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An Undeceptions Podcast. Some time later, God tested Abraham. He said to him, Abraham, here I am, he replied. Then God said, take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.
Early the next morning, Abraham got up and he loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, "Stay here with the donkey, while I and the boy go over there
"We will worship and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife as the two of them went on together. Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. "The fire and the wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham answered,
God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, Abraham, Abraham!
"Here I am," he replied. "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." That's a reading from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It's chapter 22. It's the famous story of Abraham, known to many Christians as the father of the faith.
He's the guy whom God promised would be the father of many nations. In the story, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Now, the story does end with God telling Abraham not to go through with it. Isaac doesn't die at his father's hand. But atheist Richard Dawkins has a point when he writes in the famous God Delusion,
A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. This disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense. I was only obeying orders. What kind of morals could one derive from this appalling story?
What kind of God tricks one of his followers into thinking he has to kill his own son? Now, there are some historical and textual matters Dawkins isn't aware of, and I'm going to highlight those later. But I'm sure many of us can see where Dawkins is coming from. What kind of religion says you should do something that is plainly immoral just because you believe God says so?
Reason tells us this is barbarous. Only blind faith could view it otherwise. Well, the star of today's episode raises a question mark over this particular criticism. I'm talking about the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard, which is bad Aussie pronunciation of Soren Kierkegaard.
He's been dead for 167 years, but we have some world-class Kierkegaard experts to talk us through the great man's account of so-called blind faith. In an influential book, Kierkegaard argued that Abraham's trust in God as he goes to sacrifice his son is a key to understanding the paradox at the heart of the Christian faith.
Reason might lead us toward God, but an actual encounter with the true God could not, almost by definition, could not be accounted for by human reason.
Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son because he wholeheartedly trusted that God would keep a prior promise. Several chapters before this frightening scene, God had said to Abraham that his son Isaac would be the heir through whom Abraham would become father of many nations. So Isaac had to live somehow.
No matter what Abraham's thinking, my son isn't going to be dead at the end of this. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. The whole thing pushes the bounds of human reason. And for Kierkegaard, that is the point.
Kirkygore said Abraham took a leap of faith. Well, that's the popularization of what he said. He actually said Abraham took a dancer's leap, the kind of leap that's part of something larger, choreographed, something beautiful.
But this is the source of the phrase we use today, a leap of faith. We often take it to mean something like blind faith. That's faith without reason. But as we'll come to see in this episode, Soren Kierkegaard argued that faith sits above reason, outside the human standards of rationality. Faith is not reducible to rational deduction.
All of which made me wonder, in fact, I ended up asking my guests this, would Soren Kierkegaard disapprove of the whole Undeceptions project? Our team spends days and often nights thinking and arguing about the beautiful coherence of Christianity. Is that misguided? Will our investigation of Soren Kierkegaard put an end to our humble podcast?
I'm John Dixon and this is the end of Undeceptions.
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that
that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. For those who have never heard of The Great Man...
Can you describe Soren Kierkegaard, and you can correct my pronunciation if you like, in a few sentences? And why should anyone care about him? Yeah, well, Soren Kierkegaard was a philosopher and theologian and literary writer and social critic and early psychologist, all of these things, who lived in 19th century Denmark.
and who, among many other things, was deeply concerned about the challenge of what he said, what he called becoming a Christian in Christendom. That's Dr. Amber Bowen, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Core Studies at Radema University in Canada. She's currently a visiting scholar at the Kirkegore Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen.
where she's writing a book on the great man himself. Now, if the idea of a whole Undeceptions episode on Kierkegaard sounds daunting to you, because, like, he's got a reputation of being kind of tricky to grasp, don't worry. We're in safe hands. Amber is an expert at communicating why Kierkegaard's philosophy isn't just a bunch of fancy ideas, but helpful for our day-to-day lives.
perhaps especially if you're not yet a believer. And our second guest, whom we'll meet in a moment, is widely regarded as one of the foremost Kierkegaard scholars of the last 50 years. And by Christendom, what he means is a place where Christianity is just the cultural norm, a kind of nominalism. And it's really a context in which the so-called Christian faith is established
something that offered comfort and success and position in society. So it's far more convenient for you to be a Christian or claim to be a Christian than to not actually. And he thought that that actually was detrimental to Christianity. And the reason why I think he's so important today is because we can recognize variations of this context today in everything from
politicians who use Christianity as maybe a means of attaining political power, to leaders in the church who weaponize doctrine in order to reinforce their own positions of power or cover their impropriety maybe or secure their paycheck. We also see this in believers who maybe think that the Christian life is
tantamount to following the do's and the don'ts of the subculture, of the Christian subculture. So being up on all the trends, being associated with all the right people, reading all the right books, speaking all of the right lingo, you know, being fluent in this kind of Christianese that sounds very eloquent and pious, but underneath nobody really knows what it means. It's quite empty.
