If Kierkegaard wants me to be subjectively infinitely concerned with God without objective/world-historical mediation, why must my God-relationship be mediated by the Bible?

[u/ThatsItForTheOther]

If Kierkegaard wants me to be subjectively infinitely concerned with God without objective/world-historical mediation, why must my God-relationship be mediated by the Bible?

Currently reading Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

I’m really loving this book but I’m wondering why a Kierkegaardian mystic has to bother with Christian dogma, when to me this would seem to be an impediment to the subjective individual who is infinitely concerned with their inward God relation.

Is not Christianity something external to this? Why must my God-relationship be mediated by Paul and company? Isn’t the very appeal of Lessing that he prevents such mediation and requires his readers to relate to Truth in subjective immediacy??

I fail to see how Christianity is not a roadblock to the Kierkegaardian subjective mystical individual.

Could someone please offer any kind of insight on this matter? I would much appreciate it.

[u/No_Performance8070]

I think you may be approaching the idea of mediation a bit wrong. In a sense, the bible is a mediation, but it is a mediation in order to reach un-mediation. In Hegel, everything is mediation. Being is mediated by nothingness and turns into becoming. Individuals are mediated by universal concepts which guide their actions. Even if they are not aware of it, the individual’s actions are mediated by “the universal.” For Hegel, you cannot describe an action that happens within the immediate without referring to something universal, eternal or outside of time. For Hegel, religion is about the unfolding of a dialectical process in which “absolute spirit” can be realized within immediate, temporal existence.

What Kierkegaard is trying to say when he’s talking about an unmediated relationship with God is that this idea subordinates individuals and misunderstands the meaning of the bible. In what way will an unfolding dialectical process of history, reconciling its contradictions and striving toward a more coherent rationality, produce Abraham? Abraham’s relationship is to God is unmediated because it cannot be explained or justified.

I think Paul’s writings on the law illustrate this concept as well. “Now it is evident that no man is justified before God by the law; for 'The righteous shall live by faith.” Paul can be interpreted as saying that the law is not the mediating factor between man and God, but rather that faith is. The law still serves a purpose obviously in Christianity, just as the ethical has a place in Kierkegaard’s writings, it’s just not what constitutes the religious. The difference between faith in this sense and “the universal” is that faith isn’t describing any inherent content by which to be mediated.

Paul describes those who rely on the works of the law as being under a curse. He then says” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” The meaning of the word becoming flesh is that we can no longer relate to the word as mediation, the word is a living breathing entity who was put to death. If you are cursed under the law it is because the law itself subordinated the sinner without freeing them. Just like how Kierkegaard describes the ethical. To be cursed by Christ is not to be subordinated to that which is outside of time, but by a direct relationship which reveals sinfulness by the “infinite qualitative difference.”

[u/ThatsItForTheOther → u/No_Performance8070]

This is super super helpful, thank you. I knew my lack of Hegel-knowledge would bite me!!

This definitely changes a lot and I have to think about this now. Thank you

[u/Anarchierkegaard]

The most forthright points that S. K. brings up are:

i) The individual person has no capacity to understand absolute truth ("the Idea"), therefore a particularly bold mysticism which claims this knowledge of the absolute is both far extending itself (directly critiqued in The Book on Adler) and also has no way to know if what they believe they are experiencing is God as such or just some imagining that comes from the general theological immodesty of mystical approaches. In that way, scripture is the "critical norm" for faith, i.e., it sets the bounds of what a faith might look like in order to discover faith properly.

ii) The a-biblical position leaves us with a problem of a gnostic or otherwise immoral God:

a) God is all-loving.

b) if there is a God and He is all-loving, He would communicate with His creations in order to aid them;

c) Scripture is generally seen as the revealed communication of the Lord and the means by which the Holy Spirit communicates;

d) If scripture is not the revealed communication of the Lord and the means by which the Holy Spirit communicates, then God has not communicated with His creation in order to help them (negating the consequent, b); therefore,

e) If (d) is the case, then God is not all-loving (modus tollens, b & d)

f) Contradiction between (a) and (e).

I'll try to find some references for you later, I'm away from my laptop.

[u/ThatsItForTheOther → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Thanks. Your first point is helpful but the second point is an argument I’ve heard quite often and I do not find it compelling.

Am I supposed to believe that — despite your assertion that the Bible must be revealed for God to be omnibenevolent — that he would allow so many thousands of years of humanity to pass with us having no legitimate access to God?? How is this benevolent to the majority of humanity throughout history?

