more self. A self is qualitatively what its measure is. That Christ is the measure is on God’s part attested as the expression for the immense reality a self possesses; for it is true for the first time in Christ that God is man’s goal and measure, or measure and goal.41
n Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. The second of “Two Notes on ‘the Individual’” in Point of View, 133-34.
2. Point of View, 21.
3. Papirer, 10:1:A:218 (1849), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 36.
4. Point of View, 21.
5. A note by the translator, Ronald Gregor Smith, in Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), 207, n. 9.
6. Since translating Buber’s work Smith has made a switch. Now, in his Smith Journals, he consistently translates den Entelte as “the single person”–a decided improvement. Also, he makes the very point that we here want to make, that Buber overdid it in accusing S.K.’s den Enkelte of isolationism. Smith Journals, 11, n. 2.
7. Purity of Heart, 184.
8. Martin Buber, “The Question to the Single One” (first published in 1936) in Between Man and Man, 40ff.
9. Martin Buber, I and Thou (first published 1923), 2d ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Sribner’s, 1958), 63-64.
10. Buber, “The Question to the Single One” in Between Man and Man, 44.
11. The second of “Two Notes on ‘the Individual’” in Point of View, 124.
12. That Buber’s concept, at least to some extent, was derived from S.K. is apparent. See Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber, The Lafe of Dialogue (New York: Harper, 1955), 35.
13. That S.K. did in fact come very near to defining the concept “person” is seen in his statements quoted below.
14. These more recent formulations afford no particular help in translating den Enkelte, though they do aid in understanding it, One of the best expositions of “person” is by Hugh Vernon White, Truth and the Person in Christian Theology (New York: Oxford Un. Press, 1963), 53ff. The sheer word “person” is no real improvement over “individual,” because it must fight its way clear of “personalism” and “personality” just as “individual” must do with “individualism” and “individuality.”
15. Dru Journals, 765 (1848). Cf. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:19 (1854).
16. Buber, “What Is Man?” in Between Man and Man, 163.
17. The Sickness unto Death (bound behind Fear and Trembling), trans. Walter Lowne, trans. revised by Howard Johnson (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 210.
18. Buber, op.cit., 163; see also pp. 171-172 where he makes specific the contrast between S.K. and Heidegger.
19. The Concept of Dread, by Vigilius Haufniensis (pseud.), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Un. Press, 1944), p.94. Though technically this book belongs to the pseudonymous-aesthetic works, we know that S.K. added the pseudonym at the last moment, after having written the book for publication under his own name.
20. Postscript, 219. Amazingly, this statement is from the mouth of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, an avowed non-Christian and nonreligious person.
21. The Sickness unto Death, 173.
22. Ibid., 159-160.
23. Ibid., 147.
24. The phrase “before God” as a full-fledged concept appears in the sermon that concludes the second volume of Either/Or, (2:346). This establishes the earliness of the term in S.K.’s thought (1843), although the idea is, of course, normal and natural enough in a sermon. What is much more impressive is that the conception–though not the phrase–is found in “Equilibrium,” the central essay of Either/Or, II if which supposedly is by Judge William, who represents specifically the ethical and not the religious stage of existence (221, 246).
It is indeed a rather major break of character for S.K. to allow his ethicist to express such an idea–a break which is further compounded when the Judge describes the choice of oneself as being “repentance”–just as it is out of character for the philosopher Climacus to say that it is the God-relationship that makes a man a man. These not infrequent “leaks” on S.K.’s part probably admit two different explanations. In the first place, unconsciously S.K. found simply that he could not say what he wanted to say without resorting to religious categories. And in the second place these may be part of his deliberate design to entice his readers out of aesthetics, out of ethics, out of philosophy, and into religion. These “leaks” are of positive value in proving S.K.’s contention that he was a religious author from the outset and that his entire authorship is to be understood within this frame of reference.
How and when den Enkelte became a specific Kierkegaardian category has been recounted by S.K. himself: “When I first used the category of ‘the individual’ in the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses of 1843, it still had for me, as well, a personal meaning [i.e. in reference to Regina]; the idea itself was not so very clear to me at the time that, without this personal meaning, I would have employed it immediately. When I used it the second time, with greater force, in the foreword to the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits [1847], then I realized that what I was doing was completely ideal.” Papirer, 10:A:308, quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 36n.
25. Works of Love, trans. with introduction and notes by Edna and Howard Hong (New York: Harper, 1962), 253.
26. “The Anxiety of Lowliness” (Pt. I, Discourse 3) in Christian Discourses, trans. Walter Lowne (New York: Oxford Un. Press, 1939), 43.
27. Buber, “Question to the Single One” in Between Man and Man, 43.
28. Papirer, 9:A:316 (1848) [my trans-VE.]; cf. 10:2:A:231 (1849).
29. Buber, op.cit. 45.
30. “Christ as Example” (Discourse II) in Judge for Yourselves! [bound behind For Self Examination], trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford Un. Press, 1941), 187.
31. “On the Occasion of a Confession” (Discourse I) in Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life, trans. David F. Swenson, ed. Lillian Marvin Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1941), 27.
32. Dru Journals, 1391 (1854).
33. “Behold, We Have Left All…” (Pt. III, Discourse 2) in Christian Discourses, 374.
34. Either/Or, 2:220-221.
35. “To Become Sober” (Discourse I) in Judge For Yourselves!, 120, 121-22, 123.
36. “To Have Need of God Is Man’s Highest Perfection” (Discourse I) in Edifying Discourses, 4:2.
37. Rohde Journals, 189 (1848).
38. Purity of Heart, 184-85. Cf. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:384 (1854).
39. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:135. Cf. Point of View, 89n; Dru Journals, 632 (1847); Smith Journals, 11:1:A:130, 227, 248 (1854); and Postscript, 47.
40. Dru Journals, 1089 (1850).
41. The Sickness unto Death, 244-245. Cf. “Lifted Up on High He Will Draw All Men unto Himself” (Pt. III, Reflection 2) in Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford Un. Press, 1941), 159ff.
II. The Character of Den Enkelte
A number of S.K.’s major motifs are very closely related to his conception of den Enkelte; they can, indeed, be considered as the first-ranked characteristics of den Enkelte. As we treat them, definite parallels with Brethrenism will appear.
A. Free Personal Decision
A golden key, it is said, fits every lock. But decision too and determination also unlock doors, and that is why they are called resolution; with resolution, or in resolution, the doors are opened to the noblest powers of the soul.1
The heading above could have been: Freedom of the Will. But this would be to say both too much and too little. Too much because neither S.K. nor the Brethren showed particular interest in aligning themselves with any party in the traditional theological controversy over the free or the bound will; the matter was much too crucial to be subjected to that sort of scholasticism. For them, freedom was the essential life blood of their entire ideology. And if something is that necessary, its actuality can be assumed-very simply must be assumed, for one has not time to wait out the argument. S.K. and the Brethren both believed in the freedom of the will, but they afford no help to those who would make a case for it.
But it is also too little to call our topic Freedom of the Will, because the crucial question was not whether the human will possesses the faculty of making a free choice between options That would be a necessary affirmation for S.K. and the Brethren but hardly an adequate one. The end they had in view did not remain on the rather innocuous level of “choice” but became a matter of “resolution,” “decision,” “determination,” “conviction,” “venture,” or “commitment.” Their affirmation was not “We believe that men can choose,” but rather “We are confronted with the choice through which a man becomes a man.”
S.K. and the existentialists are known as Apostles of Freedom; it is hardly necessary to prove that S.K. was an exponent of the view. However, for S.K. the subject of this freedom was den Enkelte, the one who chooses himself (more accurately, chooses God and in that choice chooses himself). The freedom of den Enkelte, as his entire existence, transpires only and always “before God.” And because S.K.’s den Enkelte was a thoroughly religious conception, so was his understanding of den Enkelte’s freedom thoroughly religious. Again, S.K.’s position will be seen to be in rather diametric opposition to that which commonly is understood as existentialist. It is upon this difference that our exposition will concentrate.
S.K. did value the human freedom to choose, the bare power of choice; it is basic.2 But this natural ability gains its true significance only in the one choice of all choices, “the absolute venture,” the choosing of oneself before God as den Enkelte. This idea was so central for S.K. that it appeared even as out-of-character “leaks” in the pseudonyms. Climacus said: “The fact is that the individual becomes infinite only by virtue of making the absolute venture. Hence it is not the same individual who makes this venture among others, yielding as a consequence one more predicate attaching to one and the same individual. No, but in making the absolute venture he becomes another individual.” 3 And it was Judge William, the ethicist, who specified that this choice–far from being a cool, reasoned nod in favor of this over that, a choice based on calculated probabilities–is rather a solemn and passionate commitment to God.4 Thus “resolve,” or “venture,” stands a whole quality higher than mere choice, or freedom of the will; and it is the fact that it transpires before God that gives it its critical character. Therefore S.K. could call resolution “the only language in which God wills to have intercourse with man.”5
This freedom to resolve is the most precious possession of the human spirit but also the most precarious, for it exists only as long as it is rightly used:
The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is: the choice, freedom. And if you desire to save it and preserve it there is only one way: in the very same second unconditionally and in complete resignation to give it back to God, and yourself with it. If the sight of what is granted to you tempts you, and if you give way to the temptation and look with egoistic desire upon the freedom of choice, then you lose your freedom. And your punishment is: to go on in a kind of confusion priding yourself on having-freedom of choice, but woe upon you, that is your judgment: You have freedom of choice, you say, and still you have not chosen God.6
Is there not something highly ironic-and profoundly significant–in the fact that precisely the sort of freedom prized as ultimate by the existentialists is branded by “the father of existentialism” as punishment and judgment? S.K. here staked the freedom of den Enkelte at an almost infinite distance from any and all concepts that carry overtones of autonomy, egocentricity, Prometheanism, or self-creation; but let it not be said that he has denigrated freedom in the process. From the standpoint of his totally religious perspective, the fact that human freedom is so completely bounded by and tied to God is in no sense a detriment but precisely the source of its glory; man’s freedom is the more real and the more precious when guaranteed by God’s involvement than it would be if unrestricted by his presence.
“Resolve,” “venture,” “decision,” “choice”–these are all synonyms for the more familiar Kierkegaardian term “leap.” Actually, “leap” is S.K.’s earlier terminology–almost the property of the pseudonyms. These later, more strictly religious terms probably are superior for communicating S.K.’s thought, because “leap” tends to carry connotations of blind abandon, almost of irresponsibility. Such ideas are not truly part of the concept at all. But the point behind this whole family of words is of great importance to S.K.’s witness, for it is through the absolute venture that a man becomes den Enkelte, and that venture is nothing more nor less than what the Christian gospel intends by faith. S.K.’s position on freedom was not a philosophic or even anthropologic affirmation but essentially an exposition of the New Testament: “Christianity and the New Testament understood something perfectly definite by believing; to believe is to venture out as decisively as it is possible for a man to do, breaking with everything a man naturally loves, breaking, in order to save his own soul, with that in which he naturally has his life.”7
The nature of this venture–now put into its specifically Christian context (which is the end S.K. had in view all along)–was made more explicit:
There cannot be any direct
transition from an historical fact to the foundation upon it of an eternal happiness… How then do we proceed [in relation to Christ]? Thus. A man says to himself, a la Socrates: here is an historical fact which teaches me that in regard to my eternal happiness I must have recourse to Jesus Christ. Now I must certainly preserve myself from taking the wrong turning into scientific inquiry and research…. And so I say to myself: I choose; that historical fact means so much to me that I decide to stake my whole life upon that if. Then he lives; lives entirely full of the idea, risking his life for it: and his life is the proof that he believes. He did not have a few proofs, and so believed and then began to live. No, the very reverse. That is called risking; and without risk faith is an impossibility.8
It would be quite possible at this point to understand S.K. as trying to make the best of a bad situation: when one cannot know, he has to make the venture of faith; it would be nice if we could prove that Jesus Christ is salvation, but since we cannot, we simply will have to act as though he is. It would be quite possible, too, to understand S.K. as making the venture completely unmotivated, fortuitous, subjectivistic, based on nothing more than what the man decides he wants to believe. Both these implications are very wide from the mark, as S.K. made plain in the very important journal entry that follows:
If I truly have a conviction (and that, we know, is an inner determination in the direction of spirit) my conviction to me is always stronger than reasons; actually, conviction is what supports the reasons, not the other way around…. One’s conviction, or the fact that it is one’s conviction: my, your, conviction (the personal) is decisive. One can deal with reasons half jokingly: Well, if you insist on reasons I don’t mind giving you some; do you want 3 or 5 or 7, how many do you want? Still, I cannot say anything higher than this: I have faith! I believe! … My development, or any man’s, proceeds like this: Maybe he too starts out with some reasons, but they represent the lower plane. Then he makes a choice; Under the weight of responsibility before God a conviction will be born in him by God’s help…. The matter becomes further personal, or it becomes a question of personality, i.e., one can only defend one’s conviction ethically, personally, that is through the sacrifice one is willing to make for it and by the dauntlessness with which one maintains it. There is only one proof of the truth of Christianity: the inner proof, argumentum spiritus sancti. In the Epistle of St. Jn. 5:9 this is hinted: ‘If we receive the witness of men’ (meaning all the historical evidence and considerations), ‘the witness of God is greater’ i.e. the inner testimony is greater. And in verse 10: ‘He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself.’ It is not the reasons that motivate belief in the Son of God, but the other way round, belief in the Son of God constitutes the evidence. It is the very motion of the Infinite, and it cannot be otherwise. Reasons do not motivate convictions; conviction motivates the reasons.”9
Here in brief compass is an epistemology of religion, the epistemology of freedom’s venture, i.e. of faith. Note that it is a supremely religious method of dealing with religious truth; S.K. certainly did not mean to suggest this as a procedure for arriving at scientific fact, or even for constructing theological dogma. This is an epistemology for matters of “infinite, personal, passionate interest,” 10 operative in that realm where the human spirit must deal with things of the spirit. And here, in faith’s proper sphere, conviction, decision, and venture–enthusiasm (enthousiusmos), if you will–are more powerful, more effective, and more knowledgeable than reasons and evidence and intellectual cognition ever could be. The free venture of den Enkelte is the only possible but also the best conceivable–way to God and to true selfhood.
Notice, too, that this venture is far from being a subjectivistic leap in the dark, even though there are no so-called objective reasons and evidences to form its rationale. S.K. was emphatic that, in the venture, den Enkelte finds and is found by “God’s help,” “the inner testimony,” “argumentum spiritus sancti,” “the very motion of the Infinite:” And here is objectivity enough and to spare; God the Spirit is a reality apart from the man, standing over against him, capable, thus, of confronting, judging, correcting, and disciplining him quite independently of the man’s own subjective inclinations and desires. Of course this is an entirely individualized objectivity that never can be “shared,” i.e. the inner testimony received by one man will not accomplish a whit in easing the need or paving the way for the next person to make his personal venture. But this in no way affects the powerful objectivity of den Enkelte’s relationship to God and thus of his “definition” of himself.
Quite simply, for S.K. faith must possess this character of venture and risk, because it is the committing of oneself in a person-to-person relationship. No other understanding of God except that he is a Person even will begin to give coherence to Kierkegaard’s thought–and not his religious thought only, but also his so-called philosophic thought. Nothing S.K. ever wrote is more fundamental than the following journal entries:
Augustine has done incalculable harm. The whole of Christian doctrine through the centuries really rests upon him–and he has confused the concept of faith.
Quite simply, Augustine resuscitated the platonic-aristotelian definition, the whole Greek philosophical pagan definition of faith…
For the Greeks faith is a concept which belongs to the sphere of the intellect…. So faith is related to the probable, and we have the ascending scale of faith and knowledge.
From the Christian point of view faith belongs to the existential: God did not appear in the character of a professor who has some doctrines which must first be believed and then understood.
No, faith belongs to and has its home in the existential, and in all eternity it has nothing to do with knowledge as a comparative or a superlative.
Faith expresses a relationship from personality to personality.
Personality is not a sum of doctrines, nor is it something directly accessible. Personality is bent in on itself, it is a clausum [something closed] an aduton [innermost shrine], a musterion [mystery]. Personality is that which is within, hence the word persona (personare)
is significant, it is that which is within to which a man, himself in turn a personality, may be related in faith. Between person and person no other relation is possible. Take the two most passionate lovers who have ever lived, and even if they are, as is said, one soul in two bodies, this can never come to anything more than that the one believes that the other loves him or her.
In this purely personal relation between God as personal being and the believer as personal being, in existence, is to be found the concept of faith.
In the margin:] Hence the apostolic formula, ‘the obedience of faith’ (e.g. Romans 1:5), so that faith tends to the will and personality, not to intellectuality. 11
But it is not enough simply to establish the concept that God is a Person.
Let us suppose that someone, a professor, spends his whole life in study and learning in order to demonstrate the personality of God–and let us suppose that in the end he succeeds. What then? Then at the end of his life he will have come to the beginning, or to the end of the introduction to the beginning….
No, God is personal, the matter is certain.
But with this you are no farther forward. Here again there is a human aberration, it is imagined that when the professor has finally proved that God is personality, then he must be so without further ado for us all.
No, God is certainly personal, but it does not follow from this that he is personal without further ado for you. Take a human relationship: a superior personality is certainly a personality, but does he not have it in his power, in the face of his inferior, to be a personality in relation to him, or to be related objectively to him?12
Yet it is clear that the superior is and remains a personality.