So yeah, he's a figure who in his day called out identity politics and virtue signalling as being dishonest and making a mockery of God and not actually being authentic Christian witness. Issues with identity politics and virtue signalling? It seems not much has changed since the 19th century.
Kirkegaard's Denmark was steeped in cultural Christianity, with most people attending the state-run Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, or the Folkekerken, the People's Church, or the National Church. And that church is still massively influential. According to data collected in January 2023, 72.1% of the Danish population are recorded as official members, almost three-quarters of the population.
Members don't just tick a box on the census. All members pay a church tax for the upkeep of cathedrals, church ceremonies, and so on. There is an actual cost of saying you're a member of the Danish National Church. The Danish government even has a minister or secretary for the church, just like there's a minister for education and so on.
That said, a mere 2.4% of national church members actually attend church on a weekly basis. All that to say, cultural Christianity is a big thing in Denmark today. It was even bigger in the 1800s, and Kierkegaard was not a fan. Can you tell me something about his upbringing and education? What prepared him for this extraordinary perspective?
Well, he was born in Copenhagen in 1813, and he lived during the Danish Golden Age. So it's a very rich part of their cultural history. And he was contemporaries of people like Hans Christian Andersen, as well as many other famous artists and poets and scientists. And it was a highly prosperous time economically. And he grew up in a home of seven children. He was the youngest. And his father was profoundly religious.
And he was raised Lutheran, which was the Danish state church. And he was a very sharp and witty and provocative child, but he also had a large degree of trauma in his upbringing with the religious harshness of his father, a lot of bullying at school, and also the death of five of his siblings, as well as his mother.
But he had a very strong educational background. He learned Latin and Greek as a young boy and was really interested in classics. The good old days. Yes. We don't do that anymore, right? But he attended the University of Copenhagen, where he studied philosophy and theology, and he wrote a dissertation on Socratic irony. So he
Socrates, by the way, was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5th century BC. He was massively influential. The teacher of Plato, who was in turn the teacher of Aristotle, and so on.
Irony was one of Socrates' teaching methods. It's where he pretended to be ignorant and asked his students questions. With each answer, he would ask another question, as if he himself was trying to learn, but the goal of the whole thing was to lead the student to see the error of their ways.
It's a bit like parents asking their teenagers about what they got up to on the weekend while they were away. Mum and dad know they had a big party, but they designed their questions to slowly draw out the truth. Anyway, Socrates was the master of that, and Kierkegaard specialised in it and was influenced by it. What was the philosophical environment at the time where he was beginning his work?
It was a fascinating environment, a very rich intellectual context with lots of academic publications and cultural life. The philosopher Hegel was all the rage. Hegel had highly influenced. Give me the 22nd Hegel. Oh my goodness. Well, Hegel was a German idealist philosopher who was very interested in understanding the
the world from this systemized perspective where history could be understood in different processes of development and all ordered under reason. And so it was a highly rationalistic kind of philosophy. And Hegelian thought believed that it had included and perfected Christianity internal to it. So it was one of those instances where
It's like Hegel looked at Christianity and said, let me make it better and give it an upgrade. And that was something that Kierkegaard was very, very concerned about. But it had very much influenced not just philosophy, but also theology and theology.
began to have some profound impacts on the way that people thought about what Christian living looks like as well. Yeah, so it's a very rationalist environment. You know, this is sort of the height of the Enlightenment, or these are the heirs of the Enlightenment, and they're pushing that as far as they can. How did Kierkegaard respond?
The Enlightenment was that intellectual and philosophical movement that swept across Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries. It was known as the Age of Reason, emphasising individual liberty and science over tradition and superstition, i.e. religion.
Georg Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and contemporary of Kierkegaard in the early 19th century. For Hegel, reason was the underlying force which shaped all of human history. Kierkegaard's response was nub. How did Kierkegaard respond to this environment? What was his intellectual project in that environment? Well, he was very much a critic. He saw himself as
on the margins looking in, this critical reflection
a little bit, especially at the end of his authorship, almost like a lonely prophet. But he was very critical of a lot of things in his era and in his context, not least the critique of religion, which we'll talk about in a moment. But he was very concerned about how Christianity was being lived out in his context. He also, he was very interested in looking deeply into the human condition, right?
And he was one of the very first to talk about anxiety and despair. And when I say anxiety, I don't mean clinical anxiety like we talk about it today. I mean more of an existential anxiety. And not to say that the two are disconnected because I don't think that they are, but they're not the exact same. But this was very different because normally what was in vogue was more of a positive romantic view of what it meant to be humanized.
And here he comes on the scene talking about the anguishes of what it actually feels like to live this human life in a fallen world. Anxiety is a qualification of the dreaming spirit. And as such, it has a place in psychology. Awake. The difference between myself and my other is posited. Sleeping. It is suspended. Dreaming. It is an intimated nothing.
