Category: theology

Inwardness, actuality, dogmatic policing, and conversion

I would have to say that Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments was the most anticipated volume in my Kierkegaard reading tour.  So far I have not been disappointed.  While it is penned under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus I really feel Kierkegaard ‘pouring it on’ in this volume (and as far as I understand this was to be last and climactic work).  There is no ‘imaginative construction’ to set the stage in so many of his other works.  From the gate Kierkegaard pours forth his account of Christianity as the truth of subjectivity; or, truth as subjectivity.  Throughout my reading of Kierkegaard I have tried to monitor just how he develops inwardness.  I wondered the extent to which I could accept his account given the temptation of introspection as a pretext for a spiritualism that does not take social structures and actions seriously.  I always held out on the side of Kierkegaard because of his insistence on actuality as opposed to abstraction.  I felt that the extent to which Kierkegaard’s thought would veer towards an isolated spirituality then in fact it would betray his commitment to existence (which demands particularity be taken with utmost seriousness).  This being said Kierkegaard’s notion of inwardness was always a little opaque.  Then I encountered this line about halfway through CUP,

The actuality is not the external action but an interiority in which the individual annuls possibility and identifies himself with what is thought in order to exist in it.  This is action. (339)

To risk putting this in a certain therapeutic language I would say this refers to being congruent.  For instance there remains Christian language about loving the sinner and hating the sin.  However, we all know this ends up looking a lot like hating the sinner even if it only sounds like hating the sin.  There remains a fundamental incongruence here.  Kiekergaard advocates famously in another place that purity of heart is to ‘will one thing’.  All possibilities become annulled in passionate clarification of existing in the actuality of love.  And so hating the possibility of hating the sin is annulled in the actuality of loving the sinner.

I frame this response to Kierkegaard due to my own recent conversion experience.  For years I have tried to reflect on how the Gospel calls individuals to orientate themselves towards peace and justice.  This led to significant life decisions in terms of where I lived, how I acted and what I studied.  It was only recently however that I have come to realize that I carried along with this commitment a certain dogmatic policing that continually annulled the actuality of the sort of life I sought.  This dogmatic policing continued to hold people in judgment while outwardly I tried to work for liberation (in what was of course limited and often naive ways).  I still harboured ambiguity around how I could support those in same-sex relationships.  I remained largely blind or at least unresponsive to the gender prejudice that swarmed around in many of my contexts.  I did not integrate the significance that the basic lack of resources can have on people’s lives.

I was not functioning congruently.  In what felt like a very short time something simply fell away.  I felt somehow released to love (yes I will let that stand for all its possible cheesiness).  I don’t have more answers and I don’t know how to act differently.  I don’t actually think anyone would notice the difference.  But I know I am living differently and I know this will effect my ethical posture.  I just know something changed (as I also now it can change for the worse).  Perhaps I am stretching Kierkegaard’s account of actuality but if I am, I don’t think it is by much.  My notion of’ ‘peace and justice’ was largely situated in a field policed by a dogma contrary to peace and justice and so I was given free reign to explore it within those bounds.  This is abstract and speculative thought according to Kierkegaard and the further that path is traveled the further away one is from existence.

Stages on Life’s Way

In many ways Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Stages is the easiest to summarize.  The book is framed as a collection of ‘found’ pieces published by Hilarius Bookbinder.  The pieces include ‘In vino veritas’, ‘Reflections on Marriage’ and ‘Guilty? / Not Guilty’.  These pieces all address particular relationships between man and woman, with man being the subject.  The first section is likened to a remaking of Plato’s Symposium.  Men gather around the banquet table drinking and making speeches about love.  This is a poetic account in which man, woman and love are abstracted and never engaged in particular.  The second second section is an ethical account of a man married to a woman.  It includes an exploration of love in terms or duties, natures and ideals.  Marriage is no abstraction.  It is the concrete and the temporal.  The third section explores a man’s internal processing of realizing that his engagement to a woman must be broken due to his internal movement or desire towards the religious.  He understands that the two of them do not fundamentally understand each other and to proceed with marriage would be of greater harm to the woman than to break off the engagement and so the man explores how best to break the engagement for the sake of the woman.  This section is framed as a series of journal entries.  There are morning and midnight entries.  The morning entries recollect events that occurred a year ago on that day while the midnight entries reflect on current circumstances.

All three sections have their moments in terms of literary expression or conceptual insight.  However, it is the ‘fourth’ section that really engages the movement of ‘stages’.  The final section is an account by the ‘author’ of the third section in which he reveals his intention in writing the piece which is to explore the phenomenon of the religious.  This is difficult because the movement of the religious cannot be secured externally.  In the case of his account there is nothing keeping the couple from having a happy marriage, no obstacle that is, except for an internal movement in the man.  The result of the inwardness is a qualitative misunderstanding that cannot allow for a happy marriage.  I would be curious to know more about the history of ‘understanding’ as it functioned in marriage relationships as it still crops up as reason to enough to end marriage (though Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish different sorts of ‘misunderstandings’).  Also, a clear critique could come in Kierkegaard giving a masculine priority to thinking about ‘important things’ rather than a feminine (esthetic) immediacy that he characterizes the woman as having.

