Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Religious Music & Entertainment
A Man For Other Seasons

A Man For Other Seasons

Last updated on: September 22, 2017 at 1:50 pm by Coyle Neal

A Man For Other Seasons 2017-09-22T13:50:45-06:00 Coyle Neal

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I’ve had the pleasure over the past few months of reading two books on Soren Kierkegaard: Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard, A Single Life and Mark Tietjen’s Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians.* Both of these books are well-written, informative, and very much worth your time.

Image Source: Zondervan

Backhouse’s A Single Life is primarily about Kierkegaard’s life and writings. He provides both an engaging biography that is just a delight to read and a useful survey of each of Kierkegaard’s publications. His blending of Kierkegaard’s authorial life with his personal life shows us how the two shaped and fed off of each other. We can also see that the key actions of his life are not necessarily commendable (Kierkegaard’s treatment of his fiancée is particularly despicable), however closely they’re tied to his thought.

Image Source: IVP

Tietjen’s A Christian Missionary to Christians is primarily about Kierkegaard’s ideas, and is presented in a roughly systematic way. He begins with a chapter surveying Kierkegaard’s reception through the years by Christians, scholars, and Christian scholars. The next four chapters discuss Kierkegaard’s view of Christ, man, Christian witness, and the Christian life. Tietjen ends with a brief summary of Kierkegaard’s basic ideas and explanation of why they matter for us today.

In both of these books, we see that Kierkegaard’s primary concern is the reestablishment of authentic Christianity as the personal encounter with God through the life and death of Christ over and against the moribund state-sponsored religious formalism of his own time. Kierkegaard is writing for Christians and calling for the revival of the spiritual life and experience of the individual. He wants us to have a deeply-felt relationship with God that is based on a true experience of Divinity, rather than relying on a cultural and traditional association with a institutional church governed by a system of cold orthodoxy. Though not all of his later fans and fellow-travelers would agree, Kierkegaard himself is insistent that this experience/spiritual life comes only through Christ. For all his anti-clerical polemics (and given the things that I’m going to disagree with below), it is important to remember that Kierkegaard himself holds to an orthodox soteriology.

What’s more, in his own time philosophy (and to a lesser extent the popular culture) had come to be dominated by the thought of Hegel. We don’t need to go into what all that entailed here, just know that the followers of Hegel far more often imitated his method of subjecting all things to careful rationalistic and systematic process than they did his concern for getting at the truth. (Though I’m no Hegellian—I do believe he should be challenged for his own beliefs and methods, rather than for the use to which those methods were put by those who followed him.) In response to the spread of cold formalism, Kierkegaard called for a return to the internal experience of the authentic spiritual life. Rather than walking us through fifteen intellectual defenses of the existence of God and the truth of Scripture, Kierkegaard appeals to the basic internal experience of communion with God through work and person of Christ as expressed in Scripture. Backhouse and Tietjen do an excellent job of explaining how Kierkegaard’s ideas developed in response to the culture of his day and how they might apply to our own time.

With all that said, and despite the fact that both of these both of these books are excellent, I’m still not convinced that Kierkegaard is the man for our moment. We see something of why this is the case in his interactions with Bishop Mynster. Kierkegaard repeatedly and publicly demanded that Mynster admit that he has misled the Danish people and failed to teach true Christianity—that Mynster has not been “a witness to the truth.” (A Single Life, 169) Instead of preaching the true Gospel, Mynster has merely worked to uphold Christendom:

“Christendom is what happens when people presume they are Christians as a matter of inherited tradition, as a matter of nationality, or because they agree with a number of common-sense propositions and Christianized moral guidelines. Kierkegaard sees Christendom as a process by which groups adopt, absorb, and neuter Christianity into oblivion, all the while assuming they are still Christian.” (A Single Life, 172)

And I think, based on reading these two books, Kierkegaard was probably right. I’m no scholar of Danish church history, but it does sound like the church in Denmark had fallen on hard times and devolved into a shallow formalism that carried no substance. It apparently required little from its adherents and was more concerned with keeping its own power than with holding up the good news of a crucified Savior before a hostile world.

And yet, that’s not the same thing as saying that our particular moment needs to hear what Kierkegaard has to say. It’s true that at times Christianity has become too cold and formalized. We have on occasion been more interested in ritual and formality than with a vibrant spiritual life. Yet that is not the temptation of early 21st century Evangelicals. If anything, our problem is an excess of Kierkegaardian thought and attitudes. We’re not stuck in a rut of tradition and formality, we’re stuck in an obsession with authentic expression seeking pure close relationships. Consequently we don’t need more or better Kierkegaard, just as we don’t need more Christians authentically expressing the deepest desires of their soul. What we need are people who, instead of being in love with themselves and gazing at their own navels, are in love with God and His church and express that love by participating in its life. That means at the very least joining a faithful local church, but it also means more. It means being concerned with church polity, with structure and order in the service and in the congregation, and with orderly worship in general. Today we don’t need more Christians ‘being real’, we need more Christians being holy in the church before the world. Maybe another way to say this is that Kierkegaard has done his work for now and that what we need is a good systematizer.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t read Backhouse’s or Tietjen’s books—both are excellent and you certainly should read them. I’m not even saying that you shouldn’t read Soren Kierkegaard. I am saying that the lessons you take from Kierkegaard aren’t as relevant now as they were in, say, the 1970s or 80s. If you want to read someone from the 19th century who does speak to the needs of our time, let me recommend five theologians from different backgrounds who deal with different areas of Christian life (but all of whom are more relevant to Evangelicals in the early 21st century):

Charles Hodge (Presbyterian)
C.F.W. Walther (Lutheran)
John L. Dagg (Baptist)
J.C. Ryle (Anglican)
Abraham Kuyper (Reformed)

No doubt someday the wheel will again turn and we’ll need to dust off the message Kierkegaard has for the church. We’re just not there yet.

*Technically I might even have read three books, if you count my slow plodding through David Walsh’s The Modern Philosophical Revolution, which includes a lengthy chapter on Kierkegaard.

Dr. Coyle Neal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, and co-host of the City of Man Podcast.

Previous Post

June 8, 2017

The Reformation for Dummies

Next Post

September 26, 2017 Two more reasons to read Stephen King

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Action AFI Top 100 Animation Best Picture Winner BFI Top 250 Biography Biopic Books Childrens Christian Classics Classics Comedy Crime Documentary Drama Editor's Choice Family Fantasy Fantasy Films Foreign Historical Historical Fiction History Horror Horror IMDB Top 250 Indie Memoir Modern Novel Musical Mystery Non-Fiction Oscars Philosophy Poetry Popular Literature Reading and Writing Reality Romance Science Fiction Science Fiction Silent Sports Thriller TV Show Uncategorized Western Westerns Young Adult

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 June 2017 January 2017 December 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

How many clean animal pairs were in Noah's Ark?

Select your answer to see how you score.

3 5 7 6