The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility, but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it. And it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. Anxiety is altogether different from fear, and similar concepts that refer to something definite.
whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 1844. But he anticipates modern psychology in so many respects and has just a very acute awareness of the human condition.
and knows how to call out self-deception and all the layers and intricacies of what it means to be a human. And I mean, I find that Kierkegaard knows how to call out not just our self-deception, but our self-deceptions about our own self-deceptions. Every time I read him, I think, oh my gosh, he got me. And then, wow, he got me again, you know? Well, that's my 11 o'clock kickoff.
my cue to interview Professor Niels-Jorn Capelon about Søren Kierkegaard. I just learned you don't say Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard. He's at the Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. And he lives in this street just off the main square of
the town of downtown Copenhagen. And apparently he lives very near where Kierkegaard himself lived. So that'll be fun to learn a little more. Well, Niels-Jan, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. And for having me into your home.
That's gorgeous. And your library. Yes. You live amongst your books. Yes, I do. I do. Yeah. There are about 5,000 of them. Is that right? Yes. So I can see one, two, three rooms of books. Is there a fourth and a fifth room? Yeah. And this room in there is a reconstruction of Kirchhoff's library. Really? It's not the exact... That's our next guest, the brilliant Niels Jorgen Kappeler.
a theologian philosopher, Kierkegaard scholar, and the former director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. Niels was kind enough to welcome me into his home when I visited beautiful Copenhagen. He also showed me his astonishing home library, part of which is a perfect replica, books and all, of Kierkegaard's own library. Meeting Niels felt a bit like meeting Kierkegaard himself.
He lives a block from where Kierkegaard lived. He goes to the same church that Kierkegaard occasionally went to and preached at. And after our interview, Niels gave me a private tour of Kierkegaard's stomping ground. It was wonderful. A quick note about our chat. Sometimes a friend of Niels assisted with the translation. What was Kierkegaard's intellectual project in this environment?
I think it was to see how can we get out of secularization. I think that's the real basic thing. Therefore he wrote all his book in another name than his own, in order to see if he could get
get in touch with people. He wrote those books and not in his own name because it was not his own understanding. It was different ways of talking about philosophy, talking about ethics, talking about Christianity and so on, but it was not what he himself meant. So that was also a way of getting in touch with people.
Kierkegaard's first book, Either Or, was published in 1843 under the pseudonym Victor Ermita, which means victorious hermit. He must have had great fun sitting around thinking of these. In it, he outlined his theory of human existence, distinguishing between a consumerist, hedonistic way of living, the aesthetic, he called it, and a more empathetic, serviceable approach to the world, what he called the ethical. The
These were two of Kierkegaard's three possible stages that a person could move through in their lifetime. The third was the religious. And according to Kierkegaard, the highest state of human existence was the religious existence. But it
But it was in another of his works, Fear and Trembling, released just a few months after Either Or, that Kierkegaard really got stuck into Danish Christendom. He would continue this attack for the next decade. Let's talk about that very fun subject of the church and the state church. Can you tell me first, what does it mean today?
for there to be a state church. Tell us about the situation in Denmark and what it meant to have a state church. A lot of my listeners are Aussies. There's no state church. And Americans, there's no state church. What did it mean? And then let's talk about his critique of the state church.
Well, in Denmark, the state church was the Lutheran Church. And what that meant was that it was a state-sponsored church. So the pastors and other leaders in the church were government employees. It exists even today at the University of Copenhagen, where I currently am researching the theology faculty. They're all state employees. So...
What it meant practically was that to be Danish just meant to be Lutheran. Something maybe kind of similar to when we say to be Italian just is to be Catholic. There's a collapsing of those two categories. And so...
Kierkegaard has this really funny line in one of his pieces where he talks about having a birth certificate and a baptism certificate being basically the exact same thing. And so what it meant was you had the North American version of it would be like a God and country kind of conflation. And this idea that Christianity ultimately is a kind of cultural heritage or really just reducible to a cultural heritage. Yeah.
Okay, so he wasn't a huge fan of that. What was his critique specifically? Well, he thought that making Christianity something cultural actually destroyed Christianity. And he thought that Christendom, this beautiful, happy Christian world that existed in Denmark, was actually an illusion of Christianity. And he used this term illusion, really anticipating the masters of suspicion, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx calling out Christianity.
fraudulent faith and deceptive devotion and this living a life of illusion. Like you think that you are a Christian, but really that's just a big illusion. And he was very concerned that the individual had gotten lost in the cultural Christian masses. And
When we read Kierkegaard today and we see him talk about the single individual, a lot of people think that he is advocating for a hyper individualism, but that's actually not the case at all. If you look at his historical context, he was worried about
getting lost in the crowd and just following the masses and not recognizing that what Christianity means is ultimately to stand before God as yourself, as your created self, who's loved, who's created, who's called into existence by God and who comes to salvation, not by doing all the things that your culture wants you to do, but that comes to salvation through Christ specifically.
