Scope:
In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard challenged modern conceptions of religion by stressing God's transcendence. Focusing on the issue of revelation, Kierkegaard discusses how the eternal God breaks into human history to give us not just salvation but also the "condition" by which we receive this salvation. In other words, faith is not a human capacity but itself a gift from God. Through an examination of the idea of "paradox," Kierkegaard explains how reason tries to "grasp" God's gift, how because of sin, it cannot accept the gift of faith. Kierkegaard also gives an account of the "teacher," that is, Jesus, and the idea that it is our encounter with the teacher, not any particular teaching, that grants us the condition an the salvation. In this way, Kierkegaard rejects the religious significance of the historical study of Jesus and the gospels.
Outline
I. Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments poses the question of whether there is a historical point of departure for eternal consciousness.
A. He states the question as a hypothesis or "thought experiment" in the opening pages: What would have to be the case if truth were not Socratic, if our consciousness of salvation is made possible by a historical event, a god coming into time?
1. Kierkegaard sets up a contrast between Socratic pagan philosophy and Christian theology.
2. Socrates believed that the soul is immortal and that it was continually reincarnated. However, with each
incarnation, the truth it had held from eternity was forgotten; thus, we need a teacher who will spark our memory of the truth.
3. In contrast, for Christians, the truth comes from outside, through an encounter with God: It has to be given to us; it has to be revealed at a particular point in time.
B. But there is another way to look at this contrast: The name "Socrates" in the book stands not only for pagan philosophy but for the approach to truth and religion that one finds in the Enlightenment and in Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.
1. In general, this approach focuses on our access to truth through reason and experience: We find, discover, and reason to the truth.
2. This approach also examines religion f'rom a human perspective: We can reason to God, or as in Kant, reason to faith in God, or as in Schleiermacher, see that God is a natural part of our experience.
3. For most of Kierkegaard's major contemporaries, even
the Christians, as for Socrates, ultimate truth, what we might call religious truth, is something that human beings basically contain in themselves and basically can realize by themselves.
4. But Kierkegaard wants to explore a different possibility — that ultimate truth is a gift and it comes to us from a transcendent source — by breaking into our lives and our history from outside.
5. Even the capacity for receiving the truth, for recognizing the truth when it is right in front of us, is a gift.
C. This is a much more traditional way of thinking about ultimate truth, about revelation and faith, than we find in the defenders of modernity.
1. Although we were created to be in communion with the truth — with God — we lost this gift through sin; as a result, we needed to be given the truth again in Jesus.
2. This salvation is not available to human beings except through Jesus.
II. For Kierkegaard, God gives us both the truth and the capacity, or the "condition," for receiving the truth: faith.
A. This is basic Protestant doctrine: That is, God not only gives us salvation as a free gift of grace, but he gives us the faith with which to believe that we are saved.
1. Luther's justification by faith does not mean that faith is a kind of achievement on the basis of which we are granted salvation.
2. Faith is a mode in which we are aware of and trust in God's saving grace.
3. As sinners, we are in a condition in which we need both the truth and the ability to accept it.
4. We are in a condition in which we do not want to see it.
B. Kierkegaard develops this idea of our refusal of the truth
through his exploration of the "paradox": that the eternal, ultimate truth has broken into the temporal to give us the truth and the condition for receiving the truth.
1. The problem is that our reason takes "offense" at the paradox, will not accept it.
2. Reason is a passion that always wants to know what is unknown and will not stop its pursuit of the unknown even in the face of paradox.
3. But God is unknown, is the "absolutely different," and in its persistent efforts to know God, reason domesticates God, makes of God something that will serve human interests.
4. Reason's passion is bound up with our sinfulness, with
our insatiable need to master or control through explanation and definition.
C. Kierkegaard argues that reason must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox.
1. We cannot comprehend the difference of the absolutely different; it must be revealed to us.
2. T o happily accept the paradox is to have faith.
III. Faith is a kind of love
A. One reason it is so hard to believe that the god would have entered time to save us is that it contradicts human self understanding and orientation in the world.
1. As sinners, we do not believe we deserve God's love.
2. As sinners, we cannot imagine the kind of self-sacrificial love we see in the death of Jesus.
B. Faith is not controlled by reason or will; it is more like a gift that is given to us.
C. Faith is a kind of falling in love with Jesus Christ.
1. This encounter can happen whether we happen to be what Kierkegaard calls a follower at "first hand," someone who lived at the time of Jesus Christ and actually encountered him, or a follower at "second hand," living, perhaps, 1844 years after the crucifixion.
2. It is not, first of all, a matter of knowing Jesus Christ because a direct witness to his life may not actually "encounter Jesus," that is, believe that he is God.