At one point the author makes the comment, “The religious is simply and solely qualitative dialectic and disdains quantity” (443).  This abolishes the significance of the external (which is important for creating a level playing field) and demands an ongoing movement in which “the believer continually lies out on the deep, [and] has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him” (444)

However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore.  He can become more calm, more experienced, find a confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament – but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water (444).

The stages from esthetic to ethical to religious are not linear and final once ‘accomplished’.  The movement is always towards the qualitatively dialectic which is not determined by external conditions.  And as dialectic one can never ‘rest’ in having arrived at the religious.  There is such an emphatic emphasis on ‘inwardness’ that it is hard to not criticize it.  This emphasis is only amped up in the climax of his ‘first authorship’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  I continue to read Kierkegaard at his word that there is indeed a spiritual or religious subjectivity.  This subjectivity is then lived actually and this is what must continually be emphasized in Kierkegaard’s writing, namely that the whole push is for philosophical and religious thought to take existence into account.

Well I am pretty much at the mid-way point and staying on track!

Closeted transcendence

Over at AUFS they have just concluded a book event engaging Adam Kotsko’s recent work Politics of Redemption.  Adam has just posted a response to the event and in it engaged one of the topics raised which is the highly debated but perhaps hardly debatable question of transcendence/immanence.  I thought the response was quite diplomatic without interest in any sensational jabs (the jabs were quite under-stated but still present . . . well fine perhaps ‘jab’ isn’t even the right word).  In any event I thought of commenting directly there but it would not have been in keeping with the event as a whole and since I am still waiting for a copy of the book I don’t have much to contribute.

I did, however, want to pick up on one line.  Adam writes,

Even at its best, though, I can’t see how one can argue for divine transcendence — it’s always going to be an argument from authority, because it’s fundamentally an argument in favor of authority.

Continue reading “Closeted transcendence” →

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.

Continue reading “Inwardness or Inwardism?” →

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.

Continue reading “The Concept of Anxiety” →

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)

I do not dance

I just finished Philosophical Fragments (PF).  I wanted to get a few observations down while they are fresh in my mind.

First, while I get Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship this is the first one where it makes real sense to me.  Either/Or is also blatantly clear but it strikes me as too much of an abstract experiment.   PF still comes as an experiment.  The experiment being whether it is possible to go beyond Socrates and what that might look like in philosophical discourse.  However, Kierkegaard comes off as more invested in this venture, more curious about how this will actually play out.

Second, it is important to note that these are fragments.  In his original manuscripts they were actually called ‘pamphlets’ which he also refers to them as within the book.  The significance of this is brought fully to bear in the final section.  Here he talks about the possibility of a ‘second pamphlet’.  He writes,

If I ever do write a second section – because a pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me – why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend to seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise?  In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. (109)

The ‘system’ of course is Hegelianism.  What I find intriguing about this passage is  the notion that perhaps the more ‘serious’, thoroughgoing, complete even social and political approach can actually end up being the most individualistic and self-serving.  This is partially a critique of academia as well as what could now be termed an ideological centralizing of power by ‘men who talk about important stuff’ as I have heard it put.  This final section really bookends well the intro to PF, which did not make a great deal of sense to me originally.  The preface begins,

What is offered here is only a pamphlet, by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense, without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy. (5).

Kierkegaard goes on in the Preface to consider what it might mean to have social (world-historical as he puts it) significance.  No one would consider a pamphlet to have such significance.  So what is Kierkegaard’s opinion on the matter?

Do not ask me about that.  Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is.  To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. (7)

There is a certain tone of liberation thought in the Preface and conclusion to PF (which hardly alludes to the book’s actual content in many ways!).  The critique is of those wielding socially constructed and maintained forms of power who believe that they can function as the benefactors of truth.  The framing of this book, which has just dawned on me, is making me rethink how I interpreted the bulk of the work.  Hopefully I can post a reading of PF that reflects its preface and conclusion.  Here are the final words of the preface.  I thought they were pretty.

I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life – not with another’s.  I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, ‘scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course’ (Cratylus).  All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears.  Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.  Every human being is too heavy for me, and there I plead per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance. (9).

Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Well I just caught up with my (rough) Kierkegaard reading schedule having finished Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Both were re-reads and I found Repetition a much more illuminating re-read.  I think Fear and Trembling has had so much press that despite how arresting it can be it may need another form in order to achieve ‘repetition’ which leads me to Repetition.

Continue reading “Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition” →