Yeah, so you're not a Christian by virtue of being part of a Christian culture. The reality of God, if God exists, bears down upon you as a person in a culture. Exactly. And you can't just hide in your culture and say that you've done what it takes to be a Christian. Ultimately, you have to stand before God.
The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains. No matter where you are, the admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe.
Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ. He renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires. Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
Part of Kierkegaard's criticism of cultural Christianity was that people weren't making decisions for themselves about the faith. To be Danish was to be Christian, but he argued that Christian faith is a personal relationship with a personal God. Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal.
that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal. Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence, and faith is then a temptation.
We don't relate to God as members of a country or culture or church. We relate to God individually. It's a personal encounter. Now, this emphasis in his thinking on an individual's personal encounter probably influenced later more atheistic thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, the mid-20th century existentialist. And some have actually dubbed Kierkegaard as the more religious father of existentialism.
Niels though isn't a big fan of that title. I've heard it said that Kierkegaard was an existentialist philosophically and the first existentialist. No he wasn't. He was definitely not an existentialist.
He is an existence thinker, but he's not an existentialist. Make that distinction for me. Because to be in existence thinking is that everything is about existence. But...
The existentialist is existence thinking without Christianity. So why did he get the reputation of being an existentialist? Because they learned it from him. I mean, think of the concept of anxiety, what role it played for the existentialists.
So they have it, they have the thinking from him, but they give it in their own way. They can talk about emptiness in life, but Kierkegaard could also talk about emptiness in life, but that was in order to get people to think of fullness. But that's not what the existentialists, they stopped there.
Was he sort of like the author of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament? You know the book of Ecclesiastes? Yes. Raising the questions without too many answers, but pointing toward. Kirchhoff gives never answers as Plato and Socrates, never. Always questions. Always, yeah, questions or explanations or speaking, trying to touch people with what he's saying.
Whether or not he was an existentialist, Kierkegaard's impact on philosophy and theology was substantial. The famed Austro-British academic Sir Karl Popper described Kierkegaard as "the great reformer of Christian ethics who exposed the official Christian morality of his day as anti-Christian and anti-humanitarian hypocrisy." It's no secret that Kierkegaard can be difficult to read.
And sometimes his many pseudonyms did him no favours in his attempts to be understood. Kierkegaard has often been cast as an irrationalist, an enemy of reason, logic, and perhaps even an enemy of truth.
Both Amber and Niels, and a building chorus of other scholars, reject this characterisation as a basic misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's project. So, after the break, we'll take Kierkegaard's famous dancer's leap. The leap of faith. Sort of.
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You know, you say you've been walking for 30 years, right? Right. Have you ever thought that maybe you were lost? No. Well, how do you know that you're walking in the right direction? You walk by faith, not by sight. What does that mean? It means that you know something even if you don't know something.
It doesn't make any sense. Doesn't have to make sense. It's faith. It's faith. It's the flower of life in the field of...
That's an excerpt from The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington. It's not the sort of film he's really going to be remembered for. A blind man wandering across a post-apocalyptic landscape with a post-apocalyptic posse in pursuit. He carries what appears to be the last copy of the King James Bible. And interestingly, this main character, Eli, is a Christian. And, quite unusual for our times, he's a good guy. He
He's violent, but he's still portrayed as a good guy nonetheless. Those lines are a good example of how we tend to think of a leap of faith, heading off somewhere new without a map, but we're sure we'll find the destination, or thinking we can jump across the Grand Canyon and make it to the other side.
For our friend Kirkegaw, accepting and trusting in the unknown was crucial for actually encountering God. But as we'll hear, that doesn't have to mean accepting without evidence. But evidence can only get you so far when it comes to faith. There comes a time, Kirkegaw argues, when evidence, reason and rationality have to take a backseat.
I want you to explain something to me that has long puzzled me about Kirky Gawne. He's a towering intellect, yes? He's read everything, he's a very astute thinker and critic. But he seems to have advocated what people call blind faith. Don't worry about rationalising the faith. Don't worry about arguing for the faith. Just believe. Just have faith. Is that true of him? Or have English speakers completely misunderstood him?
No. Again, it's very dialectic because it is true and not true. I don't think... This is Hegel, right? Yes, yes. I mean, Kierkegaard is always a dialectic thinker. And if you take the dialectic out of it, it's not Kierkegaard anymore. Yeah.
Dialectic just refers to the intellectual art of coming at ideas from different, sometimes contrary perspectives. You chip away at an idea from different angles and hopefully what's left is an approximation of the truth.