So with God. He is certainly personality, but whether he wills to be this in relation to the single person depends on whether it pleases God. It is God’s grace that in relation to you he desires to be personality; and if you squander his grace, he punishes you by relating himself objectively to you.13
And because faith is a living, existential relation between a human person and the God Person, it follows that the relationship will be of the nature of authority.
Christianity came into the world on the basis of authority, its divine authority; therefore the authority is superior. But for a long time now the situation has been quite changed around: one seeks to prove and establish authority on grounds of reason…. A so-called philosophical Christianity has discovered that authority is imperfect, at best something for the plebs, and that perfection consists in getting rid of it…. And theology seeks to establish the authority of Christianity by reason, which is worse than any attack, since it confesses in-directly that there is no authority.14
Of course faith’s venture certainly does represent a free, centered act on the part of the individual, but that is not to say that the act is self contained, involving nothing but the person’s private power and action. Indeed, in the venture the individual need free himself only far enough that God can get at him, as it were; once a man makes the effort, God stands by to energize and direct the leap. In no sense does den Enkelte become self-creating, because even with his strong emphasis upon human freedom S.K. also held a strong concept of enabling, and even prevenient, grace:
It is as when one gives a present to a child and then, to please him, pretends that he is giving us what we had given him, which in fact was ours. But our relationship with God is not even of that kind, for God is also at the same time the One Who gives us the power to succeed. It would, therefore, be like the father and mother who themselves help the child to write a congratulatory letter for their anniversary, which letter will be received as a present on the anniversary day.15
The role here assigned to grace explains why S.K. could as much as guarantee that he who leaps will leap correctly:
For one can guarantee to make a Christian of every man he can get to come under this category [i.e. den Enkelte]–insofar as one man can do this for another, or we may say rather, that he can vouch for it that such a man will become a Christian. As a single individual he is alone, alone in the whole world, alone before God–and with that there is no question about obedience! All doubt … is just simply disobedience to God.16
The work of the Holy Spirit–although not usually posed under that name–is an integral part of S.K.’s concept of freedom, even if this aspect of the matter customarily is disregarded by his interpreters. But with this inclusion it is made very apparent that, for all his notorious subjectivity, S.K.’s basic thought is oriented toward and involved in a Reality that is objective and trancendental in the highest sense possible.
As did S.K., so did the Brethren believe in (or rather, assume) the freedom of the will, although they were as little concerned to prove the point as he was. Certainly it is the case that all Protestants, churchly as well as sectarian, are eager to preserve an emphasis both on the sovereignty of God and on faith as personal decision. At the same time it is rather clear that the sectarian tradition, with its insistence upon adult baptism, conversion, etc., has been more emphatic on the latter point than has the churchly. And in this regard it is unimpeachable that, historically, the sectaries were more inclined to uphold a doctrine of freedom of the will while the churches tended toward predestination and the bound will.
Implicit hints rather than explicit discussion make it plain that the Brethren were part of the sectarian, free-will tradition, even though they came out of a Calvinist background.17 In the only Brethren word at all resembling a “theological” statement on the issue, Mack Junior took a position not intrinsically different from S.K.’s, striving to attribute all possible credit to the work of grace yet without impinging on the decisive rote of human freedom: “God, indeed, can require of His creatures whatever He wishes. But when He does require something of us, He first influences the will–if one accepts it–so that the person wills as He wills. Thus He also effects and gives the accomplishment according to His pleasure. And then things are good; God is pleased and the person is blessed.”18 The crucial little parenthesis “if one accepts it” amounts to the same thing as the child following his parents’ suggestion and letting them help him write a congratulatory letter. From one standpoint this does not amount to much in the way of freedom, but as real freedom it marks a substantial move away from the doctrine of the bound will. The Brethren-Kierkegaardian view is far from the utter and infinite freedom of existentialism, but it is also far from churchly predestinarianism.
The heart of the matter, for Mack, came at the same place it did for S.K. Mack said: “The covenant of God under the economy of the New Testament demands genuinely voluntary lovers of God and His truth.”19 It can he put no more forth-rightly–and S.K. would have been the first to applaud: The affirmation of human freedom is primarily and eminently a demand of the gospel, not a necessary concept of philosophical theology nor even an empirical observation regarding the human situation.
Thus the Brethren were not content, any more than S.K. was, to stop simply with the assertion that human freedom exists; they hurried on to the idea of faith as freedom committed through the absolute venture. Mack Junior, although speaking much less precisely than S.K., made the same point: “To have faith and to believe are to be distinguished, just as to live and to act….” Here we must clarify Mack’s terminology, for it is in some respects the precise opposite of that to which we are accustomed in English. Modern theology uses “faith” (with overtones of commitment and trust) as superior to “belief” (mere intellectual assent to cognitive propositions), but this is not at all the distinction Mack had in mind. He is contrasting “to have faith,” which is in the passive voice, thus that which is held merely as an inanimate possession, with “to believe,” which is in the active voice, thus a dynamic, creative work of the believer. The contrast is the same as that between “to live,” i.e. merely to be alive, in existence, with “to act.” Mack continues:
‘Behold the kingdom of God is within you (Lk. 17:21).’ Now, where the kingdom of God is in a person, there also is faith–nevertheless, with great disparity. With many it lies as dead and obscure as the fire in a cold stone; with others it lies as a little spark in the ashes; conversely, with others as a rather large coal.
Here lies the crux of the sectarian protest against the concept of faith as practiced, if not taught, by the churches–which protest led even to the denial of the Reformation principle of sola fide. The difference ultimately is a semantic one as to what is intended by the word “faith,” and it may well be that the sectaries stood closer to what Luther intended by sola fide than the churchmen did. But whether the debate over the word “faith” was legitimate or not, the distinction is a real one. Mack is resisting any concept of faith that makes it an almost natural endowment, one that is achieved, at any rate, simply by being born in a Christian country and following the accepted social pattern of church life. The most that can be said for faith on this level is that it is potential faith, which, by being acted upon, lived by, ventured, can be fanned into true faith. Mack continues:
But with everyone something must first happen 20 [Cf. below] inwardly or outwardly–the commonest way is inwardly and outwardly together–something real first must happen so that the person might come to believe, or to demonstrate, that faith is not his belonging but that, much more, lack of faith [Unglaube] is the element in which he chooses to live and die. In that connection Paul witnesses (Acts 17:31? [16:31?]) that God charges every person to believe.21
But the Brethren emphasis on faith as free venture comes through most characteristically as poetic exhortation rather than prosaic theologizing. Mack Junior, again, is the author:
When now a child of man
In this short life
Considers now and then
To whom he shall give himself,
God or his Enemy,
So is the number of days
For this great choice
Appointed by his Friend
God Himself makes him brave
So that he conquers,
Reveals to him the noble crown,
And metes out for him the time,
That in this conflict he
May bring off the prize.22
Here is the theme of choice and its importance, the fact that God himself aids and enables one in the choice, and a new emphasis regarding the time factor involved. This last forms a specific parallel with S.K.; he developed the idea of what he called “the moment,” or “the instant?’ This is the hour of decision, the kairos destined for the venture of faith. When fulfilled in the venture, “the moment” is the point at which eternity enters time, at which a man comes into existence before God. And the moment always is now. Yesterday has proved too early; it was allowed to pass without being used. Tomorrow will be too late; the longer one delays choosing the more likely that he will continue to delay and so never choose. Today is the day, this the moment God offers and has destined for the absolute venture.
In Brethren thought this idea is best represented in the poetry of Jacob Stoll; the urgency of decision becomes the next thing to an obsession with him. “O, the time of grace is urgent!/Therefore, buy it well.”23 Into two lines Stoll managed to cram his three favorite phrases: “this time of grace,” “the time so urgent,” and “buying the time.” One of his best hymns is built on the recurrent line: “O, how is the time so urgent?”24 But the most “Kierkegaardian” passage of all is his hymn “The Single Choice”:
Each person is what he chooses
As being his desire and joy;
Each person is what he strives for
As his enjoyment.
There must be some significance
To what one chooses as his portion;
And shall it prove, then,
To be only vanity?
So what shall now be my choice?
What shall my portion signify?
Thee, Jesus, my crown,
Thee will I prize eternally.
Of two things, choose one;
Indeed, more you cannot have;
And if you choose nothing,
The world does bury you,
And it eventually passes away
With all its lusts,
And what here pleased you
Will fill your breast with sorrow.25
‘In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Rohde Journals, 828 (1848).
2. Discourse III on “The Lilies of the Field” in The Gospel of Suffering, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1948), 228.
3. Postscript, 379.
4. Stages of Life’s Way, 114.
5. “On the Occasion of a Wedding” (Discourse II) in Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life, 68-69.
6. Dru Journals, 1051 (1850).
7. Attack upon “Christendom,” 191.
8. Dru Journals, 1044 (1850). Cf. “Christ as Example (Discourse II) in Judge For Yourselves!, 200.
9. Rohde Journals, 201 (1849).
10. Postscript, 33.
11. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:237 (1854); cf. 11:2:A:380 (1854).
12. I have taken the liberty of amending Smith’s translation so as to make a rhetorical question out of what he transcribes as a flat, negative assertion: “he does not have it in his power ….” Smith is true to the Danish edition of the Papirer, which does not have the question mark. But whether the mistake was S.K.’s or his editor’s, the sense of the passage as much as demands that the question be what S.K. had in mind. [V.E.]
13. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:175 (1854).
14. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:436 (1854).
15. Papirer, 8:1:A:342 (1847), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 110.
16. The second of “Two Notes an ‘the Individual’” in Point of View, 135.
17. Of course by the time we get down to S.K. in the nineteenth century it is not unusual to find even “churchly” theologians advocating the free-will position. S.K.’s view, therefore, does in no sense prove him a sectary, although at the same time we shall see that he uses man’s freedom in much the same existential way that the Brethren sectaries did.
18. Alexander Mack, Jr., Appendix to the Refuted Anabaptists [first published Ephrata, 1788), in a typescript translation by N. P. Springer (Mennonite Historical Library, Goshen, Ind., 1952), 3.
20. S.K. expressed this idea with the term “predicament,” or “situation”; see “Christ as Example” (Discourse II) in Judge For Yourselves!, 200.
22. Mack Junior, a poem on suicide (c. 1770), in Heckman, op.cit., 136ff, stanzas 18, 20 [trans. amended-V.E.].
23. Jacob Stoll, Geistliches Gewurz-Gartlein (Ephrata, 1806), 135-36 [my trans.-VE].
24. Ibid., 363. The second stanza of this hymn appears in the German and in a modern translation as 428 in the current Brethren Hymnal. There it is attributed to Mack Senior. Although we have not been able to trace that attribution to its source, the likelihood seems to be that Stoll is the author of the lines.
b. Antiintellectualism
The Christian thesis is not intelligere Ut credam,nor is it credere ut intelligam. No, it is: Act according to the precepts and commandments of Christ, do the will of the Father–and you shalt have faith. Christianity does not lie in the least in the sphere of the intellect.1
For the simple heart it is simply: thou shalt believe. For the understanding intellect it is: it is against reason, but thou shalt believe. Here the “thou shalt” is much stronger because it is opposed to something.2
“Antiintellectualism,” or “irrationalism,” is a Kierkegaardian hallmark universally recognized and almost as widely analyzed, popularized, criticized and/or apotheosized. It will not be necessary for us either to duplicate or to compete with these efforts; it suffices to note a few things that many commentators overlook and to make audible the sectarian tenor of S.K.’s position.
One observation common to most Kierkegaard scholars but which deserves repeating is that S.K. nowhere denied reason a proper sphere or a competency in that sphere. And that sphere is broad, as broad as the world–but no broader. Reason does not have authority or competence in the supermundane dimensions of man’s existence where he chooses himself and knows himself before God. S.K. belittled reason only where it presumed to encroach upon tuners of faith. S.K. maintained that reason cannot provide adequate answers for problems of “infinite, personal, passionate interest”; he did not question the rights and capabilities of reason per se. Thus S.K. was not an “irrationalist” either in principle or in practice, and the last thing he wanted to he is precisely what his existentialist disciples have made of him, the founder of a philosophy which proves philosophically that philosophy is impossible. 3
From this follows a second observation which is not as common to the commentators: S.K.’s contention against reason was a purely and thoroughly religious one. S.K. was not a philosopher who through his philosophic-rational investigations of reason discovered and gave rational definition to the limits of reason–as though reason were capable of mapping the territory into which it cannot go and then denying itself entry. S.K. was not a philosopher-theologian graciously “leaving room” for faith; he was a man of faith “making room” for faith against the incursions of intellectualism. If at times some of the pseudonymous works give this other impression, it is not because S.K. himself actually was operating out of a philosophic stance; rather, the religious maieuticer had “gone back” in the guise of a pseudonym to interest “philosophers” and entice them forward into religion. S.K.’s antiintellectualism–as every other of his major themes–is more accurately explicated when one starts from the true, religious premises of Søren Kierkegaard rather than the pseudo, philosophic premises of the pseudonyms.
At base, S.K.’s antiintellectualism was directed not toward any defect or shortcoming within reason itself but toward the theological tendency to posit, justify, and defend Christianity on the grounds of its rational comprehensibility. Whether, then, all theologizing is to be considered as coming under S.K.’s strictures depends entirely upon how broadly one applies the term “theology.” So-called biblical theology, lay theology, applied theology, practical theology, etc., likely would not. What definitely would is philosophical theology, systematic theology, and any other theology that tends toward interpreting Christianity primarily in terms of its cognitive coherency–and certainly, in S.K.’s day and traditionally, this is what the very word “theology” suggested. Thus S.K. could make the acid comment: “Who speaks in honor of [faith]? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy.”4 And thus in the precise language of scholarship it is misleading to identify S.K. either as a philosopher or as a theologian, although in popular usage–where “philosopher” means simply “one who thinks about the meaning of life” and “theologian,” “one who thinks about God and religion”-the terms are acceptable and, indeed, unavoidable.
It should be noted, and noted well, that the objection of both S.K. and the Brethren against theology did not have to do with the “content” of Christian doctrine. As S.K. said: “Doctrine, as normally expounded, is on the whole correct. Hence I am not quarreling about that.” 5 In neither case are we dealing with a heterodoxy attacking orthodoxy in order to supplant orthodox beliefs with new ones of its own. Thus the antitheological bent of S.K. and the Brethren is something different from that of the Social Gospel, for example, in which the objection to theologizing was made suspect by the fact that the objectors were as much at odds with the basic content of orthodoxy as with the fact of its theologizing. The true Kierkegaard-sectarian concern is not so much that the churches hold wrong beliefs (beliefs in the sense of the basic, propositional definitions of the faith) as that they foster anemic belielf (belief in the sense of decisive, ventured commitment). The live threat to Christianity is not heresy (to which theologizing might be an appropriate response, if it would confine itself simply to teaching correct beliefs rather than striving to prove or justify them) but indifference (which theologizing tends to compound by suggesting that what Christianity basically requires is intellectual comprehension and assent).
Thus S.K. was deeply troubled over the fact that theology tends to obscure rather than elucidate the true nature of Christianity. His statement quoted below is most significant because of its date; in 1836-1837 S.K. was but twenty-four years old, six years away from the opening of his authorship. Yet here appears a protest that could as well be part of the Attack of 1855:
Every Christian concept has been so sublimated, so completely volatilized into a sea of fog that it is impossible to recognize it again. To such concepts as faith, incarnation, tradition, inspiration, which in Christianity must be referred to a particular historical fact, it has seemed good to philosophers to give an entirely different general meaning whereby faith becomes immediate certainty, which at bottom is neither more nor less than the vital fluid of the life of the mind, its atmosphere; tradition has become the summary of a certain world experience, whilst inspiration has become nothing but the result of God having breathed the spirit of life into man, and incarnation nothing else than the existence of one or other ideas in one or more individuals.6
This statement, and the continuing Kierkegaardian position of which it is an expression, carries some very interesting implications regarding the way S.K. has been used in modern theology. There is not necessarily any discrepancy at all between the fact that Emil Brunner calls S.K. “the greatest Christian thinker of modern times”7 and the fact that Karl Barth gives S.K. no attention whatsoever in his history of nineteenth century theology.8 S.K. could have been what Brunner says he was without being an appropriate subject for Barth’s theological history. Either Brunner’s, or Barth’s, or both assessments of S.K. are actually more consistent than the approach of a Tillich or a Bultmann which draws heavily upon S.K. in the process of constructing a philosophical theology which almost certainly would come under Kierkegaardian condemnation.9 It would, perhaps, be both more accurate and more fair to posit an “either/or” rather than a liaison between all those who indulge in formal systematics and the man who said: “In relation to Christianity, systematic philosophy is merely skilled in the use of all sorts of diplomatic phraseology, which deceives the unsuspicious. Christianity as understood by the speculative philosopher is something different from Christianity as expounded for the simple.”10
In accord with his avowed position, S.K. did not write theology in the traditional sense, and it is only by a perverse sort of exegesis that one can make him talk like a theologian. It is difficult to pin him down on the “normal” issues of theology, simply because he did not address himself to them. Indeed, it is apparent that he made a studied attempt to avoid customary theological terminology (such as “Trinity,” “incarnation,” “natures”) even though it is equally apparent that he accepted the basic ideas with which the terms have to do.
