Author: david cl driedger

A preface to Kierkegaard’s preface of Prefaces; And, create me and let me begin

Well it has been a relief from the dense and demanding Concept of Anxiety into the satirical Prefaces.  The book is what the title suggests.  Prefaces is a collection of prefaces with no books.  The author of these prefaces believes it is high time for the preface to push back from being ‘elbowed aside’ so that it might finally ‘liberate itself’. (4)

The preface as such, the liberated preface, must then have no subject to treat but must deal with nothing, and insofar as it seems to discuss something and deal with something, this must nevertheless be an illusion and a fictitious motion (5).

Continue reading “A preface to Kierkegaard’s preface of Prefaces; And, create me and let me begin” →

Unanticipated discrepancy

Things have been humming along fairly well in my Kierkegaard reading project for this year (that is except for keeping up on posting about it).  I have run into a series of shorter volumes which has  made me feel optimistic.  I did order a couple of volumes for myself and they arrived yesterday and reminded me that my ‘two volume a month’ pace may not have been well thought out in terms of consistency.

Proximity and resources

Winnipeg’s tenth homicide was confirmed this morning.  The shooting took place around the CBC parking lot at Portage and Young.  We were likely just leaving our house at that time to run a few errands.  I am trying to retrace the moments to see if anything comes to mind.  We would have been close enough to hear the shooting.  Learning about the shooting does not seem to phase me personally despite the proximity.  In the larger media and civic perspective this will of course be another mark on the neighbourhood.  I think the reason this shooting does not phase me is due to something I have been thinking more and more about lately which is the question of resources.  I have sketched out a preliminary account of the type of resources I am talking about.

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Inwardness or Inwardism?

I have quite enjoyed following Jeremy Ridenour’s blog.  I find his contributions reflect a clarity and charity (sorry those were the two best words I could think of) that is seldom found in this nook of the blogosphere.  In his final comment on a recent engagement with Adam Kotsko’s The Politic’s of Redemption a thought has continued to linger in my mind.

He concludes his post,

Comments: On a personal note, yesterday I taught Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity in Sunday school at my mainline church. The class seemed to take quite nicely to his critique of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s idea of a suffering God. However, most were quite uncomfortable with the idea of abandoning piety and a personal relationship with God. I think Bonhoeffer’s critique is Lutheran in character because he worries that this turn inward is a false start. Luther continued to emphasize that Christ is found on the cross not inside the heart of the individual believer. If Bonoheffer’s ultimate aim is to promote a Christianity that is solely focused on living in this world, then we have to come to terms with the fact that inwardness is an obstacle to being in communion with one another. It breeds narcissism and self-righteousness. Encountering God on the cross requires that the body of Christ tear down the crosses society has erected to serve the disenfranchised. God can only be found in the midst of suffering because God in Christ has let Godself be pushed out of the world onto the cross.

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Thrusting scripture

Jaime Smith offered a brief reflection on the evangelical vortex of universalist speculation.  His guiding question in the quote is asking what compels evangelicals to branch off in this direction.  Smith readily dismisses close scriptural reasoning as the basis (because any case ‘can be so easily refuted’).  The basis for motivation then is a type of overall sensibility about God in which one speaks of their ‘hope’ and ‘imagination’ with regards to the nature of God (and Christ).  Smith goes on then to ask if this posture of hope and imagination is warranted to overturn the apparently orthodox doctrine of damnation as well as ‘the narrative thrust of scripture’.

It is the final quote that I want to sit with for a minute.  I remember sitting in a class at an evangelical seminary where the professor took great pains and extended time showing the creation motif that is strewn throughout the biblical text.  Creation, de-creation, re-creation emerges consistently in the literary forms of the Bible.  This of course culminates in the book of Revelation in which there is a return to the garden (though the return, or repetition, is with a difference as it must be and so the return is now to a city).  I am also convinced that this is a dominant theme in the biblical narrative and if there is indeed a thrust (or multiple thrusts) in Scripture creation would most certainly be one of them.  In any event, I eventually asked the professor that if this indeed was a dominant theme in the Bible (that is the  arching back [and forward] to a restored creation) then would that not lead to a doctrine of universalism.  I mean there was no hell in the Garden was there?  The professor paused for a minute and then said that he could not go in that direction due to other scripture passages.  And so the overall mechanical thrust was put at odds with an examination of the cogs that produced the motion.  I don’t really mind that this would be case only to say that an evangelical professor who had no interest in producing a doctrine of universalism basically produced one through careful scripture reading, though in the end needed to overturn it due to particulars.