Yes, so I want to know how did he think of the relationship between faith and reason? Faith and reason, yes. I don't think Kirchhoff was afraid of rationalism because he knew what it was. But you cannot bring that into Christianity because you cannot understand Christianity rational. Is that because Christianity is irrational? No, because then you couldn't talk about it. But it is a paradox.
You cannot understand it in a rational way, but you can understand it in faith. But if there were an atheist sitting here in this blank seat here, he would say, "There you go. Christianity can't be understood rationally. We are a scientific age. We are a reasonable people. We shouldn't adopt Christianity because it is anti-intellectual." Yeah, but then I would say they are stupid.
Would Kierkegaard say that too? I think so. Because it's not what is in case here. Because there are so many things in life we can't understand rationally. Can you understand the nature rationally?
Can you understand what is going on when you're going in the nature and you see the sun and the wonderful? Can you explain everything there? No. You can explain it in rationality, but there is another layer in yourself which you cannot explain. And you cannot explain God rationally, but you can explain Him in faith.
Oh, I absolutely love this conversation because I think he has a lot to offer. It's actually, there is a caricature of Kierkegaard out there that he was this irrationalist and that he believed in this belief
blind leap of faith that if you have reasons for it, it's not faith. There are atheist memes that pull quotes from Kierkegaard. Which is hilarious. But yes, he never actually says blind faith. And he does say a leap of faith. But what he means is not the concept that we have is
put a blindfold over your eyes and jump over the chasm into the Grand Canyon and, you know, hope for the best kind of thing. Especially if there's no evidence. Especially if there's no evidence. In fact, it doesn't count if there is evidence, right? That's the idea of blind leap of faith. And that's not at all what he means. So for Kierkegaard, faith is not evidence.
is reducible to content that I believe or intellectually assent to. So I can agree with the creeds, for example, but that doesn't mean that I have faith. And this was important for him because, again, in his context, he has people who recite the creeds beautifully, but he's not seeing a living, breathing, dynamic faith. So for Kierkegaard, faith is actually more like trust.
That's actually probably a better definition of it. And trust is not simply cognitive or it's not reducible to cognition. But trust ultimately is this act of giving myself fully over to something that maybe I don't completely understand, but nonetheless that I find so compelling that it is worth everything.
So he falls in the tradition of faith-seeking understanding. He's very Augustinian in this way. And I think
Augustine, one of the patron saints of Undeceptions, promoted this idea of faith-seeking understanding. As he famously preached in what we call Sermon 272, quoting Isaiah, "...as the prophet says, unless you believe, you will not understand. So you can say to me, you urged us to believe, now explain so we can understand."
In other words, while Augustine constantly used reason and thought reason could lead you to certain convictions about God, his existence, his power, and so on, Augustine was adamant that true understanding of God could only follow after faith. You had to entrust yourself to God to really move forward in understanding him. In this sense, faith precedes true knowledge.
Then there's Anselm of Canterbury, who served as Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 11th century. He echoed this same idea. In his proslogion, which just means discourse, he writes, Neque enum queru intelligere ut credum, sed credo ut intelligum.
I love it when producer Kayleigh lets me read Latin. I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe. Rather, I believe in order that I may understand. My darling Buff has the Latin on a T-shirt. True story. Anyway, you can hear echoes of both Augustine and Anselm in Kirky Gore's writings. And I think that the best analogy for this is marriage.
And Kierkegaard and his authorship frequently uses marriage as an example of philosophical concepts. This is a very Kierkegaardian way of explaining it. But when you think about standing at the altar with somebody, pledging yourself to them, you have no idea what all you're giving yourself to. There is an unknown future and you are committing to walking into that unknown future with this other person.
You also, prior to the wedding, if you had tried to square off every...
question, every doubt, if you had tried to figure out exactly what the future was going to hold, how that person was going to change, know every single thing about them as a way of achieving some kind of security before you make this decision, you're never going to get married. That's just not how living people make decisions, whether you're deciding what college to attend or what person to marry. And
And so faith is not super weird in the way that he's understanding it. It's very much like the way that we just live our lives on an everyday level. Because it's not like there's no reason.
To get married. Oh, no. I mean, I'm sure. You go there with lots of reasons, just not the reasons that would sign, seal and deliver, you know, the future together. Exactly. It wasn't that you sat there and you stacked up all the propositions in favor and against and then you decided, OK, we've got a majority here. Let's do this thing. You know, that's just not how it works.
And so he wants to re-situate it in life. But when he does talk about a leap of faith, he actually refers to a qualitative leap. Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. Whether there are also many who do not discover it in our own age, I leave open.
I can only refer to my own experience, that of one who makes no secret of the fact that he has far to go, yet without therefore wishing to deceive either himself or what is great by reducing this latter to a triviality, to a children's disease which one must hope to get over as soon as possible. But life has tasks enough, even for one who fails to come as far as faith
And when he loves these honestly, life won't be a waste either, even if it can never compare with that of those who had a sense of the highest and grasped it. But anyone who comes to faith, whether he be greatly talented or simple-minded, makes no difference, won't remain at a standstill there. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
So it's not a quantitative leap and like, I'm going to clear the chasm of the Grand Canyon. It's a qualitative leap that is like that marriage example of marriage.