An interesting example in this regard also provides a striking parallel with Brethrenism. In the course of his thought S.K., obviously, treated all three Persons of the Godhead time and again; but in all of his voluminous writings there is only one discussion of the Trinity as such, and this an unpublished journal entry. Even here, however, S.K. showed no interest at all in what the Godhead is in and for itself, what its essential nature may be or what the internal relations among the three Persons. The question he discussed is: what is the economy of the three Persons as they relate to the individual in the process of his finding salvation? His conclusion, very briefly put, was:
One begins with an immediate relationship to God the Father but soon finds the disparity too exacting and so is referred by the Father to the Son as Model. Now, the Model is found to be impossibly high and so the Model refers the man to Himself as Redeemer. However, even in the Redeemer the demands of the Model still stand, and so the Son refers the man to the Spirit as a source of present help, guidance, and comfort. Then, and only then, is the Spirit ready to lead one to the Son and the Son to the Father.11
Although in the course of their writings the eighteenth century Brethren obviously treated all three Persons of the Godhead, there appears only one discussion of the Trinity as such. But even here they showed no interest in what the Godhead is in and for itself, etc. But Christian Longenecker addressed himself to the question: what is the economy of the three Persons as they relate to the individual in the process of his finding salvation? His conclusion was: One first meets God through a confrontation with the Father in his holiness. As a consequence the man is so struck by his own sinfulness that he shuns intimacy and finds forgiveness incredible. Therefore, the “tug of the Father directs him to the throne of grace and brings him to the Son.” “Now the Son will cleanse his flesh and spirit of all defilement and give him a new leader, namely, the Holy Spirit.” And then the man discovers that “he can love God.”12
The major significance of this parallel does not lie particularly in the results; there may be more of a difference than our brief summaries would indicate. Rather, the impressive factors of the comparison are these: In the first place, neither S.K. nor Longenecker was heterodox, but their approach to orthodoxy was unorthodox, to say the least. Both recognized the importance of a correct understanding of Christian doctrine; in neither S.K. nor the Brethren is there any hint of an “it doesn’t matter what you believe” attitude. But on the other hand, both S.K. and the Brethren saw doctrine as correct only insofar as it was edifying, relevant to one’s immediate existence. The test of true doctrine is whether it edifies, not whether it is logically consistent. Just as soon as doctrine wandered toward the abstract and theoretical, S.K. and the Brethren lost all interest.
The position of both S.K. and the Brethren surely can be described as antiintellectual; it accurately could be called non-theological if one confines the term “theology” to formal, speculative, systematic thought; it would be inaccurate to call the position doctrinally heedless or promiscuous; and it would be entirely out of order to term it irrational.
Viewed from his radically religious perspective, S.K.’s anti-intellectualism shows up at point after point in widely varying connections; in fact, it is seen to be the necessary negative that proceeds from any number of his positive motifs:
First, because the concept of den Enkelte is a thrust in the direction of the personal, the concrete, the specific, the particular–any movement in the direction of abstraction and generality is to be condemned: “[People] regard Christianity as a sum of doctrinal statements and lecture upon them, just as they do upon ancient philosophy, the Hebrew language, or any other scientific discipline, treating the relation to them of the hearers or learners as entirely indifferent. Substantially this is paganism. The Christian position clearly is that the personal relationship to Christianity is the decisive thing.”13 Doctrine, if it is to touch den Enkelte where he lives, must be edification directed to that individual, not theory directed to the forum of learning.14 And because God is a Person, den Enkelte’s relationship to him must involve infinitely more than just intellectual cognition.15
Secondly we are dealing with S.K.’s antiintellectualism immediately following our discussion of his concept of faith because the connection is very close. If faith is venture in the radical sense defined above, then it can in no way be rational calculation. The two are opposed movements, for reflection proceeds, not by leaping into seventy thousand fathoms of water, but by building a pier out from the shore, welding cautious deduction to proven premise every inch of the way:
If I really have powers of reflection and am in a situation in which I have to act decisively–what then? My powers of reflection will show me exactly as many possibilities pro as contra…. There is nothing more impossible, or more self-contradictory than to act (decisively, infinitely) by virtue of reflection. If anyone asserts that they have done so they only give themselves away and show that either they have no powers of reflection (because the reflection which has not a pro for every contra is not reflection at all, the essence of it being its duality) or else they do not know what it means to act.16
Third, Immediately following this discussion of antiintellectualism will come a section on S.K.’s understanding of “inwardness,” or “subjectivity.” The relationship again is very close. Christianity becomes actual for a person only when it has driven radically inward, affecting his very being, touching the deepest wellsprings of his life; and cognitive propositions simply do not penetrate to this level. What follows is S.K.’s best and most succinct statement of an idea to which he devoted major attention. Would that in their effort to exegete S.K.’s “subjectivity” all his commentators might start with this little-used passage rather than confining their attention to words of the nonreligious pseudonyms:
The truth, in the sense in which Christ was the truth, is not a sum of sentences, not a definition of concepts, etc., but a life. Truth in its very being is not the duplication of being in terms of thought, which yields only the thought of being…. No, truth in its very being is the reduplication in me, in thee, in him, so that my, that thy, that his life, approximately, in the striving to attain it, expresses the truth, so that my, that thy, that his life, approximately, in the striving to attain it, is the very being of truth, is a life, as the truth was in Christ, for He was the truth. And hence, Christianly understood, the truth consists not in knowing the truth but in being the truth…. No man knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth. Only then do I truly know the truth when it becomes a life in me…. And hence one sees what a monstrous error it is, very nearly the greatest possible error, to impart Christianity by lecturing.”17
At least something of the same thought was expressed in an anonymous tract which almost certainly comes from an eighteenth century Brethren source. In concluding his appeal, the author requests non-Christians to renounce their own sophistical judgments of the matters presented and pray God for a beginning of experience, saying, “A completely small experience of the Way which Christ himself is is better than a great fancy [einbildung] of the Way which Christ himself is.”18
Is this not an embryonic way of saying that truth “is a life, as the truth was in Christ” and not “the duplication of being in terms of thought”?
Fourth, the point at which the Brethren most fully justified and defended their antiintellectualism was as the negative counterpart of obedience. S.K. also had a strong emphasis on obedience and also saw that intellectualism is the enemy. “To reflect” is essentially opposed to “to obey,” for reflection involves questioning, the demanding of an explanation, the holding back of commitment: “It is very far from being true that the longer a man deliberates and deliberates, the nearer he comes to God; on the contrary, the truth is that the longer the deliberation becomes while the choice is postponed, the farther he removes himself from God…. The ungodly calmness with which the irresolute man would begin in the case of God (for he would begin with doubt), precisely this is insubordination; for thereby God is deposed from the throne, from being the Lord.”19
In their earliest theological work, through the writing of Mack Senior, the Brethren also emphasized that obedience must take precedence over intellectualizing: “It is very good to look only to the express word of the Lord Jesus and to His own perfect example. If people would just follow after Him in the obedience of faith, taking reason captive in obedience to the Lord Jesus, they would not be led astray by the high sounding talk of men.”20 A generation later, the second Alexander Mack discussed the matter in more detail, in response to a specific accusation that the Brethren shrink from the use of reason: “The baptism-minded ones [the “Dunkers”] wish to have no other system than the words of their Savior, as they stand written in the New Testament, which words never give place to reason, and not only as well-ringing gold, which can withstand the most severe inspection, but also will stand when heaven and earth pass away…. Under heaven there is to be found no higher honor for our small reason than where it may shine in the bonds and fetters of heavenly wisdom, and that, on the contrary, where it is met outside this captivity, it is outside its city of refuge.”21 Certainly there may be an aspect of naivete to this “if people would just follow after Him,” but if it has not become clear already, it presently will, that S.K., for one, always would rather be identified with naive obedience than with sophisticated theologizing.
Fifth, another major characteristic of both S.K. and the Brethren is their “devotional immediacy,” i.e. the sense of God’s living presence and their intimate fellowship with him. Of course, to treat God primarily in terms of rational cognition would be to kill that sense of immediacy forthwith; thus, this is another grounds for antiintellectualism. As S.K. put it:
That which a simple soul, in the happy impulse of the pious heart, feels no need of understanding in an elaborate way, since he simply seizes the Good immediately, is grasped by the clever one only at the cost of much time and much grief.22
And in a word that is much more profound than its bantering tone might indicate:
The best proof for the immortality of the soul, that God exists, etc., is really the impression one gets in one’s childhood, and consequently the proof which, in conradiction to the learned and highfalutinproofs, can be described thus: it is quite certain, because my father told me so”23
Sixth, one of S.K.’s strongest protests against intellectualism came in connection with his insistence on the equality of all men before God. Clearly, if one’s ability to theologize is a necessary aspect of his becoming a Christian, then many a person is damned for his low native ability:
Are you, my reader, perhaps what is called an educated person? Well, I too am educated. But if you think to come closer to this Highest by the help of education, you make a great mistake…. Christianity is by no means the highest of education…. Alas, have not this education and the enthusiasm with which it is coveted rather developed a new kind of distinction, ad distinction between the educated and the non-educated.24
From the Brethren side, Mack Junior, who shared S.K.’s concern about the quality before God, also saw that intellectual distinctions dare not be allowed to stand within Christianity:
Great People can certainly make great deductions, but little people, for all that, have often learned so much out of the Bible which even great people have missed.25
It should be plain that although neither S.K. nor Brethren had much use for formal, rationalistic theology, they were not opposed to thinking and reason per se. Far from being philosophical irrationalists, they were Christians interested in preserving the simplicity and accessibility of the gospel. Indeed, their antiintellectualism was not even an independent and self-explanatory doctrine but only the negative corollary of the positive points they truly were concerned to make. Thus, on the one hand, Mag. Artium Hr. Søren Kierkegaard, “father” of philosophies, theologies, and psychologies whose number cannot yet be counted, and on the other hand, the simple, uneducated Brethren–these two were nonetheless of a mind regarding the place (more accurately, lack of place) of intellectualism within Christianity.
n Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:339 (1854).
2. Papirer, X:1:A:187 (1849), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 128.
3. Papirer, 10:6:B:114, 143ff. (1849-50), quoted in Cornelio Fabro, “Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard’s Dialectic” in Critique, 171-79.
4. Fear and Trembling [bound with The Sickness unto Death], trans. Walter Lowne, revised by Howard Johnson (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 43. The words are those of Johannes de silentio (pseud.); the sentiment can safely he ascribed to S.K. Cf., p. 5 above. Cf. also Smith Journals, 10:3:A:635 (1854).
5. Papirer, 10:3:A:635, quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 81.
6. Dru Journals, 88, 35 (1836-1837).
7. Brunner, Truth as Encounter, 112.
8. Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl trans. Brian Cozens (New York: Harper, 1959).
9. Kenneth Hamilton recently has published a full-length study of Tillich’s theology, The System and the Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1963), in which he deliberately uses S.K. as a norm against which to criticize Tillich, going so far as to characterize him as an “antiKierkegaard.”
10. Postscript, 200. These words of Climacus safely can be ascribed to S.K. In fact, by virtue of its being designed specifically as a bridge between the aesthetic and the religious works, Postscript comes as close to being direct communication as a pseudonym can be.
11. Dru Journals, 1282 (1852).
12. Christian Longenecker, “On the True Conversion and New Birth” [an essay from his book, Eine Vertheidigung der Wahrheit (Ephrata, 1806)], trans. Vernard Eller, Brethren Life and Thought 7, 2 (Spring 1962), 23-26.
13. “Our Salvation Is Now Nearer …” (Part III, Discourse 5) in Christian Discourses, 221-22.
14. The Concept of Dread, 14.
15. See the quotations above. Cf. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:86 (1854).
16. Dru Journals, 871 (1849).
17. “Lifted Up On High …” (Part III, Reflection 5) in Training in Christianity, 200-01, 202.
18. Ein Geringer Schein … (Germantown, 1747), 24. For a description of this work, a translation of parts of it, the argument for its Brethren authorship, and the suggestion that Mack Junior may have been the writer, see Vernard Eller, “Friends, Brethren, and Separatists …,” Brethren Life and Thought 7, 4 (Autumn 1962), 47ff.
19. “The Anxiety of Irresolution …” (Part I, Discourse 7) in Christian Discourses, 90.
20. Alexander Mack, Sr., Rights and Ordinances [first published Germany, 1715] in Durnbaugh, Origins, 395.
22. Purity of Heart, 55.
23. Dru Journals, 785 (1848).
24. Works of Love, 71. Cf. Postscript, 143. Cf. also Rohde Journals, 118 (1846).
c. Inwardness/Subjectivity
Chistianity is spirit, spirit is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in one’s eternal happiness. As soon as subjectivity is eliminated, and passion eliminated from subjectivity, and the infinite interest eliminated from passion, there is in general no decision at all, neither in this problem nor in any other. All decisiveness, all essential decisiveness is rooted in subjectivity.1
Because the choice through which den Enkelte chooses himself before God is not the calculated nod of the intellect but a daring venture of the self, “subjectivity,” the involvement of the total person to the roots of his existence, was bound to be a major emphasis with S.K. “Subjectivity” has tended to become the technical term by which this theme is identified (although only because the commentators insist in centering on Postscript). Actually, “inwardness” is the better term; S.K. used it more widely, particularly as he moved out of the pseudonymous and into his religious writings. “Subjectivity” carries with it philosophic connotations, “inwardness” religious ones; and as we have not neglected to mention already, S.K. was a religious author.
It proves most interesting to trace this motif in Kierkegaard, because we discover a movement that does not often appear. There is, of course, the very familiar pattern of the “feigned movement, ” the movement from the pseudonyms, with their more abstract presentation, through the gradual revelation of the true and thoroughly Christian grounding of the idea. But it also seems clear that we have here a case in which S.K.’s own thought changed and developed; there are lacking the usual clues and “leaks” that give away the fact that S.K. had in mind more than he was allowing the pseudonyms to say. Basically the movement represents the building of a dialectic–not the mere presentation of a dialectic in which the author knows what the second pole is to be before he delineates the first, but the creation of a dialectic; we see S.K. discover the second pole.
“Inwardness” is the first pole. Its negative, its contradictory, its perverted counterpart, is “hiddenness” (or, in other cases, “superficial emotionalism”). This is not the second pole. Involved here is a most important principle regarding Kierkegaardian dialectic. The relationship between a thing and its contradictory, between a positive and its negative, is never to be understood as dialectical; rather, the positive is to be wholly affirmed and the negative wholly rejected. The word “antithesis” is most confusing in this regard; it customarily is used to identify the second pole of a dialectic (although, more precisely, that of a Hegelian dialectic of philosophical concepts, which is something far different from the Kierkegaardian dialectic of existential life modes).2 But antithesis also has come to mean “the opposite,” or “the contradictory.” However, for S.K. the second pole is never the contradictory, or antithesis, of the first, because both poles must be “of the truth,” i.e. worthy of being affirmed, even though “the whole truth” is achieved only as both poles are affirmed in concert. Therefore, the Kierkegaardian dialectic always consists of two positives (never a positive and its negative) which are paradoxical yet essentially complementary.
The second pole that forms a true dialectic with the pole of “inwardness” is that which constitutes the theme of our next section, “fruitbearing and obedience.” The negative, or contradictory, of obedience is “works-righteousness,” which will be examined in the further section following. But with inwardness, as with every dialectical motif, S.K.’s thought and witness have not been well understood until the complementary pole also is in view; the doctrine of inwardness is truly Kierkegaardian only when balanced against the doctrine of outward obedience.
We are here dealing with the very fundamental dialectic of “inner-outer.” This same dialectic, as was suggested in an earlier chapter, was bred into the eighteenth century Brethren by virtue of their parentage; the powerful inwardness of Pietism came into conjunction with the equally powerful obedience-fruitbearing emphasis of Anabaptism. But with S.K. the achievement of this dialectic (not simply in his thought but even more particularly in his lift) was a most painful and agonizing struggle. All of his natural propensities–his genius, his melancholy, his delicate health, his introvertedness–all pointed him toward inwardness. It is no surprise, then, to discover in his writings the earliness, the strength, and the pervasiveness of this theme. But both in the authorship and in the biography, actually to Witness S.K. move in a direction absolutely counter to that in which every natural factor drove him, into a complementary “outwardness,” this is probably the most touching experience in the study of Kierkegaard. He claimed that this movement against the wind happened–and could happen–only by the hand of divine governance; and who would say him nay?
Our analysis begins, however, by focusing particularly upon inwardness. S.K.’s conception was rooted deeply in his understanding of the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of their relationship to one another. He stated the case in one of his early Edifying Discourses:
God is faithful, and does not leave Himself without testimony. But God is Spirit, and therefore can give only spiritual testimony, that is in the inner man; every external testimony from God, if one could imagine such a thing, is only a deception.3
And Climacus put the matter most succinctly when he said: “God is a subject, and therefore exists only for subjectivity in inwardness.”4 These two quotations speak volumes; and S.K. wrote volumes in his effort to elucidate and establish the point.
It is as important to understand what S.K. did not say here as what he did say. “Every external testimony is a deception.” Taken in the total context of his authorship it becomes obvious that S.K. did not mean to deny that God can and does use external events through which to reveal himself to and communicate with man. S.K. was too firmly rooted in the Bible to go this direction; he knew that there, indeed, God is presented as speaking through historical events much more than through inner voices and visions. S.K. was saying, rather, that external events, even when directed by God, can become “spiritual testimony” only when received by the inner man. Examined outwardly, these events can be proved only to be outward, historical events; received inwardly-and only when received inwardly-they are heard as the voice of God. A variation of the “inner-outer” dialectic clearly is at work.