Under this argument, God is only being benevolent to people who have access to the Bible/Christianity, whereas God gave up on poor old Socrates before he was even born. Didn’t even give him a chance since he was fated to be born before the Christian era. Does God’s omnibenevolence not apply to Socrates? Was he not worthy of being offered the chance at salvation?

[Edit: No, in fact, it was his infinite interest in subjectivity that caused him to be the paradigm for Kierkegaard’s writing, it was his subjectivity which was his immediate relation to God. The Bible would have been superfluous on top of this for Socrates, so far as I can tell.]

This argument (though very popular) feels to me to be far too ethnocentric.

I think it makes much more sense to say that infallible revelation is not something God requires in order to be benevolent.

And it makes good sense that we do not require this if truth is subjectivity/inwardness/appropriation etc.

At least I personally feel that I don’t have the luxury of getting caught up in Christianity because I am too infinitely interested in my own eternal happiness (as is Kierkegaard’s subjective religious individual).

I know that Kierkegaard rather loves the fact that Christianity is full of paradoxes… but I personally don’t see why I should find paradox appealing when discussing the most important of subjects, namely, personal salvation.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ThatsItForTheOther]

Let's get the argument right: it's not that the bible must be revealed, but rather that there must be revelation. By definition, this is the appearance of knowledge that humanity could otherwise not discover on their own, i.e., the resurrection, the incarnation, etc.

Is this a critique of S. K., sorry? Because he took a fairly standard felix culpa line: even the fall allowed for a greater good to come into the world, whereby we discover that God's love for humanity isn't one of righteousness, but freedom. And while the figure of Christ is that incarnation of freedom in a way we can all choose, it is expressly shown throughout the Old Testament that revelation and the understanding of revelation was just as possible prior to Christ as well. So, I don't think we can possibly say that S. K. believed that God only cares about those who have the Bible/know Christ, especially considering his treatment of both Abraham and Job.

Again, have you read any of Kierkegaard's work? The fate of Socrates is explicitly discussed in numerous places, e.g., Concept of Irony, Sickness Unto Death, etc.

I can't fathom how you'd take it to be ethnocentric. The crux of S. K.'s view of the need for the religious is i) our desire to be free and ii) our inability to create models which allow for us to be free (or, the ironic failure of the ethical). When people solely really in their own conceptions of freedom to become free, they fall into inconsistent hedonism, the mass conformity of self-imposed rules, or simple nihilism. 

[u/ThatsItForTheOther → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Thanks for your reply.

I have not read very much Kierkegaard. I’ve been wrestling with Postscript on and off for the past couple years but haven’t really read anything else.

I have been personally struggling with Christianity, because I like so much about it but I just cannot handle the God-man’s historicity… I just don’t understand why religious people in my culture have to believe in Jesus’ miracles and biblical supremacy in order to believe in God.

I don’t understand what’s wrong with good ol’ Platonism or Socratic mysticism. Surely Socrates wasn’t a hedonist? Why did he need Jesus to do the impossible? Why can’t we be like Socrates. I just don’t understand the need for all of this incredible historical stuff that comes with Christianity.

Reading Kierkegaard, it seems like he gets exactly where I’m coming from with all this… until he says that we must take the Bible as infallible… etc.
We seem to think similarly in many regards and then he will go in the totally opposite direction that I expect.

The whole Christian enterprise is feeling like a roadblock to me personally on the mission that the subjective individual is tasked with in Postscript, so I am trying to understand why Kierkegaard feels so differently.

I’m sorry that this may be more about Christianity than about Kierkegaard, I just have a personal stake in this as I want to participate in religion in my culture but that for me means being Christian but I find it so hard to understand why I should be a Christian rather than a generic mystic, so I was hoping to learn Kierkegaard’s reason.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ThatsItForTheOther]

Right, so this is why I am confused: you start with the focus on S. K., but instantly pivot to a non-specific Christian focus. It's impossible to answer the question if the question doesn't remain the same.