So in some ways I suppose Jaime is right in that good evangelicals must require something more than scriptural motivation because scriptures in themselves will always keep people in bondage and not work in freedom because there is always a particular passage to cause reserve, doubt or ultimately condemnation.

The Concept of Anxiety

The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin is often considered Kierkegaard’s most difficult work.  The work is ‘psychological’ in that psychology is in the best position to describe anxiety.  Anxiety itself however gives way only to a dogmatic (religious) orientation; psychology is required but can only go so far.

The following may not make any sense (as I am trying to sort this out myself) but I thought I would try and unpack a few key quotes in Kierkegaard’s concept.

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A little Q&A

Question: Why did Jesus die and what did Jesus’ death accomplish?
Answer: Jesus died for our sins and his death paid the penalty for our sins.

The answer comes before the question is even finished.  In fact certain readings of Isaiah would have the answer come before the question.  Is there a particularly Good Friday answer to this question.  Shouldn’t the answer be intimately bound with Good Friday?

If I stay with the text (John was our reading this year) the sequence goes as follows.  Why did Jesus die?  Because he was killed.  What did Jesus’ death accomplish?  Nothing.   So we sit with futility of death.  The God of king and priest is dead because the one and only king and priest is crucified.  By definition then Good Friday sits with atheism and anarchism.  Good Friday sits with the knowledge that the nature of religion and empire is death.

But if you would like something other than death to sit with  and there must be something more than death because the disciples continued to live in the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  If you would like some words to come alongside the words of the dead and forsaken God then listen to Jesus again from the cross.  Listen to him before his final words.  He turns to his mother, the woman who gave him birth.  Jesus looks at her and then motions to his disciple standing by her and says, “Here is your son.”  And then he looks at his disciple and motions to his mother saying, “Here is your mother.”  And with these words a community is called.  A community based not on lineage, culture, tradition, status or interests.  This community is called by all who will gather and acknowledge that the gods of this world are dead and the gods of some heaven reserved for the privileged are dead.  So what will live on?  Where will life be found?  Today all we are offered are the words to turn and see our mother, our father, our sons and our daughters among those gathered at the site of death; the site too often created by religion and empire that work to exclude the undesirable.  Jesus has called a people to gather beyond the illusion of religion and beyond the power of empire; to gather in death where we must ask ourselves if love too has died.  And if love has not died . . .  then we must love.  But few of us find that place on our own so must begin by seeking the lost who have been thrust there.  Why did Jesus die?  Maybe first we need to ask another question.  Where did Jesus die?

Guitierrez on the split of spiritual exprience

I have been picking my way through Gustavo Gutierrez’s We Drink from our own Wells.  While much of the exegesis offered there feels like well-worn territory now I was struck by his description of spiritual growth in response to God’s call to the poor.

The harsh reality of everyday experience causes breaks with the past and launches persons on new quests.

1. To the measure that solidarity with the world of the poor grows and matures, old securities collapse and fixed reference points crumble away – underpinnings that used to provide a certain tranquility in the midst of  new experiences and challenges.  A growing insecurity seems to undermine, from within, the patterns of spiritual life that guided our earlier steps.  Many continued in their original commitment for a long time, relying on the solid protection of their religious community, a Christian environment, and a particular way of understanding life according to the gospel.  The shock of reality, and the effort to enter into it to an ever fuller degree, darkened what was once a clear horizon.  Familiar paths now lead to impasses.  Those who, nonetheless, refuse to be discouraged seek more fruitful paths, but the price they pay is dissatisfaction, fear, and sometimes even frustration.  And in every case there is a keen sense of insecurity that is perhaps inevitable but that also must pass because it is not possible to build a solid and lasting spirituality on a sense of insecurity.

2. The result is a painful split in spiritual experience.  Persons begin to live in a somewhat dichotomized fashion.  On the one hand, they feel the need of a sure spiritual way; this is especially the case perhaps in those who have had a more systematic formation in this area.  On the other hand, daily life with its demands for commitment seems to run on a tangential track; it does not initially conflict with the spirituality one has acquired, but neither does it enrich it.  In the long run, this kind of dual existence is highly unsatisfactory.  Upon the disappearance of the fixed points that should give unity to everyday activity, persons live at the mercy of events, unable to establish fruitful links between them and are forced simply to jump from one to another.  They are convinced that they have learned a great deal from solidarity with the poor and from carrying out their work of evangelization among them, but when they try to express this perception they fall back on categories that begin to seem increasingly alien and remote.  The problem results from the fact that they have not reexamined these categories in the light of their new experiences or, more exactly, that they do not have another path that can replace the one that no longer seems to lead to the goal. (16-17)