Reality itself is a system—for God.…’ But if what prevents the existent from entering into a system is that it is not the sort of being that can so enter in, then it is idle to tell us it does so in the thought of God, for this is to say at once that it does and that it cannot. by A. Dru (Oxford Univ. A being who is eternal or out of time cannot have measured out his life in human years. Christianity was true, indeed, but not in their sense. And that's why my teaching on the Colson Center website and my book The Faith is important. Copyright © 2020 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. His ethics are curiously egoistic; ‘the sole ethical interest is the interest in one's own reality’.66, Secondly, to be subjective is to be passionate. If he had, he would not have argued at all. If the killing of innocent youth without regard to consequences may be right, then anything may be right, since our moral sense has proved delusive at the very point of its greatest confidence. Much in his philosophy seems to have been a rationalisation, in the Freudian sense, of his conduct in this affair. ‘Between the action as represented in thought on the one hand, and the real action on the other, between the possibility and the reality, there may in respect of content be no difference at all. In relation to Christ, there is only one time, the present. By "absurd," he means that which contradicts reason. Plainly philosophy is not enough; we must concede to Kierkegaard at once that no process of speculation can prove the occurrence of a single past event. It is the standpoint of eternity; in looking down on human nature, he is occupying for a time the position of Deity itself. He takes the case of Pilate, called upon to judge whether the prisoner before him had committed a capital offence, and maintains that Pilate erred because he tried to deal with the issue objectively. As SK says, "Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and objective uncertainty. Objectively there is no truth "out there" for existing beings, but only approximations, whereas subjectively truth lies in inwardness, because the decision of truth is in subjectivity. cit., 144. How shall we understand the truth in terms of subjectivity? Furthermore, is it true that finite beings have failed so utterly in the attempt to make existence intelligible? ‘This is… clear to the knight of faith, so the only thing that can save him is the absurd, and this he grasps by faith.’95 Here is the meaning of that most deceptive phrase, ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’. Truth as subjectivity, when it is in highest intensity, holds fast to more than objective uncertainty. And the voices of them and of the chief priests prevailed. We are thus left with a hopeless disparity between the value of the prize and our power to appropriate it. Without religious thought, religious feeling would be without form and void, and religious commitment would be to nothing. One must recognise the sophisticated intellect for the dangerous thing it is, and be content to become a child again. No doubt the utility of his strategy in this campaign is not the only cause of his posthumous revival. As Ken points out, Kierkegaard was responding to what he viewed as a caricature of faith—assent to propositions that did little, if anything, to change the way people lived. Get more than a Sunday sermon. But what of the philosophy of history? ‘Kierkegaard's explanation of the dialectical relation of freedom and fate in sin is one of the profoundest in Christian thought’; and similarly ‘Kierkegaard's analysis of the relation of anxiety to sin is the profoundest in Christian thought.’116 Georg Brandes in a letter to Nietzsche says that Kierkegaard ‘is in my view one of the most profound psychologists of all time.…’117 ‘… Harnack's once celebrated essay on The Essence of Christianity seems incredibly trivial,’ remarks a disciple, ‘when one has read S. K.’118. Is this really two different equations that happen to be very much alike, or is it the same equation, presenting itself to both minds at once? Soren Kierkegaard believed in the Christian concept of God and wrote extensively on Christianity, but did not try to rationally explain his religion. There have been cases in history and literature in which a father's killing of a child may in some degree be reconciled with our moral sense. But faith requires us to put logic aside and accept what Kierkegaard flatly calls ‘the contradiction that God has existed in human form’.102 ‘In my God-relationship I have to learn precisely to give up my finite understanding, and therewith the custom of discrimination which is natural to me.…’103 A man must somehow learn ‘to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.…’104 He must achieve a ‘crucifixion of the understanding’,105 and by a leap of faith embrace the improbable and even impossible as nevertheless certain. The Church of Rome had committed itself with all the authority of popes and councils to the view that the entire Bible was inspired and therefore true. Kierkegaard probably realised that, as mentally and sexually abnormal, he was no fit person to marry at all, and if he had rested his desertion on such ground, one could understand it, though wondering why the discovery came so late. The suffering he has in mind is more fundamental and inescapable, a darkness that remains within even while the outward sun is shining, and belongs to the very essence of religion; ‘the religious man believes that it is precisely in suffering that life is to be found’.18. When the question is thus clearly put, one must take leave to doubt not only whether such insight occurs in fact but whether it could possibly occur. From the Princeton University Anthropology news, Based on his 2017 Gifford Lectures, David Novak’s Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, an, Born in 1955 in Australia, Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the In, We are sad to announce the passing of 1985 Gifford lecturer, From the University of Glasgow Gifford Lectures, Over 100 years of lectures on natural theology, Part II. You can never prove the existence of any past fact. But neither did his thought move solely among abstractions. By placing the eternal, essential truth together with existing. He admitted that ‘little is said in the New Testament’ about it; his doctrine of the central importance of such suffering seems to have presented itself as an implication of the teaching of St Paul. For the religious man there is no waking up while life lasts. Kierkegaard is widely considered to be an irrationalist.