"Who do you say that I am?"
Kierkegaard had a difficult life and has been described as unbalanced or even insane, yet some of the craziest things he says are quotations and expansions of the New Testament. Reading Matthew 6:24, or Mark 8:27-38, or Luke 6:20-30, or John 1:1-5, or I Corinthians 1:18-2:5, we find "good news" from a God that seems determined to upset our applecarts, a God who might be accused of theological, cultural, social, economic, and religious insanity--in short, we find the incarnate-eternal impossibility of Jesus Christ, the God Kierkegaard insists on calling the God-man. How do we face that kind of radical incarnation? What does it mean for you to follow a God like that? What is so offensive about a God on a cross, a god who brings human limbs into the heart of the divine trinity? Are we really finding such a God in our churches, or are we becoming the sort of "Christendom" that only plays at being Christian? These are hard questions Kierkegaard poses. How can we answer them in and with our lives today?
Suggested Readings in Kierkegaard:
Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations, Charles E. Moore, ed. (New York: Orbis, 2003)
45. The Offense (171-172)
52. How God Relates Inversely (187-89)
61. Christ (222-24)
62. Christendom and Counterfeit Christianity (226-35)
63. The Cross (236-238)
Recommended Fiction and Poetry:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamasov
Dante, The Divine Commedy, first and final eight stanzas.
Suggested Readings in Kierkegaard:
Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations, Charles E. Moore, ed. (New York: Orbis, 2003)
45. The Offense (171-172)
52. How God Relates Inversely (187-89)
61. Christ (222-24)
62. Christendom and Counterfeit Christianity (226-35)
63. The Cross (236-238)
Recommended Fiction and Poetry:
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamasov
Dante, The Divine Commedy, first and final eight stanzas.
posted by Living the Leap at 1:31 PM
3 Comments:
Here are some thoughts I've had while reading and discussing Kierkegaard during the LEAP so far. Thank you to Sam and all of the participants for a great week. Next week I hope to make it to more sessions.
I'm not sure why I wrote all of this, but it was very helpful to me in defining and clarifying some of my own beliefs and ways of thinking about the stuff we’ve been considering.
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The Role of the Prophet
As I read more of Kierkegaard (and what I have read is very little), I am more and more inclined to agree with W.H. Auden's assessment of him: that he more a preacher than a philosopher. (Thank you Sam for sharing this.) Given Kierkegaard's own low opinion of most preachers (or at least the Church, though one must be aware that the two are separable), I guess I could think of Kierkegaard instead as a prophet.
The word "prophet" has a number of associations to me. I think of:
- the prophets of the old testament, of Israel. Voices like Isaiah, who proclaimed truth to the people of his nation.
- prophetic voices of our own age, like Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop Oscar Romero, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi, who all served and/or serve as vessels of truth to their people.
- the shamans and holy people of the primitive cultures of the world, and of our own forbearers, who served their peoples as conduits between our world and another world of external truth and spirit. Between natural agency (God/Great Spirit/Nature) and human agency (hunter/gatherer/planter/society.)
Thinking of Kierkegaard as a prophet helps me read him with more sympathy and peace than I otherwise might. He can be quite threatening (this is kind of what we've been talking about during our sessions!) He can also be stark, intensely provocative, and manipulative. I get the sense that he is sometimes writing not so that he as author and I as reader will come to a common understanding of what it is he is addressing, but rather so that his writings will provoke in me a particular sort of response.
Prophets are provocateurs. They demand action and reform from those around them. However, they are also scapegoats. Shamans/prophets were attacked and blamed when the tribe's harmonious relationship with the divine was compromised (when the crops failed, when the weather turned, when there was no food, when wars were lost.) At times like these, we ask "why did you, our spiritual compass, fail us?" "Why did not God hear us through you?"
Miracles
Miracles are irrelevant.
To me, the historical, physical reality of miracles -- including the reality of the physical resurrection of Christ -- are not central to the terror and power of the gospel. I see miracles as literary talismans used by the ancients to signify the presence of deeper mysteries -- the very core instinctual symbols of the human race. Physical miracles are like a crown and jewels on the head of a monarch. Without the adornment, the monarch is still the monarch. Without the monarch, the adornments become objects of wonder, but no more. The Bible overflows with miracles and the physically impossible. That is because to the ancient mind, there was nothing particularly surprising about a spiritually empowered individual performing miracles. After all, it was not only Christ that performed them. The Roman Catholic Church -- that ornate, hulking conservatory of all manner of vestigial western thought -- even today only admits as saints those who are proven miracle workers.
