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Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard

Last updated on: August 16, 2016 at 9:26 am by Frank Viola

Kierkegaard 2016-08-16T09:26:01-04:00 Frank Viola

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Stephen Backhouse has come out with a new biography on the great Christian philosopher Kierkegaard.

I recently caught up with Stephen to discuss the new book, Kierkegaard: A Single Life.

Enjoy!

Kierkegaard: A Single Life by [Backhouse, Stephen]

Instead of asking, “what is your book about,” I’m going to ask the question that’s behind that question. And that unspoken question is, “how are readers going to benefit from reading your book?”

Stephen Backhouse: Readers will get an accessible life story of a famously inaccessible man. They will get to meet the life and loves of the 19th century Dane Søren Kierkegaard and in so doing will meet a thinker and rabble-rouser who has somehow managed to have his name connected to some of the most profoundly positively Christian movements of our present age, as well as some of the most corrosive elements of Christian culture.

You know you are great – or at least singular – when you end up setting the agenda for both sides of an argument! Finally, apart from simply helping people to know the man and his thought, I hope that in my way I am helping to contribute to Kierkegaard’s oft-stated aim, which was to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.”

What motivated you to write this book? Why did you feel a need for people to read about Kierkegaard’s life?

Stephen Backhouse: I teach at an Anglican theology college in London, England. My colleague, Lincoln Harvey, is a brilliant theologian, teacher and priest. One day he asked me for a biography of Kierkegaard that he could take on holiday with him. I gave him what I had on the shelf (a book published in the 1940s). When he got back Lincoln confessed that he didn’t even get through the first chapter.

The Kierkegaard he met seemed distant and boring to him. I knew that if a follower of people like Karl Barth and Robert Jensen and a priest in the established Church of England thought that Kierkegaard was irrelevant then I needed to do something about it. That was the spur for the book. It is written for people like Lincoln who have heard the name “Kierkegaard” but have never known of a good way to be introduced to his life and work.

As for “need” – I do not know if anyone ever “needs” a book – but it just so happens that Kierkegaard put a lot of thought into how things like mass media, popular movements, patriotism and Christianised culture perversely affect the imagination of people who call themselves “Christian.” It seems self-evident to me that, if anything, these concerns have not abated over the years and are more relevant than ever. If Kierkegaard can help a reader navigate modern life and come to authentic Christianity in the midst of idiotic, noisy, trumpeting Christendom, then all the better.

Tell us a bit about the experiences that shaped the insights in the book.

Stephen Backhouse: I’m originally from Canada and moved to the United Kingdom about 20 years ago for an adventure. The process of relocation had me start to think a lot about the role my “home” context played in the formation of my Christian faith. I came from what I suppose is a fairly typical, conservative evangelical culture. My move to another country opened my eyes to the fact that Western North Americans not only did not invent Christianity, they do not even have a monopoly on it. Shocking I know!

Basically, I had to learn that Christianity is a lot bigger, weirder, and better than any one christianised cultural expression of it. Part of this process included discovering Kierkegaard when I was working in a bookshop in England. I read his “Fear and Trembling,” which is all about how faith might invariably put one outside the bounds of normal common sense. Not only intellectually but also morally.

It’s a brilliant book – very dark and intense but also funny and personal. Kierkegaard was wrestling with his own sense of vocation as a singular Christian author at the time, and he put a lot of his own sadness and frustration about his broken engagement (and the respectable life that this entailed) into the text. As a result of “Fear and Trembling” I changed the subject I was going to study at university and read philosophy and theology instead. I took Kierkegaard options whenever I could, and eventually wrote my MA thesis and then a doctorate on him.

List 3 things that impress you the most about Kierkegaard’s life.

