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We get comments!

 I of course started to respond to this until I realized that, despite various attempts, and occasional skims, I haven't read The Sickness unto Death.

You will recall I last tackled Kierkegaard a few years ago (The Concept of Anxiety) and did a blog post and you had a few comments. I'm not sure that Kierkegaard is quite as (Protestantly) orthodox on soteriology--there he seemed to conclude that Adam brought sin in the world, not uniquely, but as each of us does. In my skims of TSUD I haven't seen so much of atonement as another excruciatingly painful bout of self-examination.

I can't fault your overall read of the gospels. If I had to put a label on it I would call it Christian humanism, and I share it. But for all my enthusiasm for what might also be called Erasmian Christianity I have also a growing appreciation of what, in modern times, has been a mostly Protestant venture in juxtaposing human beings with God--ala Kierkegaard or Barth or even Tillich. We come up radically short. And of course the result of that isn't, for the vast majority, a depth of Kierkegaardian anxiety and despair, or Barth's sense of the fearful otherness of God. But for those of us nuts enough to think theology valuable, these kinds of deep dives help keep us from the complacency that sometimes passes for Christian comfort.

Give me a year or two and I'll give you a response that's actually informative!

First, a confession:  I still have to read COA (I think I have the Lowrie translation, The Concept of Dread.  I do prefer the Hong translations, they're much more readable.)  SK probably isn't terribly orthodox on soteriology. I just find myself wholly unorthodox these days.

Let's have a beer and talk about it!

I resonate with Annie Dillard's idea of the complete Otherness of God, one she roots in Judiasm (though she is Christian).  I have vague recollections of her description of it from one of her essays: something about if God actually paid attention to worshippers they might all be blasted to bits by the gaze.  Very in keeping with depictions of encounters with the Almighty in the Hebrew scriptures, you understand (Moses glowing from the reflected glory of God on Sinai; Elijah meeting God in an earthquake and a whirlwind, but God is not in either; Ezekiel seeing only the glory of God (the light shining off the Presence) atop the throne chariot; even Paul on the road to Damascus, struck down by a blinding light (the glory, again).  That kind of thing.)  To me that's the basis and reason for worship (to wander off task a bit):  it's for us, not for God (the usual modern critique of worship:  why does God need it?).  I (wandering further) tried to lead worship in a way that the encounter with God (however it came) was enough to change your view of the world for the rest of the week.  It was meant to be the inverse of "recharging your spiritual batteries" so you could "face the world again."  Rather than God being a battery charger, the living presence of God was so fundamentally Other that the world, by contrast, was a piece of cake.

There's also the root there for Christian humility, which I place more in the "first shall be last, last first" teachings, and in the Matthean parable of the sheep and goats:  "Lord, when did we see you?"  Take that seriously, along with the absolute Otherness of God, and you've got good grounds to be humble.

And so we come back to "How should we then live?", Tolstoy's question which has become so important to me, especially as I am as out of touch with other people as I have ever been (I don't lead a church, I don't teach a class, I don't practice law and have clients; not anymore).  No, that's not self-pity or a sad thing.  But I'm well aware I'm effectively on a desert island, and my interactions with other humans are in crowded stores and noisy restaurants (excepting the people who work in these places whom I encounter for mercantile reasons).  So I'm a bit less interested in "The Individual," and much less enamored of what I see as SK's emphasis (in SUD) on Augustine's "God-shaped hole" (which is not what Augustine meant any more than SK meant a "leap of faith" is a leap in the dark, but anyway....).  I don't think our hearts are restless until they rest in God.  But I do think the value of Christianity, and the salvation of Christianity. lies in how we live, not in how we confess ("confess" here not carrying the meaning of "confession of sins," which is a practice of Christian humility and not to be idly gainsaid or even ever set aside.  Indeed, I read somewhere that that Catholic practice of the confessional came out of the practice of the Irish monks as a spiritual discipline among them.  I wish there were a Protestant counterpart. I could have used a confessor when I was in parish ministry.  I'm not sure it would have changed any outcomes (most of the ministers I knew and trusted were as helpless as me), but it would have made life a bit easier.).

I think the root of my objection is the fundamentalist/evangelical culture we both grew up in.  I've seen true charitable work done by the large Southern Baptist church here in town, but too much of the theology is about soteriology is about having the right ideas, or at least claiming to.  As Jeremiah said, speaking for God:  "The heart is devious; who can fathom it? I, God, test the heart..."  We are known by what we do, in other words.

"Lord, when did we see you?"  "What you did for the least of these, you did for me."

So I don't think I'm tossing out the baby with the bathwater (nor did you say I am!).  It's the Romanticism of SK I can't hold onto anymore. I admire the Romantic movement, we are all living in its utter transformation of how we understand ourselves in the world.  But the emphasis on the personal, rather than the communal, is a bit more than I can give credit to, anymore.

Let's have a beer and talk about it!* 🍻

(*Something I understand Luther liked to do.  You can't too much dislike a man like that!)