I am about to enter into a new existence. My life is going to change as I know it, and I am going to go for it. Not because I have settled all the matters from the outside before I do, but because I believe that this is worth it. And there's a very real sense that I'm not going to understand this thing until I'm in it.
I don't understand what marriage is from the outside in the same way that you understand what it is internal to it. And so that is faith-seeking understanding. Yeah, okay. So let's talk about this classic skeptical criticism of Christianity that its emphasis on faith as opposed to rational argument is the very problem.
Our good friend Richard Dawkins says that faith is a virus, but much harder to kill than a virus. How would Kierkegaard respond to that very common critique? Well, I think he would want to subvert the dichotomy between faith and reason that is presented in that very question. So what I mean by that is,
He loves a good rational argument. I mean, he is a true philosopher at heart. However, as a true philosopher, he also thinks that it's very important to critically reflect on what we think reason is. So a basic stroll through the history of philosophy shows that reason is not a univocal concept, but the way that reason is defined and measured is different throughout the different ages.
And it's a very modern, and by that I mean very specific to a certain time and place in history. So it's not universal or neutral, but it's a very modern idea to think that faith is a contaminant to the objectivity of reason and vice versa. You know, maybe reason is a contaminant to the purity of faith. That would be
Fideism or irrationalism. That's the other side of the exact same coin. And so it really is the case that what he's asking us to do is to think about what is our understanding of what reason is and to then think about what would faith then look like or how might our notion of reason not actually be as universal and objective as we think.
So he was very concerned with thinkers like Kant and Hegel, who, as I said earlier, tried to subsume rationality into their systems. And they do this in their own ways. But the headline is Faith Within the Bounds of Reason Alone. So reason is what allows me to say that I can have faith. Faith is legitimized by reason. Or in the case of Hegel, faith is perfected by reason.
And a lot of apologists take this approach, I think, in trying to argue for Christianity on these grounds. But what's the problem with this? Well, it's that God can only be what our reason allows him to be.
which is another way of saying that our reason constructs God. So what happens then is we have not actually encountered the truly other, the holy divine other, but we've only ever constructed a projection of ourselves. Amber, I'm going to just press pause here and say,
That was so profound, what you just said. Oh, good. I have a shiver down my spine. Good. Okay. So Kierkegaard's concern is that when we think about rationality as this thing that can tell me if I'm allowed to have faith or not. Another example that I give to my students, it's really dumb, but it's effective, is the thought of reason as the bouncer in a club. Okay.
So reason stands outside the door and there's a long line and it looks at the idea of each person who wants to come in and it can determine like, yes, this person can go in or no, sorry, you're drunk, go home. And for Kant and Hegel, they place reason as that bouncer and the contents of faith come through the door and they get to say if this thing gets to be admitted or if it doesn't. And the problem with that for Kierkegaard
is that God becomes a construct of our reason. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet. That reason gets to choose what it puts together. And what reason will do every single time is put together a mirror image of itself. And so it will create like a souped-up version of itself. And the problem is that
you never actually encounter the divine. You never encounter that which stands outside of you, that which is, as Kierkegaard says, infinitely qualitatively different from you because you're just stuck in your own projection. And so this is the critique of
Freuer back on Christianity and sort of the wish fulfillment. Yes. And that, that, that religion's a wish fulfillment. Yeah. Yeah.
Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century German philosopher whose chief work, The Essence of Christianity, argued that the whole concept of God arises understandably but mistakenly from human longing. God is our wish fulfilled. To which his smart contemporaries replied, atheism could just as easily be a wish fulfillment. You don't want there to be a God and poof, you wish him away.
Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx say something very similar. And it's really worth asking this question. Well, how do I know that my understanding of God is not just a projection of my own desires or my own ideals of what I think it means to be like the coolest being in the world? And so this was something that Kierkegaard wanted to identify that
When reason is exalted to that position, you might have a God, but you have the God of the philosophers. You have a controllable concept. You don't have, as Martin Heidegger later says, a God that you can fall on your knees in awe of or dance before.
So what happens is you've absolutized the relative. You've taken your own concepts and you've projected it as the absolute. And you've created an idol in doing that. And so this is the god that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard beforehand proclaimed the death of, denounced to this god as merely an illusion, a no god at all, because it's just this creation of your rational imagination. Right.
It's also important to say that it's not the case that the only other option that we have is to accept something unquestioningly or immediately or without any sort of examination. In fact, that is called confirmation bias. That is called ideology. And that is not at all what Kierkegaard would understand faith to be.