Mack Senior emphasized the same understanding, applying the dialectic to the Scriptures as a specific instance:
No one may say to a believer that he should and must believe and obey the Scriptures, because no one can be a believer without the Holy Spirit, who must create the belief. Now, the Scriptures are only an outward testimony of those things which were once taught and commanded by the Holy Spirit…. All believers are united in it, for the Holy Spirit teaches them inwardly just as the Scriptures teach them outwardly…. Outwardly, [one] reads the Scriptures in faith and hears the inner word of life which gives him strength and power to follow Jesus.5 [Cf. those parts of the same passage quoted above.
We are dealing with two variations of, or contrapuntal movements within, the one, overall “inner-outer” dialectic. God’s outward works must become man’s inward testimony; in turn, man’s inward experience must find expression in outward action. Such two-way alternation is the hallmark of effective dialectic. In his concluding sentence Mack suggested the “outer-inner-outer” movement in its totality. However, both Mack and S.K. were emphatic that there is no faith apart from inwardness, that this is the only site at which a man can meet God. Why? Because “God is a subject, and therefore exists only for subjectivity in inwardness.”
S.K.’s wording is crucial: “God is a subject.” This is an entirely different thing than to say that God is subjectivity, or that he is an aspect of my subjectivity; the presence of the indefinite article “a” prohibits any such interpretation. The obvious intention is: God is a subject; I am a subject; these are two subjects, two different subjects existing independently and over against each other no matter how intimate the communion between them may become.6 Perhaps it follows that God thus is made an entity alongside other entities, but for S.K. there was no alternative.
“Therefore God exists only for subjectivity in inwardness.” And this is an entirely different thing than to say that God exists in subjectivity, or that his existence is located in my subjectivity. Louis Dupre put it well when he said, “Subjectivity is not to be confused with subjectivism…. Indeed, [subjectivity] fosters the fullest objectivity.”7 Not simply on the grounds of the statement under examination but of his entire authorship it can be said that S.K. (and for that matter, the Brethren as well) absolutely distinguished themselves from two major nondialectic types of “subjectivism.” One is the traditional mystic approach that looks for “the God within”–to the neglect of the inner testimony derived from God’s outward works. The other is contemporary existentialist theology, which, ironically enough, understands itself to be the heir of S.K., but which, in one way or another, identifies God with man’s own inwardness and undercuts the objectivity of God’s outward acts by recasting them into symbols of inward process.
The inwardness of both S.K. and the Brethren was preserved from either fate by maintenance of the dialectic. Thus the “inner” of God’s immanence was played off against the “outer” of his transcendence. The God who chooses to meet man only in his inwardness (because this is the appropriate site for encounter between “subjects,” or “persons”) is nevertheless the God who is “Wholly Other.”8 The God who “exists only for subjectivity” nevertheless revealed himself supremely in an objectively historical life recounted in an objectively historical book. The God who speaks to man only in his lonely inwardness nevertheless demands that that conversation be given outward expression in acts of obedience and fruit-bearing.
But because God, man, and their relationship are of this sort, S.K. felt it to be one of the greatest needs of his age that the life of faith become more inward and deep. He sometimes put the matter in more general and abstract terms:
All religiousness consists in inwardness, in enthusiasm, in strong emotion, in the qualitative tension by the springs of subjectivity. When one beholds people as they are for the most part, one cannot deny that they have some religiousness, some concern to be enlightened and instructed about religious things, but without allowing these things to affect them too closely…. I find no better comparison for their religiousness than the exercises in the field of maneuvers. As these exercises are related to battle or to being in battle (where there is danger, which in the field of maneuvers is absent), so is distance-religiousness related to inward religiousness.9
Sometimes, too, S.K. put inwardness into the authentic context of its Christian-biblical grounding–as when he cited Matthew 15:1-12, wherein Jesus castigates the Pharisees.
Christ is here regarded in general as [a] teacher … [who] insists upon inwardness in contrast with all empty externalism, a teacher who transforms externalism into inwardness. Such is the collision, a collision which recurs again and again in Christendom; briefly expressed it is the collision of pietism with the established order.10
Highly significant is S.K.’s identification of inwardness with pietism (whether he had in mind the specific historical movement or only the broad tendency of piety) and his aligning of himself with it. Indeed, the inwardness of both S.K. and the Brethren appears as a rather clear and direct influence from their Pietistic backgrounds.
The aspects of inwardness presented thus far form a stable element of S.K.’s thought; there is no particular change in this emphasis, except for the usual revelation of its essentially Christian character. When S.K. moved on to stress the second pole of the dialectic, he did in no way alter or deemphasize this conviction about inwardness. However, in the pseudonyms there is another aspect of inwardness which in time very definitely did change, to the point of being consciously renounced and condemned as the negative of true inwardness. This was “secrecy,” “invisibility,” or “hiddenness.” The note is very strong in the pseudonyms. In Fear and Trembling perhaps the most notable characteristic of the “knight of faith” is that there is absolutely no outward sign by which he can be distinguished from other men. And the principle is stated definitively by Johannes Climacus.11
But although it is the pseudonyms who most strongly emphasize secret inwardness, it seems certain that this was S.K.’s own honest opinion. There is no evidence that, in this instance, the edifying author actually stood beyond the pseudonym. And given S.K.’s conviction about the utter necessity of inwardness, plus the “inward” proclivities of his own introverted psyche, it is very plausible that he should have taken such a position. Indeed, he had a very valid religious motive for his belief. Secret inwardness was not thought of as opposed to obedience and fruitbearing; this pole of the dialectic simply had not yet come into view. Secret inwardness was opposed to the hypocrisy that demands an outward sign seen by men in order that one’s inwardness not go unnoticed and uncredited. Surely, secret inwardness is the cure for Pharisaism and is indubitably an authentic New Testament teaching.
But it is interesting to trace S.K.’s growing realization that there was another side to the coin and, consequently, his development of a true dialectic. The signs of awakening appear already in Postscript, almost alongside the most insistent demands for secrecy:
The medieval spirit [i.e. monastic asceticism] did not have complete confidence in its inwardness until this became an outwardness. [S.K. elsewhere made it clear that this may not have been motivated by the hypocrisy of wanting to be seen of men but by the more excusable weakness of wanting to transmute the strenuous solitude and insubstantiality of inwardness into safe and sure objectivities.] But the less outwardness, the more inwardness, and an inwardness expressed through its opposite (the outwardness of being wholly like all others, and that there is outwardly nothing to see) is the highest inwardness [To this point, S.K. simply has reiterated the case for secrecy, but he continues with a parenthesis which in the course of the authorship grew in emphasis until it supplanted the demand for secrecy and reduced it to parenthetical status.]–provided it is there. This qualification must always he added, and also the warning that the less outwardness the easier the deception…. Had I lived in the Middle Ages, I could never have chosen to enter a cloister. And why not? Because anyone who entered a cloister was in the Middle Ages accounted a saint, and that in all seriousness…. If a cloister were set up in a modern environment the entrants would be regarded as mad…. This I regard as an extraordinary advantage. To be considered mad is something like; it is encouraging, it protects the inwardness of the absolute relationship.12
Probably without quite realizing what he had accomplished, S.K. here, in the first place, made impossible further insistence on secrecy. “Secret inwardness is the highest inwardnes--provided it is there.” S.K. first had detected pharisaic, monastic, or pietistic hypocrisy, i.e. the desire for externalities that will prove one’s inwardness, and had countered with the demand for secrecy. Now he began to sense a different sort of hypocrisy, that of established Christendom. In time the emphasis became conscious:
Protestant ministers made the discovery that up and down the land there are true Christians living, who are true Christians in all secrecy–and indeed, in the end we are all true Christians in hidden inwardness, we are all models. How charming! If the New Testament is to decide what is meant by a true Christian, then to be a true Christian in all secrecy, comfortably and enjoyably, is as impossible as firing a cannon in all secrecy.13
But in the second place, in this same early quotation from Postscript S.K. paved the way for a dialectic relationship which could protect against both types of hypocrisy simultaneously. If the outward expressions of inwardness were such that father than evoking the praise and admiration of the world they called up its enmity, then, of course, outward works would lose their illegitimate appeal. This too, in due course, became a conscious emphasis:
Christianity in the New Testament has more hidden inwardness than you find in Protestantism, but that is not enough for it, it wants to be recognizable in a paradoxical form, and it is at this point that all the Christian conflicts arise.14
And thus the way was open to bring in outward obedience as the dialectic corollary of inward faith; and thus were the Kierkegaardian motifs of non-conformity to the world, the scandal of Christianity, and suffering for the faith drawn into the basic pattern of that dialectic.
All this is but hinted in the quotation from Postscript; the actual development took time and agony. A further step, in which the value and need of secrecy strove for preservation but in which the outward also gained in standing, came a few years later in a most penetrating analysis from The Book on Adler:
Alas, the need of giving an inward resolution a striking outward expression is often an illusion…. Not rarely there is a suspicious incongruity between inward decision (the strength of resolution, salvation, healing) and the outward signs of decision…. That the outward expression is not always the inward is true not only of the ironists who intentionally deceive by a false outward expression, but it is true also of the immediate natures who unconsciously deceive themselves, yea sometimes feel a need of self-deception…. A man of some seriousness would rather hide the decision and test himself in silent inwardness in order to see whether it might not deceptively be true that he the weak one felt the need of a strong outward expression of resolution…. But if the change has really come about, then it is permissible, then one always may change little by little the outward expression, if one has quite seriously been on the watch lest the change might be before others in the outward, not before God in the inward.15
This statement has some implications that form an interesting parallel with Brethrenism, for the sort of “striking outward exhibition of decision” that S.K. deprecates here does not really touch the concept of outward obedience and fruitbearing to which both S.K. and the Brethren came. Indeed, we shall see that their understanding of obedience involved a change in one’s mode of life, the sort of conformance to the will of God which only could be attained deliberately, gradually, studiedly. S.K. did not specify, but his “striking outward exhibition” would seem to point to the phenomenon of an actual outwardness that appears as the deepest sort of inwardness, or put conversely, the kind of inwardness that comes closest to being outwardness. This is revivalism, ecstaticism, emotionalized conversion, enthusiasm (in the popular and not the strictly etymological sense). Emotion itself, of course, is something basically inward, but emotionalism inevitably focuses on the outward manifestation.
It is not only of interest but quite significant that although both S.K. and the Brethren were strong in their emphasis on inwardness, devotional immediacy, and the like, both were equally strong in their suspicion of revivalism and hyperemotionalism. It is rather plain that there was nothing of this tendency in S.K.;16 but the same is true of the Brethren. Their tradition was quite staid and dignified, particularly in comparison with the excesses of Radical Pietism and of many groups in colonial and frontier America. During the nineteenth century the Annual Conference actually prohibited the holding of revival meetings. But earlier, one aspect of the Brethren break with the Radicals was the rejection of their emotionalism; and in eighteenth century America, “awakened souls” among the Brethren almost inevitably fled to the more congenial atmosphere of the Ephrata Cloisters.
Although not for a moment denying the place of genuine emotion (S.K.’s “passion”) as a concomitant of inwardness, the thing that guarded either S.K. or the Brethren (or the Anabaptist tradition in general) from going the way of revivalism was the dialectical balance with obedient fruitbearing. If humble, day-by-day obedience is the authentic outward correlate of true Christian inwardness, then a quick, highly charged emotionalism is no acceptable substitute. Something of this thought was revealed in a letter by Mack Junior. His correspondent, John Price (a descendant of the John Price mentioned earlier), had delayed being baptized because he could point to no concrete assurance of his sins having been forgiven. Mack responded:
It must indeed be accepted gratefully when the Lord by the inward joyful strength and comforting voice of the Good Shepherd gives to the soul a sure marrow- and bone-penetrating assurance that his sins are now forgiven and that his name is written down in heaven. However, it seems to me that our prayer should be more to the effect that the Lord may keep us from sin and may lead us into the pleasure of His will, in order that our will, our desire, and our entire pleasure may become a daily burn t-offering to the pure love of God.”17
This would seem well qualified as a specific instance of S.K.’s stated preference for step-by-step transformation as over against “the striking outward exhibition.” Yet the entire discussion also becomes important from another standpoint. Inwardness is a strong emphasis among the sects (although not by that token entirely absent in the churches), but contrary to the popular impression, revivalism is not necessarily the form in which that inwardness expresses itself and indeed not the normative form for classic sectarianism; the complementary emphasis on obedience tended to check emotional excesses.
But the difficulty that hampered S.K. in moving out of secret inwardness into the full-fledged dialectic was not an intellectual one; the doctrinal solution undoubtedly would have come much more quickly and easily had not S.K. encountered within himself a personal compulsion toward secrecy. He spoke in one place of a despairing feeling of being shut up that was “inwardness with a jammed lock.18 This was S.K.’s own cross; and how hard it was to bear, those of a different psychology scarcely can imagine. For S.K. to venture out of his secret inwardness was a tremendous personal achievement, but once he saw that it must be done, he saw also that he had a personal obligation to his readers:
And yet perhaps it is my duty to God [to speak openly about my own religious experience], and my hidden inwardness something which God countenanced my having until I had grown strong enough to talk about it.19 Hidden inwardness, that is what must be rejected–all the lying, hypocritical, conceited confusion which “hidden inwardness” has brought about…. It is to a certain extent true of me that I was unfortunate enough to go about and conceal a hidden inwardness. For that very reason, because there was some truth in me, I am the one who was given the task of throwing some light on this point.20
Without in the slightest deemphasizing the need for inwardness as such, and without approving the pharisaical hypocrisy that requires outward credit for its inwardness, S.K. now felt obliged to damn hidden inwardness just as strongly as he had insisted upon it earlier.21
But the truest picture of S.K.’s position comes not through his polemic against hidden inwardness but in his presentation of the complete inner-outer dialectic. This was done most effectively when he used Christian love as a specific example:
As the quiet lake is fed deep down by the flow of hidden springs, which no eye sees, so a human being’s love is grounded, still more deeply, in God’s love…. Yet this hidden life of love is knowable by its fruits–yes, there is a need in love to be recognizable by its fruits…. For one is not to work in order that love becomes known by its fruits but to work to make love capable of being recognized by its fruits….
What love does, it is; what it is, it does–at one and the same moment; simultaneously as it goes beyond itself (in an outward direction) it is in itself (in an inward direction), and simultaneously as it is in itself, it thereby goes beyond itself in such a way that this going beyond and this inward turning, this inward turning and this going beyond, are simultaneously one and the same.22
Essentially the same inner-outer alternation was applied by the Brethren in a wide variety of instances. In fact, it is, as we have seen, the basic pattern of early Brethrenism. Mack Senior suggested the double movement of “outer-inner-outer.” Michael Frantz made rather wide use of the dialectic.23 But perhaps the most extensive and self-conscious presentation of the pattern came in a poem by Mack Junior. He used the dialectic as S.K. did, pinpointing the same two types of hypocrisy, when he said:
The outward service of God is correct
Where one is not the servant of sin;
The inward is supremely good
Where one does not deceive himself.
For how do all appearances help us
Where we are not true Christians?24
The statements of this dialectic by S.K. and by the Brethren form a rather clear parallel–not that this makes it the exclusive property of S.K. and sectarianism, yet S.K. must have felt that the emphasis runs at least somewhat counter to churchly thought or he would not have been so polemic in asserting it.
But because, for S.K., this matter involved a deeply personal “jammed lock” rather than simply a doctrinal formulation, his most significant demonstration came not in the form of statements but of decisive actions. First, in a preliminary way by challenging the Corsair and then by launching a full-scale attack upon Christendom, S.K. deliberately and with full knowledge of what it would cost chose to give his inwardness outward expression–an expression, indeed, that was conspicuous and flagrant in its very outwardness. The Attacker of Christendom is at some remove from the incognito Knight of Faith; and the basic significance of the battle stance that concluded S.K.’s career is that he was determined to practice what he had been preaching, namely: What a Christian believes, he is; what he is, he does; what he actually believes is what he is and does. Thus when S.K. took signal action, he not only had formulated but had lived the most fundamental dialectic of Christianity-and this on the part of a man totally unqualified by nature to achieve it. Only when inwardness is coupled with outward obedience is S.K.’s doctrine understood, and only when he had matched the hidden depths of his faith with an equivalent action was his witness complete.
n Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Postscript, 33.
2. There is a further distinction between the Hegelian and the Kierkegaardian dialectics which constantly should be borne in mind. Because the Hegelian dialectic operates with intellectual concepts, and because concepts are essentially stable, fixed, defined, and thus inanimate, “synthesis” is made possible. Once achieved, the “synthesis” is itself a concept, a third concept which is just as fixed and stable as its parents had been. And once that synthesis is accomplished, the prior dialectic becomes completely relaxed; the parent concepts are transcended and supplanted; the synthesis itself stands ready to perform as a new thesis. But in the existential dialectic of Kierkegaard, “synthesis” would negate the whole idea, for the pattern derives its dynamic precisely from the living and continuing tension between the two positives. To resolve the paradox or to stabilize the situation by defining a middle-ground compromise would be to rob the relationship of its life and vitality. The goal of such dialectic explicitly is not to transcend or synthesize the dichotomy but to keep both poles distinctly in view through constant alternation, through the attempt at simultaneity, through the ever gaining and regaining of balance.
From the above follows a very important implication: The characteristic Kierkegaardian theme of “either/or” is not part of S.K.’s conception of “dialectic”–as many commentators would have it “Either/or” is the proper approach to a thing and its contradictory, to items which are essentially incompatible; to fail to make the decisive choice here is to sin. But on the other hand, (although S.K. does not so use the term) “both/and” is the only proper approach to polar dialectic; at this point to make an “either/or” choice or to synthesize would be to sin by destroying the dialectic. Precisely here, then, lies the crucial issue of the Kierkegaardian method: to recognize contradictories and meet them with an “either/or”; to recognize dialectics and meet them with a “both/and.”