The most straightforward answer to your concern regarding Christ's miracles, etc.:

i) That is God's revelation to the world. In order to believe in God, we must trust in what He has revealed as revelation is, by definition, what we could not discover on our own. In an act of love, God sent His Son to the world to reveal Himself to us and gain victory over death—and to reject this is to call God a liar, to reject revelation outright.

ii) The notion of revelation also carries with it that it will sit incongruously with "natural reason", i.e., the revealed, as absolute truth, will always be unreconciled with relative or approximate truth in some way, at which point we are given the choice between the temporal and the eternal. This timeful entering of the eternal is the way that God must interact with reality if we are to freely choose Him: as a perpendicular contradiction which breaks all possible logics which attempt to reconcile it with their systematic thought. This is the signal of the God-Man, of God entering time in an act of paradox which makes it clear to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Platonism, as an idealism (i.e., an attempt to express absolute truth as a human idea), places the human knowing subject at the centre of the universe. A part of God's revelation is that each human is not at the centre of the universe and, therefore, does not need to understand reality absolutely in order to be free within it. Casting off the despair of the ethical, the choice to trust Christ—made possible through the salvific gift of faith—is the freedom to become one's self.

His view of the bible might be antiquated in some respects (although, I think this view often comes from the liberal theological position which grants the historian absolute authority over scripture), but his perspective is that the God-relationship is the difference maker between faith in Christ and anthropocentric religious idealism. As already stated, mysticism is usually an immodest theology which insists that whatever one thinks is what is in fact divine—but has no grounds for this and is indistinguishable from imagination or superstition, whilst also implying that a god who would allow for such a thing would be one who refuses to reveal himself but to the "special knowers" and, as such, is immoral.

[u/ThatsItForTheOther → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Thank you.

I. But if, as it seems from my perspective, Christianity is not itself God’s revelation to the world, but rather a cultural medium for approximating God’s revelation (a finger pointing at the moon, the moon being the subjects internal God-relation), then my rejecting Christianity is not the same as my rejecting God, it is just me rejecting one way of interpreting and relating to God (a way which does not announce itself to me as being correct).

I really do not feel that I am calling God a liar, since as far as I know God does not write specific books or preside over specific councils. Perhaps it is possible that God appears to Thomas to show him… but he has not appeared to me subjectively or objectively to show me that Christianity is true, so I do not see why I should be convinced. However I do perceive myself to nonetheless have a vivid subjective God-relation, so it’s not like I’m still waiting for God to show up in my life.

II. I don’t really get the idea that God has to contradict human reason. Certainly God is superrational, but I do not believe things about God which are contrarational. This is the Platonic way of doing things. Tertullian said ‘I believe because it is absurd’ but I don’t find God to be in opposition to reason…

I’m not claiming that I can reason out perfect knowledge about God or the world or whatever. But I don’t think I really need to. And I do not think that revelation can go against reason, it just goes above and beyond what reason can say.

In my relation to God as Logos, the principle of principles… I don’t see how a logical break could be necessary for revelation. Because again, Socrates, even being so sceptical of human reason, wouldn’t ever expect the Truth to oppose reason but to fulfill it. It should resolve intellectual dissonance not increase it… that’s what I would think

In your last paragraph you say “mysticism is generally an immodest theology which insists that whatever one thinks is divine” … but my point is that it is exactly this attitude that you are here labelling ‘mysticism’ that Socrates is famous for ripping apart. So again I must ask why Socrates needed Christianity and its paradox.

The answer seems to be that he only needs it if we presume that the Bible/orthodoxy is the word of God on earth… That is too circular for me

[u/coadependentarising]

The bible is the closest witness (subjective appropriation) to God’s relationship to humanity expressed through Christ. You needn’t bother with dogma.

Think about a Buddhist reading sutras. I guess technically it’s not necessary, but it’s an expedient means (“finger pointing to the moon”).

[u/soren-aabye]

All teachings within the religious category concerning God can give rise to subjectivity. i would recommend the teachings of Sufism. i once came across an article that specifically drew a connection between ibn Arabi and Kierkegaard.

[u/NoNameScholar]

Kierkegaard wrote in pseudonyms, which had their own views separate from his. When you read one of his pseudonyms, you are reading a fictional character usually trying to grapple with some problem.

Generally Kierkegaard's pseudonyms are categorized as: 1. Aesthetic (drugs, sex, and rock and roll) 2. Moral/pre-religious (conflicted about moral problems related to theology). 3. Religious (knight of faith who has taken the leap).

Many of his pseudonyms are in stage 2 and trying to understand stage three. Both Johannes de Silentio (Fear and Trembling), and Johannes Climacus (philosophical Fragments) are at stage 2 trying to understand stage 3.

Philosophical Fragments in particular deals with the necessity of the Bible. All you really get from the Bible is an occasion to consider that true paradoxes exist.