And so he wants us to think about the conditions for the possibility of faith or of knowing God. What would have to happen, hypothetically speaking, for something like encountering God to be a possibility? And he reasons that if there's a God, then this God would have to be truly other, infinitely qualitatively different from me.
This God would have to be bigger than my realm of human understanding. Otherwise, this God is just an object among lots of other objects in my world. So for such a thing as genuine revelation, genuine divine self-revelation to happen, it would have to come to us, he thinks, from the outside.
It would have to break into the horizon of my finite human understanding. So basically, it would have to blow my mind. And that is the only way that I can know that it's not a creature of my imagination. If it does not completely blow your mind, if it doesn't completely turn your life upside down, chances are the Jesus that you have in your head is an idolatrous conception. Boom.
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. There's no getting around the strangeness of that Old Testament story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac just because God told him to. But the story is also making points that were valuable in the ancient setting. And in the sweep of biblical history, the story points forward to Jesus Christ himself.
There are historical and textual observations that many scholars make about this account in Genesis chapter 22. For example, we know that Abraham's original hometown of Ur was a center in the ancient world of child sacrifice to the pagan gods. The disturbing archaeology is clear.
So this biblical story seems designed to nod to that pagan background, only in the end to deliberately overturn any idea that this God, the true God, would ever demand what Abraham's former hometown religion demanded. There's also the textual observation that the passage deliberately repeats the word provide, yiret.
as a reminder that God will provide the sacrifice, not Abraham or Isaac. So in the story, Abraham says to Isaac, God himself will provide Yireh, a lamb for the burnt offering, my son.
That's exactly what ends up happening in the story. And the scene concludes with the words, So Abraham called the place the Lord will provide. And to this day it is said on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided. So the point of this entire chapter seems to be that God takes an assumed part of Abraham's pagan background and flips it, subverts it,
And there's reason to think that within the story, Abraham himself knows that that's what's going on. For one thing, he says the Lord will provide. So unless he's flat out lying to Isaac, Abraham is pretty sure that despite what God commanded, it's not going to come to sacrificing Isaac.
The other thing is, at one point, Abraham says to his servants, you stay here while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you. The plural we is key and it's there in the original Hebrew, not just the English. So it looks like Abraham knows that whatever is about to happen up there on Mount Moriah, they are both coming back somehow.
And what's driving all this confidence must be that in the previous chapter, Genesis chapter 21, God had told Abraham that the boy Isaac is the heir through whom God would create many nations. So Abraham is clinging to that. God has made a promise, he's thinking. And that means there's no way this can be the end for Isaac.
He knows God. He knows, therefore, that this must be some larger choreographed dance. And so he makes the dancer's leap, as Kirky Gore put it. Risky, frightening, but also part of a larger, beautiful work of art.
And sure enough, we read, So Abraham called that place, the Lord will provide.
The story forever branded in the minds of God's ancient Israelite people two things. One, God will never demand they offer up themselves or their children in sacrifice. And two, God will himself provide the sacrifice, a sacrifice of his own making. Richard Dawkins complained, Richard Dawkins complained,
But I reckon Isaac himself would reply, don't fret for me. I learnt better than anyone in history that unlike our pagan forebears, we will never have to sacrifice ourselves to God. God himself provides the sacrifice.
And this, of course, is why the story points forward to Jesus Christ. It's impossible to read Genesis 22 without thinking of the ultimate divine provision of a sacrifice. And this too happened where Jewish tradition places Mount Moriah. That's Jerusalem. Jesus Christ lived the perfect life none of us could live. He offered up that life for us, for our forgiveness.
The punchline of the Abraham-Isaac story is "The Lord will provide the sacrifice." The punchline of the entire biblical narrative is "God gave himself in sacrifice." That God is worthy of the dancer's leap. You can press play now. What is the legacy of Soren Kierkegaard, if you can summarize that legacy in a few sentences?
The legacy from philosophy is definitely what we have talked about. Existentialism. Existentialism and all what is in that. That is, I think, the way he is remembered. But it's also in a way existentialism in Christianity. I would like to say, but I may not be right because it's difficult, but I think
What is the main thing in his Christianity is that you should always reduplicate your faith into action. So that what you believe, you should also act in this way. If you don't do it, you are not a Christian. And I think that is the basic thing in all what he is saying.
Because if that doesn't happen, it's always to be Christian, is always to be in existence. To be a Christian in existence. Not to be a Christian at home or many others. No. Always in existence. Because it has to be in life.
Sohn Kierkegaard died in 1855, aged just 42, after a month in hospital following a fall in the streets of Copenhagen. According to the diary notes of his close friend Emil Bosen, Kierkegaard remained principled to the very end, even refusing to be served communion by state parsons on his deathbed.