Stephen Backhouse: (1) Dedication. The guy was convinced of his divine calling to be an author, and he was monstrously prolific. Over a writing career of about fourteen years, he wrote and published thousands of pages of text. Books, journals, letters, newspaper articles, pamphlets, sermons, you name it. And all while still being a human being with a life, which leads me to:

(2) Humanity. Kierkegaard has a reputation for being dark, gloomy and angry. And he was. Sometimes. But he is also funny, melancholy, romantic, worshipful, joyful, wise, silly, self-reflective, sarcastic and pastoral. All of human life can be found in his pages, and he was interested in the rich inner life of every individual. Simply put, Kierkegaard liked people. A lot of his sharpest polemics (against the Church, against popular mass media, against the christianised herd) were done precisely on behalf of the common man. He thought individual persons were robbed of their ability to meet Christ, and thus robbed of their personhood, by self-serving, cultural institutions that inevitably accrue over time.

(3) Regine. When he was twenty-seven, Kierkegaard became engaged to a lovely young woman named Regine Olsen. She was smart and sensitive and seemed a good match for Søren, and he for her. Eventually Søren convinced himself that his serious, polemical life would be a sort of curse on Regine, so he engineered a break-up that would bring shame on himself rather than on her. He deliberately made himself out to be a rake who no longer loved her, hoping that she would be so angry at him that the breach would be her idea. Sadly, the scheme never worked; as we know from her memoirs that Regine never stopped admiring and loving Søren, even while she gave him his freedom. Of all the people in his life’s story, she comes out as the most mature, and most appealing. So one of the things that most impressed me while researching Kierkegaard’s life was his girlfriend!

How can Christians living in the 21st century who aren’t academics or intellectuals be helped by Kierkegaard?

Stephen Backhouse: Kierkegaard cared about you. He wrote all his books for the person he called “the Single Individual.” Anyone who engages with his ideas can be this person. Indeed, academics and intellectuals as a generic class were decidedly NOT who he was writing for. He thought that they were part of the problem – coming up with lots of background noise that helps to cloud the issue rather than make it clearer. The issue being: Jesus says follow me and I will give you rest. What do you think about that?

That being said, Kierkegaard is not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination. He thought all the flotsam and jetsam of Christendom had confused the issue of becoming a Christian. In the day and age where Christianity is effectively synonymous with participation in a nation, popular sub-culture, traditional values or certain habitual patterns, then “becoming a Christian” is as easy as being born. Kierkegaard deliberately sought to make Christianity harder. At one point he tells his readers that he is not a waiter, offering “Christianity” on a silver platter. His life was intentionally construed in such a way as to deflect anyone from seeing Kierkegaard himself as a paragon of Christianity. His writing is meant to make you wrestle with the ideas and decide for yourself, rather than swallow his system whole.

If you read Kierkegaardian books like “The Present Age” (arguably his most influential book), you’ll be helped to recognize the pernicious effect of chatter, common sense and the herd on authentic personhood, but face it with hope and courage. If you read “Practice in Christianity” (a favorite of Bonhoeffer) or “For Self-Examination” (my personal favorite) you will be helped to clear the cobwebs of Christendom from the exciting and true (and therefore potentially offensive) person of Jesus Christ.

If Kierkegaard were living today, what contributions would he make to the issues that face our world?

Stephen Backhouse: Kierkegaard was very playful when it came to using different voices and pseudonyms so I know he would be fascinated by the kind of communication we do on the internet and sites like Twitter. He was no stranger to mass media (he was persecuted and caricatured by a popular newspaper), and he called out the bloviating commentators of his day for their mindless chatter.

I’d love to see him take a pop at the shallow spectacle that passes for “news” today. Kierkegaard was also at the forefront of critiquing the idea of a ‘Christian nation,’ but he did so for deeply Christian reasons. In our present age where politicians and public opinion gurus find it incredibly easy to push Christian buttons on these issues, I’d love to have someone as Christ-centered, dogged and articulate as Kierkegaard on the case. He would not be so easily hoodwinked as a lot of our people and their leaders are about what Christianity actually is and entails!

What do you hope readers will walk away with after they finish your book?

Stephen Backhouse: I hope they will like the guy and find him interesting. I hope they will read some of his books (I suggest starting with ‘For Self-Examination’). I hope they will become followers of Jesus, or, if they decide not to, at least know who it is they are rejecting.

Order Kierkegaard: A Single Life on discount.

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