For those of us with a more contemporary consciousness, things are a bit harder. (Perhaps I should speak for myself here …) My choice is the following: I can either live in a state of spiritual denial, in the crystal cathedral of our eternally bejeweled monarch, or admit to myself and to everyone that there is nothing of which I can possibly conceive … no entity, person, or object of thought or discussion, that can violate the nature of time and space (ie- literally perform miracles.) There is no historical person who can die and become alive again.
Would Kierkegaard agree? "Woe to him that makes miracles reasonable". But I get the sense (and here I could be wrong of course), that to Kierkegaard, miracles are in fact to be accepted as historical, despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. They are not to be sanitized, nor tamed. Their acceptance by us is part of our choice to be Christian … their acceptance is part of our willingness to "offend" the world.
But what if the offense is not only to the world, but also to our own created natures? Whether we like it or not, the Monarch has been stripped of her finery. We are left with the underlying unspeakable metaphor, whose power remains despite the absence of the miraculous. In a way, this is a restoration, not a revolution. The ancient spirit was not violated by the idea of miracles -- they were utterly possible and even probable -- but not necessary. They were not the point. The apostle Thomas could perhaps be cited as a counterexample to this idea, although one wonders if he doubted the possibility or the actuality of Christ's central miracle? Not whether it could happen, but whether it did.
I don't have the luxury of this question. To borrow a way of speaking from Kierkegaard, am not even fit to be a doubting Thomas. Certain questions are no longer open to the contemporary mind.
Metaphor
In our session today, we briefly discussed the phrase "just a metaphor". As in, "that's JUST a metaphor." As if the truth value of a statement is changed because it is JUST a metaphor. What we mean when we say this is that metaphorical statements should not be evaluated for physical, actual, temporal truth, or they will all be found to be false. What we always seem to leave out is what sort of truth they might contain.
As Sam mentioned, a metaphor's truth is contained in the its surprise … in its internal DIS-similarity as well as its similarity. In the tension between similarity and difference. Also, in humor and outrage.
To the extent that God is real and present to me, God is present through metaphor.
The ancient mind may have been better at comprehending metaphor than the contemporary mind. Maybe this was an unspoken skill in the era of prophets. How else can we explain our inability to move beyond simple belief to a wholeness of truth?
Why do we either ignore prophets or murder them as outrages?
It is because we are unable to hear the metaphors they speak and we misconstrue all that they say as claims of fact. We violate our own minds and hearts with what is impossible to believe. We misunderstand the idea of "belief" itself. Is not the believable identical to the explainable? Tell me something that I can possibly believe in a rational way that some potential person could not explain to me.
Is it not possible to believe anything that is not subject to explanation.
The ancients knew how to listen to prophecy. We do not. Prophets speak in metaphors, which by definition contain nonsense. Prophets are not to be believed, they are to be heeded.
The Resurrection
We have come into an age of consciousness as a people when the metaphorical resurrection is obscured in our hearts by the attempt to integrate a physical resurrection. There is no such thing as justified belief in the resurrection of Christ. There is only the resurrection of Christ itself -- it is to be proclaimed and acted upon, not believed. It is what it is of itself. It is not a historical proposition.
Regarding the resurrection, there is only knowing, doing and proclaiming.
In the same way, a good metaphor is most powerful on its own terms. It is weakened rather than aided by any additional explanation.
I face the problem of having been raised to think I’m supposed to play at being a Christian. Now I am a man, I unfortunately have not always given up childish things—I still play the game. It’s a drama where even the confession can become a mantra lozenge. Luckily, this playacting sometimes creates a painful contradiction with sincere spiritual feelings I have and the tension throws me into the arms of a living God who laterals me to his incarnate son. The closer I stay to this living Jesus—the ultimate reality check—the healthier my insanity is. Maybe in the society of the world, Christians have to choose between an unhealthy “sanity” and a healthy insanity. Maybe that’s a bit of what this leap is about. And though it’ might seem insane to choose to land on your knees at the altar, that’s the only time I really know where I am—in a real true for me–God for me moment.
Annonymous... whoever you are... Amen. I agree. I agree. I don't want to play at Christianity. I have in the past and it works for such a short time, if at all. I want to reflect this Jesus, this impossibility, this offensive
being, this man whose innocent life caused such scandal. It doesn't always figure out in my understanding, but I always want it, I always hope to have more of it. Yet how do I get it? When does that become reality and not some vague thing described by Christians, though well intentioned, that I never fit? When I stop. When I'm kneeling. When I am in scripture. Then I'm sane, then motion begins again! Praise God.
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