As part of the collaboration between the Reformed, 19th Century Theology, and Christian Systematic Theology Units on freedom in modern theology with reference to Schleiermacher and his counterparts, this paper examines Søren Kierkegaard as a counterpart and alternative to liberal theology’s metaphysical accounts of authority and freedom.
One of the most important works of retrieval ongoing in contemporary theology is the recovery of non-competitive accounts of divine and human agency and divine authority and human freedom. Both G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s accounts of the Holy Spirit, in particular, have been crucial for current theologians like Rowan Williams, Kathryn Tanner, and Kevin Hector to account for the Spirit as the enabler of human freedom, with divine authority working in non-competitive collaboration, rather than confrontation, with human discernment in community. In short, God’s transcendence is so great that God constitutes the causal relations of creatures, rather than acts as a direct agent in engagement with creatures. Recent works in Christian metaphysics, such as Rowan Williams’ Christ the Heart of Creation, have gone so far to argue that God never acts as a direct agent or cause within the causal relations of the immanent universe. Instead, the Spirit acts as inspiration of the bottom-up, pragmatic reasoning of the Christian community in the world.
My paper will argue that the work of Søren Kierkegaard stands against this contemporary retrieval of non-competitive divine agency. Against Hegel and Schleiermacher, both explicitly and implicitly, Kierkegaard presents the God-human relation in directly competitive terms, especially in his religious discourses of his Second Authorship. I will focus on Christian Discourses, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!In all these discourses, Kierkegaard enforces a strict either-or relation between the Divine and human will: either one must submit to God’s will or to one’s own will, and these two choices directly contradict each other. The Christian life is one of constantly divesting from one’s self-will for the sake of the Divine Will, to the point that one is so totally drained of one’s own agency and is instead filled with the Holy Spirit. In all these discourses, a strong emphasis of Divine Authority through the proclamation of the Word resounds, which might strike some readers today as quite authoritarian or regressive.
I will argue, however, that Kierkegaard has such a strong account of Divine agency over and against human will because he cares so much about genuine human agency. He argues, in these discourses and elsewhere, that if the rigorousness of the choice for or against God is not emphasized, or if it is reinvested in the natural causes wrought by human communities or natural processes of the immanent frame of the world, then the freedom of the individual is diminished. Free choice is abstracted and diluted into the movements of the ‘crowd,’ the temporal is confused for the eternal, and ironically, there comes to be no genuine movement or alterity in human life at all. For only choice in the face of transcendent authority can instill the free moments of decision which are the true drivers of human love, Christian community, and even world history.
I will conclude, then, that as offensive as Kierkegaard’s high and competitive sense of Divine authority might seem, it actually serves to ground free human freedom rather than to occlude it. In that sense, the authoritarian bent of Kierkegaard should be heard as a needed, if uncomfortable, rejoinder to 19th century liberal theology—precisely for the sake of the liberality the latter is going for.
Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of Divine Authority was a counterpart to 19th century liberal treatments of human freedom. German idealist philosophers and theologians—including Hegel and Schleiermacher—were striving to overcome oppositions between divine and human authority, especially to reconcile naturalistic causal accounts of the universe with Divine action. These have been key points of retrieval by contemporary theologians. But Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of the attempt to reconcile contradicting claims of agency. Instead, he offered an account of absolute and rigorous Divine Authority. And yet Kierkegaard’s account is so interesting because it pairs with an equally rigorous account of human agency and free choice before this authority. Both are found in Kierkegaard’s signed religious discourses and later-life polemics. I conclude Kierkegaard’s high sense of Divine authority serves, rather than detracts from, a high sense of human freedom and a general ontology of dynamic engagement between God and world.