Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - June 1/62

Contributor - T. Hogerwaard

Title - Soeren Aabye Kierkegaard

Topic - Church History

Of all the men who have influenced the theological and philosophical thinking of our days, the Dane Soeren Kierkegaard is one of the most important.

The works of the great Norwegian authors Ibsen and Bjoernson would have been impossible but for the life and work of Kierkegaard. It was by reading Kierkegaard that Karl Barth's eyes were opened to the "infinite qualitative distance" that exists between God and men, which discovery was the starting point for his own tremendous theological works.

The great existential philosophers of our days, Heideger, Jaspers and the French representatives of that school of thinking and also the theologians, who try to spin theological thread from this godless cotton, claim Kierkegaard as their spiritual forefather too. However, they can only be considered to be his illegal spiritual issue, because the relation to God was for Kierkegaard the one and all, while the just mentioned philosophers are atheists. If Kierkegaard had lived in our days, he would have attacked the theology of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann no less fiercely than he did the theologians of his days, who nurtured themselves spiritually on Hegel as Paul Tillich and Bult,mann are doing it on the existentialists.

The great influence upon Kierkegaard's life is that of his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, who combined extra-ordinary gifts of thinking with an unusual imagination; gifts which his famous son possessed in an even higher degree. The father was born in Seeding, West Jutland, Danmark, as the fourth of nine children. As the family was poor, even before he was 10 years of age, he had to tend sheep and one day, overcome by an intense feeling of loneliness, hunger and cold, he stepped upon a stone, shook his fist to heaven and cursed God, because He allowed a poor small boy to suffer so much. Shortly afterwards he was sent to a relative in Copenhagen to assist him in his wool-business. The brand of Christianity prevailing in those days in Jutland was severe and somber: not the joy of salvation received dominated everything but the cross of Jesus Christ, which showed clearly what the world was like, in which the supreme manifestation of God's love was murdered.

For many years no one knew or even suspected the dark secret of Michael's sin; his whole life he expected God's punishment for his terrible deed, but instead his business flourished and when he died, he left quite a capital for those days. In the last part of his life one of his children after the other died, so that only two sons were left: Peter Christian and Soeren. Both studied theology; in later years Peter became a bishop of the Lutheran Church in Danmark, but many years before he died he gave up his high office, because he felt himself unworthy. The melancholy which had so characterized the father's life had put its stamp upon the son as well. Soeren himself has wrestled with melancholy his whole life and was never able to overcome it completely.

The first years of Soeren's student life were more spent in seeking entertainment and reading romantic books than in earnest study, a fact which greatly grieved his father who had hoped to see his son a minister, but Michael Pedersen died before Soeren had finished his studies. His father's death however, made Soeren dedicate his time to his work and after passing his examinations in due course, he obtained the degrees of a doctor of philosophy upon a dissertation, titled: "About the conception of irony in relation to Socrates".

One year before, when preparing himself upon the pastorate, he had engaged himself to Regine Olsen, daughter of a high government official, but the day after the engagement he discovered that he had done wrong. She was a lovely young woman, in whose life Christianity did not play too important a role, while his whole being was occupied with it; she would never be able to understand his melancholy which coloured his thinking and life. Nothing but discord and unhappiness could result from a marriage. So, shortly after his promotion, he broke off the engagement, which harvested him the contempt and anger of Copenhagen, for in those days a broken engagement was considered to be more serious than a divorce in our days. His short engagement, however, had a deep and lasting influence upon his whole life; he never stopped loving Regine; all his books were dedicated to "an unknown person whose name will be revealed later". Not long afterwards Regine Olsen married Fritz Schlegel, who was appointed governor of the Danish West Indies shortly before Kierkegaard died. Never did any woman mean anything in his life but Regine; although he thought that he could not marry her, yet he remained faithful to her till his death. Like so many of the prophets he went his way through life alone, so that no one and nothing would interfere with the way God wanted him to go. Shortly before he died, he said: "I have lived with God as one lives with his father."

A few weeks after he had broken off his engagement, he went to Berlin to hear the great theologians and philosophers of that time, but sooner than originally planned he returned to Dan' mark, having written to a friend that he had discovered "that the great thinkers had no thoughts".

Another event which took place several years later was of decisive influence. In those days a satyrical paper was issued regularly in Copenhagen, the Corsar, which attacked everyone in a shameful way. Because the articles were not signed, everyone could take a mean revenge against anyone. The real editors were known, but printed on the front page as editors were the names of men, who never wrote a piece, but who were only appointed to sit out the jail-sentences imposed upon the editors now and then for their libelous writings.

Many were of opinion that something should be done about it, but because of fear, no one did anything. Kierkegaard attacked the Corsar and in reply, for months and months his literary works (he was already famous as an author by then) and he himself were ridiculed, so that the scum of Copenhagen were amusing themselves at his expense, whenever he appeared on the streets. This deepened his melancholy and strengthened him in his conviction that to be a Christian is only possible if one is willing to suffer for Jesus Christ's sake. Not lonc., before the father Michael died, his two sons had learned from him the terrible sin which he had committed while young.

The last great event of Soeren Kierkegaard's life was the war against the Danish Lutheran Church because of its worldliness; this lasted several months and exhausted him so much that his weak health could not stand it: shortly afterwards he died.

Kierkegaard was born 5th May 1813, he died llth November 1855 and in that short period in between, only two scores and two years, he had produced quite a number of works, psychological, philosophical and theological with only one end in view: to show people the way to become Christians.

He is convinced that the Gospel should be preached directly and straightforwardly to the pagans,

to those who do not know God, but for those living in Christendom another method should be applied, because upon them the direct preaching of the Gospel has little or no effect. People receive a Christian education, they become members of the Church without having undergone anything resembling conversion, without knowing God, indeed, but they know the Christian expressions and use them: they speak like Christians, they think and act like pagans; the whole of Christendom is caught in an immense illusion. So the only thing to do is, start where the people really find themselves, not where they think they are and from the starting point lead them gradually to the heart of the Christian message: God's grace revealed in the death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In his younger years Kierkegaard had been under the influence of three great spiritual forces: Socrates, Hegel and the German Romanticism. The more he himself grew spiritually, the more he discovered how Hegel and Romanticism not only distorted Christianity, but simply destroyed it; Hegel especially under the disguise of perfecting it.

And so his life is dedicated to the war against Hegel, who deified human intellect, putting aside revelation and against romanticism which is a betrayal of everything the Gospel of Jesus Christ stands f or.

According to Kierkegaard, a person c n live in el er one of the following spheres: the aesthetic, the moralistic, the religious and the Christian sphere. The last one is the existential sphere, where that which you profess to believe has to be repeated in action in everyday life. Therefore it is also called "reduplication": living your convictions. It is paradoxical at the same time.

The aesthetic sphere is that of the man who lives to enjoy himself, without recognizing any obligations, a life of eudaimanism and hedonism, a man of moods, not of character. The moralistic sphere is the one where moral obligations are fully recognized, but in the naive assumption that a person is able to carry them out all by himself, without divine help, therefore when remorse sets in it is a sign that a person is no longer completely at home in this self sufficient moralism; the sphere of religious life is the one in which the soul is stirred by the unseen world, by the vision of goodness, truth and beauty, but it takes God's own action to bring a man into the last stage, the paradoxical stage, the relation to God in Christ, where a man is willing to loose his life for Christ's sake so that he might find it.

Irony is the boundary between the aesthetic stage and the moralistic; humour (in the classical meaning of that word) is the boundary between the moralistic and the religious sphere, the "smile with tears" as it has been called.

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