3. “Strengthened in the Inward Man” (Discourse 5) in Edifying Discourses, 1:103.
4. Postscript, 178.
5. Mack Senior, Rights and Ordinances, in Durnbaugh, Origins, 384-85.
6. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:237 (1854); cf. 11:2:A:380 (1854).
8. It is interesting, is it not, that Barth chose to emphasize one pole of S.K.’s dialectic and Tillich the other, and yet that often both have been lumped together as “dialectic theologians!”
9. On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, hereafter referred to as The Book on Adler, translated with an indroduction and notes by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p.155.
10. “Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended in Me” (Part II) in Training in Christianity, 87.
11. Postscript, 424.
12. Postscript, 370, 372. Here and elsewhere the material in parentheses is part of S.K.’s original, and only the material in brackets represents my addition–V.E.
13. Smith Journals, 11:A:106 (1854).
14. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:80 (1854).
15. The Book on Adler, 151. Cf. Purity of Heart, 43ff.
16. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that S.K. as much as said that he would rather court emotionalism with the sects than passionlessness with the church. See above.
17. Mack Junior, a letter to John Price (Dec. 29, 1772), quoted in Brumbaugh, op.cit, 240.
18. The Sickness unto Death, 206.
19. Dru Journals, 894 (1849).
20. Ibid., 1226 (1851).
21. Ibid., 831 (1848), quoted above, p. 33; 1003 (1849); and 1123 (1850).
22. Works of Love, 27, 28, 31, 261.
23. Michael Frantz, Einfaltige Lehr-Betrachtungen … (Germantown: Sauer Press, 1770), in the long lead poem, see stanzas 125-26, 359-60; cf. pp. 39-40.
24. Mack Junior, a poem from Geistliche Magazien 34, c. 1767, in Heckman, op.cit, 126 [trans. amended–V.E.]; cf. the lines following those quoted.
d. Fruitbearing/Obedience
My thesis is not that what is thus proclaimed in official Christianity ought not to be regarded as Christian. No, my thesis is that proclamation in itself is not Christianity. What I am concerned about is the “how,” the personal enforcement of the proclamation; without that, Christianity is not Christianity.1
My duty is to serve truth; its essential form: obedience.2 Our examination of the inner-outer dialectic already has pointed us to the theme of this section, but we have yet to realize the extent of this fruitbearng-obedience emphasis in S.K. and the fact that it is not brought in merely for purposes of completing a dialectic but actually stands as one of S.K.’s strongest and most pervasive motifs.
The double term of the heading is necessary to suggest the full scope of the thought of both S.K. and the Brethren. The very word “fruitbearing” suggests that outward action, or “personal enforcement,” as S.K. called it above, is the natural outgrowth, the proper and necessary consummation of true inwardness. “Obedience,” on the other hand, suggests adherence to a directive, a command, or a counsel that has come to one from another; it connotes submission to a superior will. Although, in their abstract definitions, these two conceptions are quite distinguishable, and although both must be kept in view if either S.K. or the Brethren are accurately to be understood, nevertheless in practice the two ideas tend to merge. The fact is that the “fruit” which is the natural product of true Christian inwardness is loving and joyous “obedience” to God.
That there is this close connection between fruitbearing and obedience says a great deal about the character of the obedience that S.K. and the Brethren had in mind. S.K. got to the heart of the matter when, in the guise of Judge William, he offered an etymological analysis of the word “duty” (which is, of course, the direct corollary of “obedience”). The Danish word for “duty” is Pligt, apparently derived from paa ligget, “upon lying,” i.e. “that which lies upon.” “It is strange that the word “duty” can suggest an outward relation, inasmuch as the very derivation of the word [Pligt] indicates an inward relation; for what is incumbent upon me, not as this fortuitous individual but in accordance with my true nature, that surely stands in the most inward relation to myself. For duty is not an imposition [Paalaeg, literally, “that which is laid upon”] but something which is incumbent [paaligger, literally, “that which lies upon”].”3 Obedience, then, comes as the desired and desirable fruit of faith, something valued in and for itself, something germane to one’s existence as den Entelte. Obedience definitely is not understood as a grudging concession, as something which, unfortunately, must he given in order to merit the rewards that are consequent to the painful sacrifice of one’s own will. Paul Minear has pointed to this aspect of S.K.’s doctrine in his article which presents gratitude to God as a major Kierkegaardian motif. He suggests that S.K. saw obedience as motivated basically by thanksgiving for grace.4
The positive, happy quality of obedience was lifted up by S.K. in a statement which forms an amazing parallel to what Mack Senior had written over a hundred years earlier. S.K. said:
Be therefore as the child when it profoundly feels that it has over against itself a will in relation to which nothing avails except obedience–when you submit to be disciplined by His unchangeable will, so as to renounce inconstancy and changeableness and caprice and self-will: then you will steadily rest more and more securely, and more and more blessedly in the unchangeableness of God.5
Mack wrote:
[God] does not need the service of men…. [But] in order to redeem man from his perilous condition, God ordered through his Son that [certain] simple things be done. If a man does them in true faith and in obedience holds his reason captive, he will gradually become single-minded and childlike. It is just in this single-mindedness that the soul again finds rest, peace, and security.6
Clearly, “obedience” is a necessary concomitant of the concept den Enkelte, for it is precisely through obedience that one becomes single.
Although a number of the Brethren spoke to the theme of joyous obedience, it was Mack Junior who best expressed the thought-in verse:
Indeed, the world speaks: "Christ's teachings
Are not so to he understood
As though one were bound
To follow him in all things;
[For instance,] in poverty,
That certainly would be too much!"...
[Yet] all the words of his teachings
Taste to [Christians] like sweet sugar.
Their desire, indeed, their adornment and honor
Are his footsteps....
All that [Christians] learn from him
Tastes sweeter than honey;
Christ's spirit and word are ever
Their freedom and law.7
A concept of obedience that couples “law” and “freedom”–as Mack did in his concluding line–on first thought may seem a manifest contradiction, yet this gets directly to the point that both the Brethren and S.K. were concerned to make. Only through perfect submission and obedience to God does den Enkelte become free to achieve the simplicity and singleness of his own authentic existence.
From S.K.’s side, his most outstanding word regarding joyous obedience was:
The Christian serves with perfect obedience only one Master…. This life is a hymn of praise; for only by obedience can a man praise God, and best of all by perfect obedience…. The hymn is not something higher than obedience, but obedience is the only true hymn of praise; in obedience the hymn consists, and if the hymn is truth, it is obedience.8
Yet more moving than even these beautiful lines is S.K.’s personal testimony to the effect that “I have had more joy in the relation of obedience to God than in thoughts that I have produced… [and] indescribable bliss when I turned to Him and did my work in unconditional obedience.”9
In one sense the remainder of this study is an exposition of what S.K. and the Brethren felt to be the specific content of their religious duty, that in which Christian obedience was to consist. But what will become very obvious there perhaps should be given initial consideration at this point. In the first place this obedience is never understood as being directed toward any other human being or group; it is not submission to any formal discipline or program. There is no spiritual superior, no order, no church that commands allegiance. This sectarian (and thoroughly Protestant) concept of obedience is at a considerable remove from that of monasticism or any such regimen.
In the second place, although this obedience is very closely related to inwardness, it retains an entirely objective focus. Obedience is never taken to signify “fidelity to my own true nature,” “response to my own higher possibilities,” or anything so esoteric as this. The Brethren, of course, would have been incapable of such sophistication; S.K. disdained it. Their concept of obedience necessarily assumed the presence of a “wholly Other” possessing a will and intention of his own and capable of communicating it to man.
Ultimately, then, both S.K. and the Brethren saw the source of authority, the seat of command, as being threefold. Primarily, one seeks to be obedient to the individual intention, the “custom-cut” will that God has in mind for each particular person, for den Enkelte. But the matter does not end on this level, as it does in atomistic spiritualism. Objective help has been provided for discovering and interpreting this subjective revelation–this in the life example and the teachings of Jesus Christ (to be examined in Chapter XII). The third seat of command, or rather the third link in the one chain of command, is, then, the document that preserves and transmits the gospel record, namely, the New Testament (to be treated in Chapter XIII). And the crucial culmination of the matter is this: in neither Brethren nor Kierkegaardian thought does obedience amount to a rather general and abstract quality of mind, a wholly inward submission to God; rather, it everywhere implies and customarily is spelled out in terms of the actual, concrete fulfillment of specified commands.
S.K. was adamant on this score, expressing it in some of his shortest and sharpest thrusts:
God is willing to understand only one sort of sincerity, namely, that a man’s life expresses what he says.10
All my labor with respect to knowing has no effect upon my life, upon its lusts, its passions, its selfishness; it leaves me entirely unchanged–it is my action which changes my life…. Thy understanding [is] constantly to be expressed as action, warm, full, and whole, issuing instantly the instant thou hast understood something.11
And the Brethren had been just as convinced as S.K. was. When his Radical Pietist opponents put to Mack Senior a question regarding the necessity of outward actions in relation to inward experience, he gave the blunt answer: “The spiritual rebirth is nothing else than true and genuine obedience toward God and all of his commandments.”12
As S.K. and the Brethren saw obedience as absolutely necessary to the Christian life, so did they see the quality of that obedience as being absolutely unconditional. It is impossible to overstate the case that S.K. put in these terms:
[God] demands obedience, unconditional obedience. If thou art not obedient in everything unconditionally, then thou lovest Him not, and if thou lovest Him not–then thou dost hate Him…. [It is inconceivable] that a little disobedience might not be absolute disobedience,… that the least, the very least disobedience, might in truth have any other name than … contempt of God…. Reflect that every sin is disobedience, and every disobedience sin.13
Here, too, is one of the deep springs of the Kierkegaardian. sectarian protest against intellectualism; and S.K.’s statement raises a fundamental issue regarding the theological situation pertaining in our own day and age. There would appear to be a rather major divergence between S.K. and his “heirs.” “People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.”14 Quite explicitly, the “demythologizing” efforts of current existentialist theology presuppose that it is problems of intellectual formulation of the faith that have alienated modern man from Christianity; S.K. was of a different mind, and consequently his “theology” was of a much different character. S.K. considered that even the church (to say nothing of the world) was in a state of mutiny, despite the lip service that was paid. He saw only one means of bringing it to a stop: “I wonder if every individual is not duty bound toward God to stop the mutiny, not, of course, with shouts and conceited importance, not by omineering and wanting to force others to obey God, but by unconditionally obeying as an individual.”15
The Brethren emphasis on obedience was every bit as forceful as S.K.’s. In fact this was the thrust of Mack Senior’s Rights and Ordinances,to the point that he came perilously close to advocating a form of works-righteousness. He could make such statements as:
If you had been obedient in everything to me for ten or even more years, and I requested you to pick up a piece of straw, and you did not want to do it, I would have to consider you a disobedient child. Even if you said a thousand times, ‘Father, I will do everything; I will work hard; I will go wherever you send me, but it does not seem necessary to me to pick up the piece of straw because it neither helps you nor me,’ I would say to you, ‘You are a disobedient wretch.’16
God looks only upon obedience, and believers are bound to obey the Word. Then they will achieve eternal life by obedience.17
What Jesus has ordained cannot be intentionally changed or broken by any person without loss of eternal salvation.18
It may be helpful to know that the author of the above lines was also a believer in the eventual salvation of all men and, as we shall see, that both the Brethren and S.K. took considerable pains to avoid the implications of works-righteousness; but these considerations in no way blunted their understanding of the Christian demand for unconditional obedience.
A further facet of the Brethren-Kierkegaardian concept calls for notice. This was a uniquely Christian concept, not only because it is Jesus Christ who is to be obeyed, but because he was himself the supreme example of obedience.19 And the fact that Christ was the pattern for obedience led to the conclusion that obedience necessarily will entail suffering. S.K. observed that “if it were possible for man to learn obedience toward God without suffering, then would Christ, as human, not have needed to learn it from suffering.”20 The Brethren fully concurred in understanding this relationship as an essential one. In the public letter which they circulated prior to the first baptism, the note was struck: “We must publicly profess what Christ Jesus taught and did without hesitation or fear of men. We need not be ashamed and must above all suffer and endure all things with rejoicing.”21 And almost a century later, Jacob Stoll asked the rhetorical question:
Does he who is indeed obedient
and follows Him in lowliness and submission-- ...
Does he nevertheless experience
Persecution, ridicule, and shame?22
It is difficult to give a true impression of how central and all-pervasive is the emphasis on obedience in S.K.’s religious works. It must suffice to note that five or six of his discourses treat obedience per se, quite apart from those that center upon following Christ, the duty to love, and such closely related topics. Once S.K. got past the idea of hidden inwardness, obedience became one of his major motifs.
Both in character and in emphasis, the Brethren doctrine was of a piece with S.K.’s, being beautifully summarized in a poem by Mack Junior:
But whenever the love of Christ
Can penetrate a man's poor heart,
He begins of himself
To sing a new song.
He seeks not pretences, forms, nor appearances;
He will be only eagerly obedient.
Obedience is the stone
Despised by all the world.
Obedience alone is
That for which faith aspires.
Obedience is the treasure
Buried deep in the field.23
But the most eloquent witness to this aspect of Brethrenism comes not out of any Brethren writings but from two outsiders contemporary with the early Brethren. One was Elhanan Winchester, the outstanding leader of colonial universalism, the other, Morgan Edwards, the equally outstanding Baptist pastor and church historian. Winchester wrote:
Such Christians as [the Dunkers] are I have never seen. So averse are they to all sin, and to many things that other Christians esteem lawful, that they … [and he proceeds to list the things that Brethren do and do not do]. They walk in the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, both in public and in private…. Whatever they believe their Saviour has commanded, they practice, without inquiring or regarding what others do. I remember the Rev. Morgan Edwards, formerly minister of the Baptist church in Philadelphia, once said to me, “God will always have a visible people on earth, and these are His people at present, above any others in the world.”24
In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, hereafter referred to as Papirer, ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting, 2d ed., (Copenhagen: Gyldenalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909-1948, 11:2:A:435 (1855) [my trans.-VE.].
2. Among the early Kierkegaardians who at least leaned in this direction, Walter Lowrie names Brandes, Brøchner, Höffding, and Schrempf; see Lowrie’s Kierkegaard (first published 1938) (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 1: 3-6. More recently, Karl Jaspers has hinted at this view–as reported (and discounted) by Walter Kaufmann in his Introduction to S.K.’s The Present Age and The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle (hereafter referred to as The Present Age), revised trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchhooks, 1962), 11-12. Colin Wilson also has made the hint; see his Religion and the Rebel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 239.
3. Attack upon “Christendom,” trans. Walter Lowrie (Boston: Beacon Press Paperback, 1956), 57ff.
4. “Bruchner’s Recollections,” in Glimpses and impressions of Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. T.H. Croxall (Welwyn, Herts: J. Nesbjt, 1959), 38.
5. Dupre, op.cit., 165. He does not cite the source of this information.
6. “Priest” is the term commonly used in the Danish church for its clergymen, and thus it appears extensively in S.K.’s writings. It should not be taken as implying any sort of sacerdotal sarcasm either here or in S.K.
7. S.K. was willing to send Peter a brotherly greeting but did not feel up to receiving him in person. Croxall, op. cit., gives us a letter by the relative who carried the greeting (102, 4) and a statement by Peter (129) which together make it plain that both Soren and Peter realized how the matter stood.
8. Boesen’s account is found in Dru Journals, 551.
9. The primary sources describing the funeral and burial are collected in Croxall, op. cit., pp. 84ff.
10. Of course, any study of S.K.’s religion that fails to raise the question of his church affiliation as much as suggests that he remained a Lutheran. More explicit claims of varying sorts are represented by H. V. Martin, Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (NY: Philosophical Library, 1950), 108; by Hermann Diem, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence, hereafter referred to as Dialectic, trans. Harold Knight (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), 157; and by Martin J. Heinecken, The Moment Before God (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1956), pp. 378-79. Our contention is simply that the burden of proof rests just as heavily upon those who would claim S.K. for Lutheranism as upon those who would claim him for Roman Catholicism, secularism, sectarianism, or any other tradition. S.K.’s natural connections with the Lutheran Church do not answer the problem; too many objections must be taken into account.
11. David Swenson, in the translator’s Introduction to S.K.’s Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson, 2d ed., with an introduction and commentary by Niels Thulstrup translated by Howard Hong (Princeton: Princeton Un. Press, 1962), xli-xlii. Cf. Walter Lowrie, in the translator’s Introduction to Attack upon “Christendom,” xiii. Cf. Diem, Dialectic, 154.
13. See, for example, Diem, Dialectic, 157.
14. In addition to Diem, see, as another example, Theodor Haecker, Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford Un. Press, 1937), 67.
15. Attack upon “Christendom,” p.91.
16. This journal entry has been inserted by the translator into Attack upon “Christendom,” 17. An admirable summary which cites many of the scholars and their claims is Heinrich Roos, S.J., Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, trans. Richard Bracken (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1954). Cf. Cornelio Fabro, C.P.S., “Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard’s Dialectic,” in A Kierkegaard Critique, particularly 156-58, 190-94.
18. Dupre, op.cit., 216, 217, 219.
19. Ibid., x, xii.
20. Though not addressing himself specifically to our question, it is perhaps Hermann Diem (Dialectic, 98ff.) who has given most decisive demonstration to the fact that the existence of an organized church with its preaching, doctrine, and sacraments was an essential presupposition of S.K.’s whole dialectic.
