Abraham and Isaac

Kierkegaard is wrong: an absurd God is not good.

I’ve posted three times previously on Søren Kierkegaard As with all my posts, I’m always trying to figure out the gist of someone’s argument by presenting it to others—that is, you dear reader. I think I’ve finally “got” Kierkegaard, and I think he’s fundamentally wrong.

The three stages of life

Kierkegaard says that there are three stages to life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic life is concerned with pleasure. The ethical life is concerned with living by principle. If married, I should follow the principles of marriage, which are loyalty, care, and love. The ethical man acts in a way he would want others to act. It’s actually pretty close to the golden rule, which in turn is pretty close to what Immanuel Kant called the categorical imperative.

The religious stage is where it gets complicated, because Kierkegaard subdivided the religious stage into A and B. We reach the religious stage when we see that the principles that guide our lives are not merely a product of human reason, but a divine imperative. Failing to live up to these principles is not only unethical; it is an insult to God.

Kierkegaard makes a big deal out of the difference between what he calls “religiousness A and religiousness B.” (CUP, p 494) The main difference is that in religiousness A, God is thought of as comprehensible by humans, and understandable by reason, at least to a certain degree. There is continuity between the ethical and religiousness A.

Stage B, which Kierkegaard sometimes calls simply Christianity, is where God is beyond human reason, infinitely different and utterly inexplicable. Kierkegaard frequently uses the term “absurd” to characterize this God and his commandments. The experience of God as absurd is good, for it means we have abandoned trying to understand him. To act on the absurd is to act completely on faith (Journal).

“Religion B” is a bad idea

In Isaiah 55:8, God says “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” This makes sense. We should not expect God to be a larger and more powerful version of a human. To fail to recognize and appreciate God’s otherness is a mistake. Nevertheless, God’s commandments, his presence in our lives, must be recognizably good, decent, and moral, or he is no longer a God that humans can worship.

Continue reading Kierkegaard is wrong: an absurd God is not good

Kierkegaard and the leap to faith.

I’ve decided that the only way to understand religion is in terms of what Søren Kierkegaard called the “leap.” (CUP, p 340) He never used the term “leap of faith.” I’m still struggling with Kierkegaard. My post is a series of comments on some important ideas of his. There are others.

I am particularly interested in the religious implications of his earlier works, those not explicitly Christian. When people refer to Kierkegaard as the first existentialist, it is to these earlier works that they refer.

One influence on my decision to study Kierkegaard was reading some of Reinhold Niebuhr’s sermons, prayers, and religious essays (2015). Far from being a “Christian realist,” as I may have portrayed him here, Niebuhr was first of all a man of faith. But what does this mean?

Truth as subjectivity

It means that through an act of “imaginative reorientation,” one chooses to see the world as gift, and Christ as our savior, because doing so makes life more meaningful. Reasons can be given, but the world as gift and Christ as savior becomes a reality by acting as if it were so. This is what Kierkegaard means by “truth as subjectivity.”

Truth is not just a proposition. Truth becomes a way of life. This is exemplified in Christ’s claim that “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Christ not only claims to teach the truth; His life is the truth (Evans, p 62). Our lives can never be the truth, but we can seek to make the ideals represented by Christ’s life and teachings our own, in so far as this is humanly possible. In this way faith becomes a reality.

Continue reading Kierkegaard and the leap to faith