The Parsons are royal functionaries, and royal functionaries are not related to Christianity. Kierkegaard authored 33 books, scribbled 7,000 pages of notes kept in private journals, and planted the seeds of a new generation of philosophy.
The likes of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ludwig Wittgenstein, just to name a few, all cited him as a major influence on their work. At the heart of his work was the desire to know how to live a genuine faith. He famously wrote in a journal entry early in his career,
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do. The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
For my skeptical listeners, Amber, what do you think are the most compelling ideas of Kierkegaard? Oh, well, for skeptics in particular, I think he has some of the greatest advice that I've ever heard. And this is in his text called For Self-Examination.
And he talks about doubters and people who are having a hard time with the biblical text, maybe who are having a hard time believing some of the claims of Christianity. And in fact, the example that he gives is the ascension. How in the world are you supposed to believe that Jesus ascended into heaven?
And what he says is, you know, you can keep trying to feed your doubts with reasons. And that's usually what we try to do. We try to assuage our doubts by giving reasons to it, finding evidence and that sort of thing. And he says, you know, that's fine. But the reality is that reason is like food for doubt. It's almost like
adding sugar and milk to a bread dough and it actually feeds the yeast and it makes it more and more and more hungry. What he says is if you're experiencing doubts, he says get busy imitating. Some have doubted and then in turn, there were some who sought to refute doubt with reasons. As a matter of act, the connection was actually this.
First of all, they tried to demonstrate the truth of Christianity with reasons or by advancing reasons in relation to Christianity. And these reasons fostered doubt and doubt became stronger. The demonstration of Christianity really lies in imitation. This was taken away. Then the need for reasons was felt. And thus doubt arose and lived on reasons.
And what he means by that is
You don't ever just figure things out and then fully and then decide to step in. Okay, I feel like I've kind of answered all of my questions. Now I'll go ahead and become a Christian. He's like, that point will actually never come. But like the marriage example, you come to truly understand Christ only by following Christ. And this requires entrusting yourself to something that you don't fully understand, following someone into this unknown future.
But the Christ that you imitate is not the God that you control, but it is the God who loves you and gave himself up for you. And so pick up the cross, follow him into this unknown and see what it's like. See what happens. But if you try to keep looking at it from the outside, you're never actually going to get there. And for him, this venture, this risk,
That is what makes up this beautiful life of faith. So practically, for my skeptical listener, what would that mean? So practically, I think that we focus a lot on trying to understand, answer the question, is Christianity true? Is it true? Is it objectively true? Right. And then after that, we think if we can settle the truth questions, then we'll be able to recognize it as good and then beautiful. Truth, goodness and beauty.
But what if you reversed that? And this is not to discount truth by any means, but it's simply to say, what if the question that people are asking right now is not so much, is Christianity true as much as they're asking, is Christianity good? And is Christianity beautiful? And maybe deep down, that's what you're asking too. That's what you're really wondering. That's the real question, right? And so, yeah.
What if we reversed those? What if you looked for the beauty of Christ? And what if we as Christians sought to not convince people, beat them over the head with like, you know, make them intellectually say uncle, like, yes, Christianity is true. But what if we sought to help them see the beauty of Christ?
And beauty is this thing that you're drawn to, you want to follow, you want to just be near it. And as Augustine says, it's that thing that evokes your desires. And so what if you looked at the beauty of Christ and then we saw the goodness of Christ in that, and then through that, we come to know him as truth. And I think that that's actually that faith-seeking understanding posture, and I think it's
a more productive, like potentially productive way if you're serious about asking that question of Christianity.
And you're seriously wondering if it is the truth. You haven't decided in advance, right? So he wouldn't totally object to, say, a podcast called Undeceptions that's trying to promote the truth and beauty of Christianity. Well, absolutely not. In fact, I think that there's a very strong Kierkegaardian impulse in what you're doing, even in the title, Undeceptions.
uncovering potential deceptions and looking and pondering and thinking. And it's modeling a willingness to ask hard questions and to critically self-examine and to really seek to understand what it means to follow Christ in the context within which we find ourselves. And so his entire project really sought to help people see the truth and the beauty of Christianity. ♪
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Now just tell me one more time how to pronounce his name. Nils Jørn. So it's just Jørn. See, I would say Jørgen. Yeah, Jørn. Jørn. Like a Y. Nils Jørn. Yeah, I would say Kaplan. Kaplan. Kaplan. Yeah. And give me the correct pronunciation of Soren Kierkegaard, or is that correct? Soren Kierkegaard.
"Kierkegaard" Oh my goodness! Hang on, say that nice and slow. "Søren Kierkegaard" "Kierkegaard" So it's almost like an L at the end? It's a... we say it's a... it's a like a hidden D. You don't pronounce the D. Okay, so it's really just an R. "Kierkegaard" Yeah, exactly. "Kierkegaard" Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I won't make a fool of myself with this professor now. No, that was good. So where am I going exactly?