21. Papirer, 11:2:A:435 [my trans.–V.E.]. Cf. the trans. Offered by Ronald Gregor Smith in his volume of journal selections, The Last Years, hereafter referred to as Smith Journals (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
22. Papirer, 11: A:407 (1849) [my trans.–V.B.]. Cf. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:39 (1854) and 11:2:A:39 (1854).
23. Dru Journals, 831 (1848); cf. 1234 (1851).
24. Walter Kaufmann, in the editor’s Introduction to Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956), 11.
25. Dupre, op.cit., 224-22. Another inadvertent description of S.K.’s sectarianism is found in Fabro, op.cit., in A Kierkegaard Critique, 156-57.
26. Emil Brunner, Truth as Encounter (Phihidelphia: Westminster Press, 1943 and 1964), 112, 84; cf. 42-43.
27. Joachim H. Seyppel, Schwenckfeld, Knight of Faith (Pennsburg, Pa.: The Schwenckfelder Library, 1961), p.427. Cf, Dupre, op.cit., xi, 171.
28. Ibid., 427-29.
29. Ibid., 129. Seyppel cites E. Peterscn, “Kierkegaard und der Protestantismus,” Wort and Wahrheit 3, 579 ff.
30. Papirer, (through an error in transcription, the locus of this entry has been lost) [my trans.-V.E.].
31. Brøchncr’s Recollections in Croxall Glimpses, 21.
32. Dru Journals, 970 (1849).
33. Henriette Lund’s Recollections in Croxall Glimpses, 50.
34. Hans Brø9chner’s Recollections in Croxall Glimpses, 36.
35. In the Introduction to Dru Journals, 1, note.
36. In the editorial materials of S.K.’s Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, hereafter referred to as Johannes Climacus, trans. and ed. T. H. Croxall (Stanford: Stanford Un. Press, 1958), 27-28.
37. Purity of Heart, trans. Douglas V. Steere (NY: Harper, 1948), 152.
38. Edifying Discourses, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1948), 4:70-71.
39. Stages on Life’s Way, ed. Hilarius Bookbinder (pseud.), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Un. Press, 1940), 218.
40. Either/Or, ed. Victor Eremita (pseud.), trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson and Walter Lowrie, revised by Howard Johnson (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1959) 2:112.
41. Dru Journals, 1220, 443 (1851).
42. In Point of View, 140.
e. Faith and Works
Christianity’s requirement is: Thy life
shall as strenuously as possible
give expression to works–
and then one thing more is required:
that thou humble thyself and admit,
“But none the less I am saved by grace.”1
Anyone who promotes as emphatic a doctrine of works (which is precisely what “obedience” amounts to) as did S.K. and the Brethren inevitably opens himself to the risk and the accusation of works-righteousness. Protestant sectarianism continually had to face the charge. Fortunately, as it turned out, the Brethren were pushed hard on this score and thus were forced to clarify and define their own position, something they likely would not have done except under the spur of controversy.
In S.K.’s case, he was enough of a thinker to see the problem on his own and so address himself to it. It may well be that he gave more attention to this matter than has any other Protestant theologian. So impressive was his achievement that a Roman Catholic scholar has named as one of S.K.’s foremost contributions the solid integration of a doctrine of works into Reformation sola fide theology; Louis Dupre recognizes and expounds S.K.’s understanding of works as being a uniquely Protestant doctrine, explicitly refusing to claim it as a Catholic tendency.2
The Brethren, of course, hardly were capable of matching S.K.’s accomplishment, but they did reach after the same sort of solution. And if a central emphasis on works is a sectarian characteristic, the attempt to relate it to grace is a mark of Protestant sectarianism. With both S.K. and the Brethren, the fact that their emphasis on fruitful obedience was coupled with an equal emphasis on inwardness was itself some protection against a legalistic works-righteousness; at least their works would have to involve more than empty and merely outward acts. Yet it was necessary that they go further and explicitly posit salvation upon grace through faith, but doing it in such a way as not to blunt the demand for works of obedience. We shall see how this was accomplished.
It was inevitable–and appropriate–that baptism became for the Brethren the crux over which the issue should be joined. For one thing, baptism is the first work of the Christian life, first, that is, in chronological sequence, if not in preeminence. Second, it is apparent that baptism has some sort of connection with salvation, and thus if any work runs the risk of becoming a “saving work,” it is certainly this one. And third, except as a “saving work” baptism would seem the most useless work of all. It fits precisely Alexander Mack’s description of the command to “pick up a straw.” Unlike works of charity or even those of self-discipline, baptism would seem to be of no use to either God or man-unless one did claim it as a grounds of salvation.
On the face of the matter, then, the purest Protestants would be the “spiritualists” who had altogether rejected such outward sacramental works; and they did indeed claim such status for themselves, accusing the churches as well as the sects of following works-righteousness. And it should be recalled that the Brethren came into being precisely out of such a spiritualist milieu and precisely through the readoption of baptism and other such works. In their very origin and from their very colleagues, then, the Brethren had to answer the charge that they were deserting the true faith in favor of works-righteousness.
We already have seen that Mack Senior, in stressing the necessity of obedience, had come very near suggesting that one is saved by his obedience. Even before making such statements, however, he had responded to the Radical Pietist charge and made it abundantly clear that he did not believe in works-righteousness but in salvation by faith alone. Both his assertions regarding obedience and regarding sola fide must be kept in the picture, because together they form the dialectic of grace and works.
Mack’s reply to the Radicals’ accusation that Brethren baptism was a saving work was in this way: First, salvation is trough faith (it would be more accurate to say “only through faith” rather than “through faith alone”). “We do indeed believe and profess that eternal life is not promised because of baptism, but only through faith in Christ (John 3:15, 18)?” But by its very nature, true faith cannot exist alone, its natural and necessary concomitant is the desire to obey. “Why should a believer not wish to do the will of him in whom he believes? If it is the will of Christ that a believer should be baptized, then it is also the will of the believer.” Strictly speaking, it is not the outward obedience that is the essential corollary of faith but the desire to obey. “If he thus wills and believes as Christ wills, he is saved, even if it were impossible for him to receive baptism.”3
Obedience, then, is the proof, or test, of the sincerity and thus the reality of one’s faith. “Salvation is not dependent upon the water, but only upon the faith, which must be proved by love and obedience.”4 This is not to suggest that the proof operates infallibly in both directions; Mack was far from suggesting that the mere fact that one submits to an external work proves that he possesses true inward faith. “That would in-deed be a good baptism, if all those whom we baptize in water were truly reborn. [But] it cannot be proved that [even] all those baptized by Christ and the apostles turned out well.”5 The proof operates only in the other direction, i.e. anyone who deliberately disdains to submit to the explicit commands of God cannot be in a state of true and saving faith: “We do not seek to earn salvation with these simple works, but by faith in Christ alone. If it is to be a saving faith, it must produce works of obedience. Where that faith is not present which produces obedience, . . . then no salvation is promised for a single work done without faith.”6 The fact of the matter is that the sectary Mack, for all his insistence and scrupulosity about outward works of obedience, was in a better position to defend his sola fide Protestantism than were the Reformers who retained a doctrine of baptismal regeneration and who, by virtue of its being infant baptism, would have had difficulty interpreting their baptism as being a work of voluntary obedience on the part of the believer.
Mack’s was the fullest discussion of this matter among the eighteenth century Brethren, but there are enough hints among later writers to make it plain that this basic understanding was retained by the church.7 And although the discussion tended to limit itself to baptism, clearly the same explanation could be applied to “works” in general.
S.K.’s solution of the faith-works dichotomy was not essentially different from that of the Brethren but went much further, simply because S.K. was more skillful in handling dialectic. S.K. not only alternated his emphasis between the two poles but showed how each pole, by its very character, impels a movement toward its counterpart. Here is true Kierkegaardian dialectic in its most dynamic form, not the logical, mechanical progression from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, etc., but the motion of a particle suspended in a magnetic field, pulled both ways, pushed both ways, forced to recognize the attraction of both poles and yet unable to give itself to either pole, every movement simply establishing the conditions for a countermovement.
Such a relationship between faith and works is basic to S.K.’s entire discussion; as his norm he specified that “for every increase in the degree of grace the law must also be made more severe in inwardness–otherwise worldliness breaks in and takes ‘grace’ in vain?”8 Precisely here is found one of S.K.’s fundamental criticisms of Martin Luther and the Reformation, a point to which he continually returned.9 Certainly the medieval doctrine and practice of meritorious works-righteousness marked a perversion of the Christian faith; certainly it was proper that Luther endeavor to correct this situation with a radically new emphasis on grace; certainly Luther had no intention of eliminating the role of works. But the nature of churchly Protestantism’s corrective was such that the dialectic got as badly out of balance in the “grace” direction as it had been in the “works” direction.
S.K. complained that Luther either did not or could not think dialectically; and a comparison of the two authors makes evident the nature of S.K.’s dissatisfaction. Luther tended to define and explicate “faith” and then turn to define “works” in contradistinction (rather than in relation) to “faith.” A legitimate role was assigned to each, although they were compartmentalized to the point that one encountered something of a disjuncture in moving from one to the other. Thus, to illustrate S.K.’s contention at the risk of oversimplifying Luther, the Reformer’s presentation almost amounted to a panegyric on faith always followed by a footnote to the effect that works dare not be neglected. And in later editions (speaking figuratively) it was next to inevitable that the footnotes would tend to drop out.
S.K.’s dialectical approach, on the other hand, strove to establish the continuity between true faith and true works. The gospel is not served by soft-pedaling works in order to enhance grace; “for every increase in the degree of grace the law must also be made more severe.” Indeed, when they are properly related, emphasis on one will work to the immediate enhancement of the other; neither can be overemphasized as long as they are tied together in close dialectical conjunction. And it was just this tie that S.K. sought to provide.
In the first place, works must never be stressed in such a way as to detract from the cruciality of grace:
But in spite of the fact that it is wise to stress the need for discipleship, even though–instructed by the error of the Middle Ages–in a new and different sense, yet above all the matter must not be so viewed that Christ appears merely as our example and not as our Savior, as though the spiritually mature, at any rate, did not need the atonement. No, no, no–and for this reason: the more mature one is, so much the more will one discover that one needs the divine atonement and grace. No, atonement and grace is and remains the decisive thing.”10
In short, churchly Protestantism needs correction but not by any method that would endanger its basic insight. However, S.K. saw (and this is the heart of his contribution) that there is a truly Christian conception of works which directly and emphatically feeds into a conception of grace rather than detracting from it.
The best presentation of this idea came in a journal entry which might well qualify as the one most basic and succinct statement of S.K.’s faith and witness. If only this one page survived out of all S.K.’s writings, theoretically at least, the entire content of his religious thought could be constructed. Almost every one of the Kierkegaardian motifs to be treated in this present study are either mentioned, implied, or made plausible by this passage. We quote only a part:
How does a man become a Christian? Very simple. Take any Christian principle of action–dare to follow it. The action which you would make actual also will be characterized by its unconditionedness, for this is the mark of all true Christianity. At the same instant, in this action you will collide with the outer world in which to a certain degree your life essentially consists. The collision will now become such that … you need Christianity in order to hold out in this collision–unless you want to rely on the good that you do, although in this tension you likewise will discover that, quite contrary to your own idealism, you are still a wretched weakling so that you need grace unconditionally. Without occasion, without this occasion which isolates him almost to desperation and always in inverse proportion [i.e. the harder he works, the more he despairs], a man never comes to faith. This is also what Christ said and is the only proof possible for Christian truth: ‘If anyone will do what I say, he shall learn what I say about myself [John 7:17].’… Dare once for truth’s sake unconditionally to lay yourself open before everything; thus you shall indeed learn the truth of the Teacher, learn how He alone can save you from despairing or from going under.11
Only the man who earnestly has striven after works and consequently realized his own inability–only he is in position truly to appreciate and receive grace. But the total effect of this procedure is not as negative as it might appear; quite the contrary:
So it is with the unconditional requirement [of works]; if I must lift it, I am crushed. But this is not the intention of the Gospel, its intention is that I, through humiliation, shall be lifted up in faith and worship–and then I am as light as a bird…. Thou canst not worship God by good works, still less by crimes, and just as little by sinking into a soft slumber and doing nothing. No, in order to worship aright and rightly to have joy in worshipping, a man must so comport himself: he strives with might and main, spares himself neither day nor night, strives to produce as many as possible of what upright men, humanly speaking, might call ‘good works.’ Then when he takes them and, deeply humbled before God, beholds them transformed to wretchedness and vileness, that is to worship God–and that is exaltation.12
This is the conception of works that feeds into grace; S.K. also understood the more usual conception of works that proceed from grace. There is no conflict between the two ideas; the dialectical movement continually must go both ways. For one thing, faith desires to express itself in works of obedience and service–not, indeed, to earn anything but as a simple expression of gratitude. S.K. used the analogy of a lover’s desire to do something for his beloved.13 Also, he saw that the conviction that all things come of grace, that God does everything, is no real detriment to works. He spoke of the seamstress who discovered that it was God and not herself who did spin and sew. But far from killing her initiative, she knew that God could sew only as she sewed; she redoubled her efforts for the joy of witnessing and experiencing that it is God who sews every stitch.14 And finally, S.K. saw that when works are motivated by grace they possess a much more powerful dynamic than when they are required by law, even if for the sake of one’s salvation:
[As a child] it bored me much to copy father’s letters, but he only had to say to me: all right then, I will do them myself. I was immediately willing. Oh, if he had scolded, alas, there would simply have been a row; but this was moving. In the same way many a self-denial may come difficult to a man and embitter him if it is imposed by law, but the Saviour’s look and his words: Everything is given to thee, it is nothing but grace, only look upon me and my suffering which won this grace: yes, that is moving!15
n Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. “… The Mirror of the Word” (Discourse II) in For Self Examination, 42.
2. Dupre, op.cit., xi, 165-72.
3. The sentences quoted in this paragraph form a continuous passage in Mack Senior, Basic Questions, in Durnbaugh, Origins, 331, answer to Question 12.
4. Ibid., 335, answer to Question 19.
5. Ibid., 338, answer to Question 28.
6. Ibid., 335, answer to Question 21.
7. Michael Frantz, op.cit., stanzas 395-432; Ein Geringer Schein, 4-5, 24-25; Mack Junior, Apology, 25-26, and Appendix to the Refuted Anabaptists, 7; Christian Longenecker, op.cit., 24-26.
8. Dru Journals, 1207 (1851).
9. Dupre, op.cit., presents and treats considerable of this material on 166ff.
10. Papirer, 10:4:A:491 (1852), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 114.
11. Papirer, 10:3:A:470-71 (1850) [my trans.–V.E.]. Cf. Papirer, 10:4:A:349 (1851), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 180; and Dru Journals, 1248 (1852).
12. “Christ as Example …” (Discourse II) in Judge For Yourselves!, 165, 166.
13. Dru Journals, 1272 (1852).
14. “Christ as Example . . .” (Discourse II) in Judge For Yourselves!, 192.
15. Dru Journals, 1283 (1852).
f. Devotional Immediacy
I have, quite literally, lived with God
as one lives with one’s father.1
This God-relationship of mine
is the “happy love” in a life which has been
in many ways troubled and unhappy.2
O my God, I have really nothing to ask Thee for; even shouldst Thou promise to fulfill every wish, I really do not know what to ask for, only that 1 may remain wish Thee, as near Thee as possible in this time of our separation one from the other, and wholly with Thee in all eternity.3
We are here to deal with one of the most obvious characteristics of both S.K. and the Brethren, although also one that is most difficult to specify and document, for we have to do, not with a doctrine but a mood, a set of mind. And yet this is one of the most important concomitants of S.K.’s concept of den Enkelte. It is a quality which, in both the Brethren and S.K., can be identified rather positively as an inheritance out of their respective Pietist backgrounds. This is the quality which, in the Brethren, has been named and discussed as “mysticism.”4 It is the strain in S.K. which led Time Magazine to identify him as a mystic5 and Walter Lowrie more cautiously to suggest that “his constant ‘practice of the presence of God’ almost justifies the common notion that he was a mystic.”6
The appellation “mystic” might be an acceptable one for either S.K. or the Brethren, if only there were a very clear understanding as to what the term implies. But because there definitely is not, it seems wise to forego the label. The motif we are identifying certainly does have something in common with what is found in the classic traditions of mysticism, but those traditions also include other elements that were assiduously avoided by S.K., the Brethren, and most Protestant sectaries. If, for instance, he is to be called a mystic, the term must be so defined that it can allow for the fact that S.K.–in the person of Judge William–wrote a most trenchant ten-page analysis and critique of mysticism7 and under his own name made such statements as: “[Mysticism] has not the patience to wait upon God’s revealing,” and “[Mysticism wants to] take the Kingdom of God by force.”8
Likewise, in neither S.K. nor the Brethren is there any hint of a hypostatic union with God that would weaken one’s consciousness of individuality; rather, with them one’s sense of being den Enkelte is heightened. There is no intellectualistic tendency that would experience God as the consummation of philosophic contemplation; the presence of God is experienced immediately, directly, and simply. There is no self-conscious and programmed straining after God; one has only to turn and speak to him. There is no inclination to depersonalize God into the traditional hyperboles of Beatific Vision, Sweetness, Illumination, Oneness, Infiniteness, ecstasy, Ground of Being, etc.; God is considered and described almost exclusively in familiar, personal terms. Given such fundamental divergencies between the Brethren-Kierkegaardian type and much of what has constituted the classic traditions of mysticism, it seems wise simply to drop the term and here use “devotional immediacy,” which can imply only what we desire.
The clearest demonstration of S.K.’s devotional immediacy comes in the fact that he was that rarity among “philosopher-theologians,” one whose writings included prayers of such merit as to deserve being collected and printed under separate cover,9 some of them even being set to music.10 Likewise, the Brethren parallel can be demonstrated merely by pointing to their passion for writing hymns and devotional poetry. Both S.K.’s prayers and the Brethren hymns are rather obviously flowerings of the same Pietist tradition of devotion.
It is perhaps unnecessary to bring in specific documentation regarding Brethren devotion; in the case of any group born out of the same historical milieu that produced Gerhard Tersteegen and the Moravian Brethren, argument would he needed only to explain the lack of such piety. There was no lack among the Brethren; they practiced and expressed a very close “walk with God” and desired only that it might become even closer.
With S.K. the case is somewhat different in that his Pietist connections are not as widely recognized, his fame as an “existentialist philosopher” having obscured this much more fundamental aspect of his life and thought. But in the first place, S.K. had a doctrinal frame of reference that would allow for and even encourage personal devotion. He could, on occasion, put the matter in more abstract, theological terms: “God is really the terminus medius in everything man undertakes; the difference between the religious and the purely human attitude is that the latter does not know it–Christianity is therefore the highest union between God and man because it has made the union conscious.”11 He could, on other occasions, make the matter much more pointed and moving, although still in the “objective” terms of third-person discourse:
Christianity teaches that this particular individual whatever in other respects this individual may be, man, woman, serving-maid, minister of state, merchant, barber, student, etc.–this individual exists before
God–this individual who perhaps would be vain for having once in his life talked with the King, this man who is not a little proud of living on intimate terms with that person or the other, this man exists before God, can talk with God any moment he will, sure to he heard by Him; in short, this man is invited to live on the most Intimate terms with God! Furthermore, for this man’s sake God came to the world, let himself be born, suffers and dies; and this suffering God almost begs and entreats this man to accept the help which is offered to him!12
However, this immediacy ceased to be simply doctrinal and began to become truly devotional only as S.K. assumed the role of pastor, speaking directly to a hearer regarding his own condition:
Now if you have truly realized that God is present here and you are in his presence, … it will be noticeable in you. One should be able to tell from a man’s behavior that he is in love, one should be able to tell that he is in the power of a great thought: how then should one not be able to tell that he is in thepresence of God.13
The impression was heightened when S.K. spoke to God Himself:
If only Thou, [O God,] dost find some willingness on the part of the single individual, Thou art prompt to help, and first of all Thou art the one who with more than human, yea, with divine patience, dost sit and spell it out with the individual, that he may be able rightly to understand the Word; and next Thou are the one who, again with more than human, yea, with divine patience, dost take him as it were by the hand and help him when he strives to do accordingly–Thou our Father in heaven. 14
But the full picture of S.K.’s devotional immediacy came only when it included testimony to his own personal experience.
It is clear that S.K. considered this immediacy as a necessary element in the Christian faith of every man and not simply a preference of his own, but nonetheless the character of that conviction is best seen in his personal application of it. For S.K., God was Father in the most actual sense possible:
My father died–and I got another in his stead: God in Heaven–and then I found out that, essentially, my first father had been my stepfather and only unessentially my first father.15
God was S.K.’s father in the most central and profound aspects of his life:
It is wonderful how God’s love overwhelms me…. I continuously thank him for having done and for doing, yes, and for doing so indescribably much more for me than I ever expected…. [My life] was all embittered for me by the dark spot which ruined all; … God takes charge of our lives. He lets me weep before him in silent solitude, pour forth and again pour forth my pain, with the blessed consolation of knowing that he is concerned for me–and in the meanwhile he gives that life of pain a significance which almost overwhelms me.16
But it is also significant that God was S.K.’s father in life’s trivialities as well:
And it is true indeed that in agreement with God, which I always try to be, I am able to be perfectly calm and childishly happy in behaving as I do behave. Like a child I can say to God (it comes so naturally to me) as I would say to my father: now I must have a little recreation so as to amuse myself–and then I amuse myself.17
And the most sure and unshakable reality of S.K.’s life was the quality of that fatherhood:
This is all I have known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love, that I believe, and whoever believes that is not mistaken. If I have made a mistake it will be plain enough; so I repent–and God is love. He is love, not he was love, nor: he will be love, oh no, even that future was too slow for me, he is love.18
None of the early Brethren produced the sort of Journal that would display their sense of devotion in such intimacy, but it is clear that theirs was of the same tradition arid quality. It is also clear that with both S.K. and the Brethren this sense of immediacy represented the heart and core of their faith and not an idiosyncratic adjunct to what is truly important, their “theology.” Thus whenever S.K. wanted to talk to real men about really important matters concerning the real God, his language became highly anthropomorphic–brashly, blatantly, brazenly anthropomorphic–without the slightest indication that he considered himself to be speaking symbolically, mythologically, or metaphorically. In the Brethren this might be overlooked as naivete. S.K. knew, however, that such language is suspect in sophisticated theology. But he was writing neither as a theologian nor for theologians. He knew where he stood and took his stand deliberately:
As it is the worst thing that can be said about a man that he is inhuman, so it is the worst and most abhorrent blasphemy to say about God that He is inhuman, even if it is supposed to be distinguished or bold to speak thus. No, the God to whom [man] prays is human, has a heart to feel in human fashion, an ear to hear the complaints of human beings. And even if He does not fulfi1l every wish, His dwelling place is still near at hand, and He is moved by the cries of the petitioner.19
There here becomes apparent a drastic enough divergence between S.K. and some of his successors that more than the customary categories are called for. If S.K.’s thought is existential (which certainly it is in some sense of the term), then it is not enough even to specify it as Theistic, or even Christian, existentialism. In order to recognize the major distinction between it and contemporary schools which bear the name and yet threaten to weaken, if not eliminate, the “personhood” of God, perhaps S.K.’s variety could be called Pietistic existentialism. It probably is no accident that the two great contemporary theologians who best understood Kierkegaaird and best appropriated his contributions in their own work were Martin Buber, with his strong background in Hasidism, i.e. Jewish pietism, and Emil Brunner, schooled by the Pietist Blumhardt of Boll.
A final note is important. Although in S.K. we find devotional immediacy raised to a high pitch, it should be recalled that it was in this same S.K. that Karl Barth found a “wholly Other” God with whom to counter the immanental immediacy of Liberalism. Devotional immediacy, in and of itself, is not subversive of God’s dignity, sovereignty, or freedom; and neither S.K. nor the Brethren allowed it to become so.20
In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Dru Journals, 771 (1848).
2. Point of View, 64.
3. “The True Man of Prayer …” (Discourse IV) in Edifying Discourses, 4:132.
4. Floyd Mallott, in particular, has developed this theme; see his Studies in Brethren History, 13-14, 19.
5. The statement from Time is quoted on the dust jackets of the Princeton University Press editions of S.K.’s Authority and Revelation and Philosophical Fragments. The full appellation given him is “philoshopher and mystic”; the philosopher obloquy we have refuted already; the mystic, we have now to deal with.
6. Walter Lowrie, the translator’s appendix to S.K.’s Repetition (Princeton: Princeton Un. Press, 1941), p.211.
7. Either/Or, 2:245ff. There is no apparent reason why S.K. would reject or even modify Judge William’s position; his own statements do, in fact, support it.
8. Papirer, 3:A:8 (1840) and 1:A:168(1836), both quoted by Croxall in his notes to Johannes Climacus, 47.
9. Perry LeFevre’s collection of The Prayers of Kierkegaard supports the point we are making not only as a collection but also in LeFevre’s discussion of S.K. as a man of prayer; his chapter well could serve as this part of our study.
10. Samuel Barber has composed a cantata, The Prayers of Kierkegaard.
11. Dru Journals, 487 (1844).
12. The Sickness unto Death, 216.
13. Dru Journals, 1028 (1849).
14. “…The Mirror of the Word” (Discourse I) in For Self Examination, 39.
15. Rohde Journals, 45 (1848).
16. Dru Journals, 754 (1848).
17. Ibid., 1114 (1850).
18. Ibid., 1102 (1850).
19. “The True Man of Prayer …” (Discourse IV) in Edifying Discourses, 4:126.
20. None of the above should be taken to imply that devotional immediacy is the sole prerogative of sectarianism. Obviously this is not the case, although it is nevertheless a fact that the emphasis has been more central and pervasive in sectarian than in churchly (and, particularly, theological) circles.
g. Self-Examination
How examine thyself--for that thou hast a right to do.
On the other hand, thou hast properly no right,
with out self-examination,
to let thyself be deluded by "the others,"
or to delude thyself into the belief
that thou art a Christian--therefore examine thyself.1
The motif now before us is a close corollary of den Enkelte, inwardness, and devotional immediacy. As with devotional immediacy, in both S.K. and the Brethren it can be understood as a direct inheritance from Pietism. And again, it is as much a mood or quality of mind as it is a doctrine.
One of S.K.’s books bears the title For Self-Examination; many of the others could as well have. Likewise, the title of the first and major section of Michael Frantz’s long poem is “Mirror and Test of Himself.”2 The opening stanza reads:
Lord Jesus, Thou my Alpha and Omega,
Thus my beginning and my end,
now have it in mind
To lament to Thee how it is with me.
Seventy-six stanzas later he was still on the theme:
O! If I could rightly test myself,
Then no one would be judged as I would be;
I should not rebuke others
Until I have first judged myself.
And Stanza Ninety-Three reads:
Lord, help me test myself still more,
Because I am very obscure to myself;
I can judge only on the basis of what I myself am,
A self fallen into serious judgment.3
In an issue of Sauer Junior’s Geistliche Magazien
there appeared a brief appendix (evidently by Sauer himself) on “the necessity of self-proving,” in which it is said:
Out of all considerations that a man can have, none is so necessary as this: that one’s present thoughts and deeds agree with eternity, wherein one ponders what will be the result of each deed, word, and thought with which we detain ourselves…. Also, we must give God’s judgment unimpartially not only upon all our deeds but also upon each unnecessary word that we have spoken.4
In addition to such specific references, Brethren devotional literature is pervaded throughout with this mood of pietistic soul-searching; the certainty of God’s presence continually reflected itself in questions ahout one’s own responsiveness. Without doubt a similar mood of introspection could be found in many writers of the churchly tradition, yet it does seem to be more widely typical of the sectaries.
However, if the flavor is pervasive in Brethrenism, in S.K. it is so strong that some readers find it distasteful Of course, S.K. did indulge in self-dissection, although this emphasis in Kierkegaard studies is not entirely of his doing. As we observed earlier, scholars have taken it upon themselves to set out and footnote every “self-examining” passage in S.K.’s works, even where he had not intended them to be read as such, and so too have his journals been edited in a way that makes this aspect more central than it actually was.
Nevertheless it is probably true that no one in history ever has been more acutely cognizant of and concerned about his own inner nature, development, and history than was Søren Kierkegaard. Reinhold Niebuhr has called him “the profoundest interpreter of the psychology of the religious life since Augustine”;5 and with S.K., as with Augustine, that psychology was learned from precisely one case study, himself.
S.K.’s penchant for self-examination was, of course, in part a purely personal propensity; but more than that, it was part and parcel of his religious orientation and tradition. Self-examination is a necessary concomitant of the Kierkegaardian concept of faith. As was his custom, S.K. could and did put the matter in general, semiphilosophic terms:
The law for the development of the self with respect to knowledge … is this, that the increasing degree of knowledge corresponds with the degree of self-knowledge, the more the self knows, the more it knows itself.6
And as was even more customary with S.K., he did not leave the matter on the level of abstract statement but made it more personal, more religious, more Christian: “It is indeed our aim to prompt the hearer to test his life, his Christianity, to be observant of where he is.”7 A most important point regarding self-examination, although one that almost goes without saying, is that it must take place before God and with his help. Thus S.K. was an enthusiastic supporter of the office of confession–not auricular confession to a priest (in which S.K. would have had no interest) but the Lutheran practice of his day, which was a service of worship preceding communion, directed specifically to helping the individual make his personal confession to God. A number of S.K.’s discourses were designated for this occasion, and of confession, S.K. said
Not God, but you, the maker of the confession, get to know something by your act of confession. Much that you are able to keep hidden in darkness, you first get to know by your opening it to the knowledge of the all-knowing One.8
Although apparently not attested from eighteenth century sources, the Brethren traditionally have followed much the same practice. Theirs was not called “confession” but precisely “the self-examination service” (based on Paul’s “Let each man examine himself” [1 Cor. 11:28)). It took the form not only of a direct adjunct to the agape-communion service but also of an earlier visit by the deacons with each member of the congregation individually.
1. Training in Christianity, 42.
2. The fact that this title is worded in the third person may indicate that it was contributed by the publisher rather than the author himself; it is accurate in any case.
3. Michael Frantz, op.cit., stanzas 1, 76, 93, respectively [my trans.-VE.].
4. Sauer Junior (presumably), in Geirdiche Magazien, Series I, No. 27, c. 1765, 143 [my trans.-V.E.].
5. Niebuhr’s remark is quoted on the dust jackets of the Princeton University Press editions of Philosophical Fragments and Authonty and Revelation.
6. The Sickness unto Death, 164. Cf. Works of Love, 331-32.
7. “Our Salvation Is Now Nearer …” (Pt. III, Discourse 5) in Christian Discourses, 222.
8. Purity of Heart, 51.
h. Equality Before God
… As no coin is so small that it cannot bear the image of the emperor
so no man is so humble that he cannot bear God’s image….1
Whatever difference there may be between two persons,
even if humanly speaking it were most extreme,
God has it in his power to say:
“When I am present, certainly no one will resume to be
conscious of this difference, because that would be
standing and talking to each other in my presence
as if I were not present.2
Thou plain man!
The Christianity of the New Testament is infinitely high;
but observe that it is not high
in such a sense that it has to do with the difference
between man and man with respect to intellectual capacity, etc.
No, it is for all…. Thou plain man!
1 have not separated my life from thine;
thou knowest it….3
With its doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers” the Protestant Reformation made a tremendous stride toward establishing the theological foundations for the equality of all men before God. However, the churchly wing of that Reformation did not make nearly comparable progress in adjusting the structure and life of the church to implement the theological affirmation. Thus in our own day the problem of the laity has become an urgent one. The sectarian wing of the Reformation, on the other hand, took the doctrine more seriously and developed a form of church organization that did attempt to give existential expression to it. But the one Protestant who felt this demand of the gospel most deeply, who preached it most insistently, who interpreted it most radically, who was most alert to spotting violations of it–this Protestant, we propose, was Søren Kierkegaard.
But first, the Brethren. Although sectarian to the core, the eighteenth century Brethren did not speak much about equality; appropriate quotations are hard to come by. However, careful consideration makes it plain that this silence is not an indication of the absence of the doctrine but of its presence at so basic a level that it simply was taken for granted. The church (the Gemeinde) was so structured that this equality was a fact, arid there was no reason to talk about it. The other sects and the spiritualist groups with which the Brethren had contact were all of a mind on this matter, arid the Brethren so completely had shaken the dust of the “churches” from their feet that the question of equality did not come under discussion But
- that conception which, in the Brethren situation of acceptance, was so primary as to be unconscious and
- that conception which, in the churchly situation of S.K., he felt to be so primary that it must be made painfully self-conscious-these two were yet the same conception.
The Brethren understanding of equality is not to be found in written statements but in the way they constituted the Gemeinde and its ministry–this actually being a much more compelling demonstration than a mass of assertions about equality would be. It is the Brethren concept of “clergy” that is most revealing. This, of course, does not cover the whole gamut of equality before God, but it does stand as the crux of the issue and as a symbol of the Brethren conception in general. The case is that the distinction between clergy and laity was a very fluid and informal one. In some ways it would be correct to say that every Dunker was a layman; in other respects it would have to be said that every Dunker was a priest; the most accurate formula probably should adopt a Pauline style: in Christ there is neither layman nor priest.
A real rarity in church history, the Brethren constituted a church founded entirely by laymen; in fact, the evidence is that it was well into the nineteenth century before anyone with previous ministerial background and training even joined the brotherhood. Certainly from the outset Alexander Mack carried the role of elder (bishop), but there is no record of how, when, or if the church ordained him; and what is even more amazing, no one ever has raised the question. Although well respected and beloved as the “founder” of the church, Mack’s original gravestone bore only his initials (not even his full name) with the dates of his birth and death. The stone of Peter Becker, the “founder” of the church in America, was even more simple, an unshaped fieldstone on which was scratched “Anno 1758, P.B.” The early Brethren did not run the risk of giving undue honor to men.
The customary practice seems to have been that the “clergy” were chosen by the Gemeinde as a whole, out of its own number, as need arose. Apparently there were not even nominations, any and all members being considered as eligible for office. There were, of course, no educational or professional requirements, as, likewise, no salary nor monetary recompense. Brumbaugh cites a document from the pen of Mack Junior reporting the rather astonishing fact that a woman served as an elder in the church during its earliest days at Schwarzenau.4 All members, irrespective of office, were addressed simply as Brother So-and-So and Sister Whomever; and in some Brethren writings it comes almost as a shock to discover the men we commonly know as St. Paul and St. Peter referred to as Brother Paul and Brother Peter.
In a letter of 1747 Michael Frantz counseled specifically that laymen are free to administer baptism and the communion if no elders are present and if all things are done in order.5 His statement gives the impression (undoubtedly correct) that the clerical office exists not for the sake of any peculiar authority or power it imparts but as a means of assisting the Gemeinde to conduct its life and worship in a dignified and worthy manner; Dunker “priests” did not so much administer the sacraments as they superintended their observance.
But the most interesting and perhaps most enlightening in sight into the Brethren concept of equality came in connection with the very delicate problem of ministerial discipline; surely the clergy would have to assert its prerogatives here. But not so. In 1764 Mack Junior and Sauer Junior were co-elders of the Germantown congregation. At that time some of the members became unhappy over the fact that Sauer was printing catechisms for the Lutherans. It was not that they objected to his doing work for another denomination, but they could not quite see a Dunker elder putting his imprint on a book that advocated and defended infant baptism. The writ of censure (if that it can be called) presumably was drawn up by Mack Junior; the manuscript was in his possession. It must be one of the strangest specimens of its kind. It opens with a prayer to the effect that God will strengthen and use his servant Christopher Sauer; it closes with a strong endorsement of the Sauer Press, its work and witness. In between, the petitioners are almost apologetic as they explain that they find themselves constrained by their consciences to lay the matter upon Sauer’s conscience. And in the end their only “demand” is a polite request that, if Sauer ever contemplates publishing another edition of the catechism, he kindly inform the church beforehand so that a “big meeting” of the brotherhood might be called to consider the issue.
But the aspect of this writ that bears upon equality is its signatures. One of the signers is Alexander Mack, Sauer’s co-elder and unquestionably the leading figure of the sect. But Mack’s signature neither leads the list as foremost in authority nor does it conclude the list as being the last word; it appears unobtrusively in the middle. Two others of the signers are known to have been deacons;6 of the remaining two we know not that much.7 Clearly, ecclesiastical powers and prerogatives which would make one believer in any way superior to another simply were not part of Brethren thought. These Dunkers were concerned studiously to avoid any sort of either spiritual or governmental hierarchicalism, although it is important to note that they were concerned just as studiously to have the order and offices that would guard against anarchy and atomism.
We shall discover that S.K.’s doctrine of equality was developed in an entirely different context than that just traced for the Brethren. S.K.’s comments on the government and ministry of the church were entirely negative, directed against the evils he found in his own situation. Actually, he had no occasion to prescribe what the ministerial structure of a Gemeinde should be. Nevertheless, is not a significant agreement between the Dunkers and the Dane suggested in the fact that, on his deathbed, S.K. asked for communion from the hands of a Layman?8 [quoted above]
Our observations regarding the Dunker Gemeinde make it obvious that the Brethren held a strong doctrine of the equality of all believers before God. It might be objected, however, that this does not cover the question regarding men universally. But in a very real sense all men do share in this equality in respect of the fact that all are potential believers. Indeed, it is upon precisely such a premise that S.K. will found his doctrine of equality, i.e. on each man’s potentiality for becoming a Christian. Moreover, the Brethren doctrine of radical love for all men (to be examined in a succeeding chapter) certainly carries rather direct implications regarding the equality of these men before God.
However, the view which in Brethren thought was only implicit became in S.K. very explicit:
But let me give utterance to this which in a sense is my very life, the content of my life for me, its fullness, its happiness, its peace and contentment. There are various philosophies of life which deal with the question of human dignity and human equality; Christianly, every man (the individual), absolutely every man, once again, absolutely every man is equally near to God. And how is he equally near? Loved by Him. So there is equality, infinite equality between man and man.9
I set the problem, the problem which faces the whole age: equality between man and man. I put it into practice in Copenhagen. That is something more than writing a few words on the subject: I expressed it approximately with my life.10
It is quite true that in other places S.K. spoke just as emphatically about other themes being the center of his witness, but this indicates no particular vagary on his part. The themes that made up the core of his thought were so closely interrelated that emphasis on one necessarily emphasized the rest. Thus to become den Enkelte, to live in true inwardness, to be unconditionally obedient to God, to practice devotional immediacy, or to achieve complete equality before God–all ultimately appear as necessary aspects of the same spiritual existence. Nothing is to be gained by promoting any one of them as the true key to Kierkegaard. It is not improper that, in turn, he should speak as though each were the most fundamental.
The theme of equality can be traced throughout the authorship, even back into the pseudonyms,11 although the true depth and grounding of S.K.’s conviction became evident only in the religious works. Climacus of the Postscript began to develop the religious aspect, yet doing it in rather abstract, theological terms.12 However, when S.K. spoke directly and in his own name, it was made obvious that his interest was not in a theological proposition but in a religious reality, a Christian reality which he was fervently concerned to actualize. He derived the thought of equality in a number of ways. For instance, equality is the concomitant of faith:
Faith has a different quality; it is not only the highest good, but it is a good in which all men can share…. And this is the glory of faith, that it can only be had on this condition [that its possibility be conceded to all men].”13
Just as fundamentally, equality is a concomitant of love: “He who praises art and science emphasizes the cleavage between the talented and untalented among men. But he who praises love equalizes all, not in a common poverty or a common mediocrity, but in the community of the highest.” 14
But what is probably S.K.’s most basic statement is the one that follows. It merits being quoted in full because it reveals so much both of the background and the implications of S.K.’s thought: It points to the ultimate, Christian source of equality, God’s redeeming act in Christ. It relates equality to S.K.’s concept of den Enkelte. It reveals how equality lays the foundation for a strong doctrine of Gemeinschaft. And it very precisely distinguishes what this equality is from what it is not.
[Christianity] has saved men from this sort of evil [the ungodliness which teaches one man to disclaim relationship with another] by deeply and eternally unforgettably stamping the imprint of kinship between man and man, because kinship of all men is secured by every individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ, because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to every individual and teaches him that God has created him and Christ has redeemed him…. Before Christ just as in the sight of God there is no aggregate, no mass; the innumerable are for him numbered–they are unmitigated individuals…. Christianity has not taken distinctions away–any more than Christ could or would pray God to take the disciples out of the world–and these remain one and the same thing…. [Christianity] sees–and with real distress, that earthly busy-ness and the false prophets of secularism will in the name of Christianity conjure up the illusion of perfect equality, as if only the high and mighty make much of the distinctions of earthly existence, as if the poor were entitled to do everything in order to attain equality–only not by way of becoming Christians in earnestness and truth. I wonder if one can come closer to Christian likeness and equality that way? Christianity, then, will not take differences away, neither the distinction of poverty nor that of social position. But on the other hand, Christianity will not in partiality side with any temporal distinction, either the lowliest or the most acceptable in the eyes of the world.15
This last is a point that S.K. emphasized as strongly as any he ever made; it was reiterated time and again in his writings. Christian equality before God is not the same thing as sociopolitical equality. Equality within the context of the Christian faith is an entirely different phenomenon than equality in the worldly context. To read implications back and forth from one sphere to the other leads only to confusion. S.K. put the matter very bluntly:
No politics ever has, no politics ever can, no worldliness ever has, no worldliness ever can, think through or realize to its last consequences the thought of human equality…. For if complete equality were to be attained, worldliness would be at an end. But is it not a sort of obsession on the part of worldliness that it has got into its head the notion of wanting to enforce complete equality, and to enforce it by worldly means … in a worldly medium? It is only religion that can, with the help of eternity, carry human equality to the utmost limit…. And therefore (be it said to its honor and glory) religion is the true humanity.”16
Closely related to S.K.’s thought on equality is his doctrine of nonconformity to the world (to be examined in a later chapter); and this linkage gives his thought a particularly sectarian bent. Although committed to a most radical view of equality, neither S.K., the Brethren, nor sectaries generally are to be considered as “democrats” or as an integral part of the democratic tradition. They assigned no particular value to “the voice of the people” or to “the natural rights of man.” They were out-and-out “theocrats,” the only thing distinguishing them from usual theocratic thought being that they conceived of God’s rule not as mediated through any sort of hierarchical structure but as apprehended personally and directly by each individual believer. The connection between sectarian Christian equalitarianism and democratic social equalitarianism is not as close as it might seem; and our interpretation of history probably is oversimplified when, for instance, we take religious sectarianism to be a direct progenitor of American democracy. It is significant that the classic sects showed no particular inclination to get involved in secular politics and made no attempt to give their ideology expression through widespread social reforms; S.K. understood why.
He did not deny that the Christian understanding of equality might have implications regarding the worldly relationships of man’s social and political life, but for him these never could amount to a simple equation between democracy (or any other social-political system) and Christianity. Thus he did not merely fail to draw these implications but deliberately refused to, in order to avoid confusing the categories. For S.K. any equality based elsewhere than “before God,” any equality derived from the nature of man rather than the gracious action of God in Christ, any equality that must be enforced by law rather than being the expression of neighbor love, any equality dedicated to mutual self-interest rather than to mutual service–any such equality hardly can qualify as true equality, hardly dare be yoked with Christian equality. Obviously, the Kierkegaard-sectarian view bears little resemblance to the liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that charted the advance of the kingdom by the spread of social equalitarianism; and the Brethren and other such groups deserted their true heritage to the extent that they were captured by this modern ideology.
Because democratic equalitarianism is a worldly rather than a truly Christian form, it is bound to include seeds of the demonic within itself. And S.K.–amazingly early in the historical development–saw precisely where the demonism lies. It is in what he called “soul-consuming uniformity,”17 a process which proves to be a “leveling” rather than an “elevating” equalization:
The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or to his science, he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection, just as a serf belongs to an estate…. There is no other reason for this [leveling] than that eternal responsibility, and the religious singling out of the individual before God, is ignored.18
Whereas democratic equalitarianism includes tendencies toward the deadening conformity of mass man, the organization man, etc., the true Christian equality is preserved from such a fate in that the presence and pressure of God posits and guarantees the retention of den Enkelte. S.K., in his analysis of secular equalitarianism, foresaw the situation which in our day called forth the existentialist revolt. But this revolt, no less secular in its orientation than that against which it revolts, is no real answer, because in its autonomous assertion of individuality it inevitably undercuts human equality and Gemeinschaft. No, the only solution is S.K.’s, the religious concept of a man finding his true, elevated equality with all other men precisely by existing as den Enkelte… before God.
There is nothing in S.K. that would deny that democracy might be the best form of secular government; but he passionately would have resisted the suggestion that a state’s achieving of social and political equality made it in any sense Christian. Secular equalitarianism must be justified and defended on its own secular premises; and whatever its achievements, it does not begin to approximate the Christian concept. And how great the tragedy when it happens–as it often has happened–that Christians become confused, lose sight of their true equality, and in its stead chase the phantom of worldly equalitarianism. “Therefore, be it said to its honor and glory, religion is the [only] true humanity.”
But of equal importance and perhaps even greater contemporary relevance than S.K.’s pointing us to the true source of human equality is the incisive way in which he pinpointed and exposed the equality-killing distinctions that slip into the very practice of our faith. One of these is the idea of merit, or accomplishment, in God’s sight-whether the “Catholic” ascetic accomplishments of self-discipline and mortification or the “Protestant” accomplishments of service to the cause of the kingdom. In either case the inevitable implication is that one person stands higher with God than another; but S.K. said:
If both in relation to the demand do all, then they do equally much. And if neither of them does all, then they do equally little…. Oh, how great is the mercy of the Eternal toward us! All the ruinous quarreling and comparison which swells up and injures, which sighs and envies, the Eternal does not recognize. Its claim rests equally on each, the greatest who ever lived, and the most insignificant.19
Another invidious distinction between man and man is that of intellect; and the full thrust and passion of S.K.’s anti-intellectualism cannot be appreciated until seen in this connection. In the following, Climacus hardly spoke as a pseudonym: “God is affronted by getting a group of hangers-on, an intermediary staff of clever brains; and humanity is affronted because the relationship to God is not identical for all men…. For the speculative philosopher and the plain man do not by any means know the same thing, when the plain man believes the paradox, and the speculative philosopher knows it to be abrogated.”20 Closely related but cutting even deeper is S.K.’s observation about social-cultural distinctions, an observation that may be particularly appropriate when, in our day, a certain conception of “secular Christianity” is popular:
Therefore this distinguished corruption teaches the man of distinction that he exists only for distinguished men, that he shall live only in their social circle, that he must not exist for other men, just as they must not exist for him. But he must be circumspect, as it is called, in order with smoothness and dexterity to avoid getting people excited…. He must be prepared to employ extreme courtesy towards common people, but he must never associate with them as equals, for thereby expression would be given to his being–a human being–whereas he is a distinguished personage. And if he can do this easily, smoothly, tastefully, elusively and yet always keeping his secret (that those other men do not really exist for him and he does not exist for them), then this refined corruption will confirm him as being … a well-bred man… In company with scholars or within an environment which insures and elevates his distinction as such, a scholar would perhaps be willing to lecture enthusiastically on the doctrine of the equality of all men, but this means a continued maintenance of the distinction.21
Although certainly neither intended nor applicable as a blanket indictment, S.K.’s words do point out a phenomenon that is readily apparent on the current scene. This is the lust for sophistication–whether it take the form of impressive jargon-juggling; the display of ecclesiastical elegance; the studied casualness of name-dropping and quote-lifting; the two-way pose that can pass one off as a man of God or of the world as the occasion demands; the “being in touch with the world” which ever risks getting lost in the world; the proficiency in theological and ecclesiastical gamesmanship. S.K. understood that all such represents a living refutation of Christian equality before God.
In a way it is amazing that Søren Kierkegaard should be the one to arrive at this insight, for he was eminently qualified to play the role of the sophisticate himself; he had the intellect, the wit, the money, the taste, the connections, even a natural propensity for aloofness. But perhaps it was precisely because he knew the disease within himself that he was so able to diagnose and expose it. And most assuredly it was because S.K. knew the disease within himself that he was not content “to lecture enthusiastically on the doctrine of the equality of all men” but felt impelled to go out on the street and put it into practice:
I have been deeply and inwardly concerned to recognize each of the poor men who knew me, to greet every servant with whom I had even the slightest acquaintance, to remember the last time I saw him, whether he had been ill, and to enquire after him. I have never in my life, not even when I was most preoccupied with an idea, been so busy that I did not first find time to stop for a moment if a poor rnan spoke to me.22
Only when, alongside his eloquent words, one also sees the person of the queer, introverted, melancholy Kierkegaard painfully practicing neighbor love–only then does one truly understand what he meant by the equality of all men before God. In the words of our epigraph: “Thou plain man! I have not separated my life from thine; thou knowest it….” S.K. could say this besause he was convinced that God, as it were, had said it first.
n Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Discourse II on “What Is To Be Learnt from the Lilies” in The Gospel of Suffering, 234.
2. Works of Love, 315.
3. Attack upon “Christendom,” 287.
4. Brumbaugh, op.cit., 68, 176-77.
5. Michael Frantz, a letter dated Dec. 9, 1747, in Henry Kurtz, The Brethren’s Encyclopedia (Columbiana, Ohio: 1867), 133-34.
6. Whether, in eighteenth century Brethrenism, the deacon should be considered as a cleric or a layman is a very neat question. Deacons were inducted into office through a laying on of hands, although it is also true that every member was so ordained into the Christian life at the time of his baptism. When, in the late nineteenth century, the Brethren began to develop a trained, professionalized ministry, the diaconate clearly became a lay office; but in the eighteenth century, the lay clergy distinction was of such little moment that the question about deacons could not even be formulated.
7. The so-called writ of censure (which is entirely my own title) is preserved in English translation in Kurtz, op.cit.,137-41.
The sequel and climax to the story is this: To the original, 1764 manuscript of the writ was appended a note by Mack Junior, dated May 17, 1767. In it he asseverates that, although he still holds the views expressed in the writ, he does not want either his name or the writ itself to be made the authority for calling any “big meeting” that might endanger the Gemeinschaft of the church. In addition to his own, this “concluding unscientific postscript” bears the signatures of three more of the original four other signers of the writ It seems quite unlikely that the writ was ever “served”; the Brethren put higher value upon the preservation of Gemcinschalt than upon correcting Sauer. At the same time, however, it is highly likely that the concern did get communicated to the offender; the catalog of the Sauer Press lists no further printings of catechisms until 1777, the year when control of the business passed from Sauer to his sons. Apparently Elder Sauer–as well as his petitioners–had some feeling for Gemeinschalt.
8. Dru Journals, 551.
9. The Preface to For Self Examination, 5.
10. Dru Journals, 877 (1849). Cf. S.K.’s statements quoted above.
11. Either/Or, 1:116; 2:77, 2:280, 2:297; Stages of Life’s Way, 222, 226, 282, 297.
12. Postscript, 92, 502.
13. “Faith’s Expectation” (Discourse I) in Edifying Discourses, 1:10.
14. Works of Love, 335; cf. 97. Cf. also the second of “Two Notes on ‘the Individual’” in Point of View, 118.
15. Works of Love, 80, 81.
16. The Preface to “Two Notes on ‘the Individual’” in Point of View, 107-8. Cf. Works of Love, 52, and The Book on Adler, xxi.
17. “Every Good Gift …” (Discourse III) in Edifying Discourses, 2:48; see the entire discourse for an extended discussion of the theme.
18. The Present Age, 53; cf. 51ff for an extended discussion.
19. Purity of Heart, 123, 125.
20. Postscript, 204. Cf. Attack upon “Christendom,” 159.
21. Works of Love, 85, 87.
22. Dru Journals, 719 (1847); cf. 769 (1848), 1092 (1850), and 1367 (1854). Cf. also Point of View, 48-49.