3. Something in the encounter, the condition, makes it possible for the person to take a leap of love and trust and receive the paradox as paradox.
Suggested Reading:
Kierkegaard, Swenson, Thulstrup, and Hong, Philosophical Fragments.
Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. How does Kierkegaard's view of the Socratic approach to ultimate truth apply to modern philosophical treatments of religion?
2. How, for Kierkegaard, does reason express human sinfulness?
Lecture Seventeen — Transcript
Kierkegaard's Paradox
In our first lecture on Kierkegaard, I suggested that his approach to writing and philosophy set him apart &om thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, who were devoted to aligning religion — and especially Christianity — with the modern age. Kierkegaard, by contrast, was a critic of Christian views that cohered too easily with the social, cultural, and intellectual commitments and assumptions of modernity. To make this point, the first lecture focused on the book Fear and Trembling to examine what Kierkegaard calls the "absurdity of faith." I pointed out that we should be careful to understand that Kierkegaard does not use the term "absurdity" in a pejorative sense, but it is equally important to note that Kierkegaard also does not use it to celebrate faith as irrational. Rather, this term indicates for him the limits of reason with respect to faith. It indicates that we cannot fully explain, using our reason, why and how we are committed to God.
Clearly, Kierkegaard makes great use of reason as a writer, and it is the case that he holds philosophy — at least certain kinds of philosophy — in high regard. But he uses reason and philosophy to make the point, a point that by its very nature cannot be fully defended rationally, the point that faith exceeds reason, and so escapes the judgment of reason — whether reason is imagined in Kantian fashion as the universal command to duty, or in a Hegelian sense of a more historical and social collective judgment. Kierkegaard's Abraham, as we have seen, stands alone before God in fear and trembling, unable to justify himself to his wife and his son.
In this lecture, I want to develop these claims about absurdity and faith in Kierkegaard in some more depth, and I want to do so by focusing on another of Kierkegaard's most famous texts, Philosophical Fragments, which Kierkegaard published in 1844 the year after the appearance of Fear and Trembling. In my brief discussion of Kierkegaard's writing in the last lecture, I did not mention one of the most well-known aspects of many of Kierkegaard's most important books: He published them under pseudonyms. He published Fear and Trembling under the name of Johannes de Silentio, and Philosophical Fragments under the name of Johannes Climacus. We could devote a whole lecture to why Kierkegaard used pseudonyms and to explore the details of the particular names that he chose, but I' ll only make a couple of comments about this here. One reason Kierkegaard did this is that he wished to communicate with his readers in a manner he described as "indirect communication." That is, he was less interested in trying to persuade his readers of a single point of view, and particularly the point of view with respect to faith in each of these books. He didn't want to persuade them so that this particular view was the right one. He was more interested in provoking his readers to thinking through these issues on their own. His books, then, are provocations. They' re spurs to thought. They' re not traditional philosophical or theological statements of how they are defending a particular point of view as the right one.
So, we have to be careful in attributing the ideas we find in books such as Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragmentsdirectly to Kierkegaard. Interestingly, though, in the series of the pseudonymous works, the book Philosophical Fragments is unique, for it is the only one where in addition to the author — in this case, Johannes Climacus — the title page also identified an editor, and the editor it names is S. Kierkegaard. Apparently, the original plan was to have the book published under Kierkegaard's own name, but it was given the pseudonym at the last moment before publication. This may suggest that it is closer than all the other pseudonymous works to Kierkegaard's "real position." In the end, though, however close one wants to argue that the books I am discussing are the "real" Kierkegaard, the main point is to keep in mind that in these books we find a conception of faith that raises productive and provocative questions about how we can think about religion and modernity, faith and suspicion. With these questions, Kierkegaard is one of the first major thinkers to challenge, in a substantial way, the mainstream of philosophical and theological reflection on religion as it had been established by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.
In what follows, I want to trace the contours of this challenge. Philosophical Fragments is, even by Kierkegaardian standards, a complex work — in large part because it is a kind of parody of Hegelian philosophizing. There are some extremely dense and convoluted passages and sections that mimic Hegel's abstruse philosophical prose. My students are always going on and on about this book and sort of banging their heads against the desk — even as they' re having fun with it. But Kierkegaard does us the favor of posing the basic problem of the book in the form of a question on the title page. It reads: "Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness?" What does this question mean?
Kierkegaard restates the issue in the opening pages of the book when he asks another question: Can the truth be learned? This may seem like a question with an obvious answer, until we see that what is at stake in the book, for Kierkegaard, is the difference between two conceptions of truth and how we come to the truth. The first position Kierkegaard identifies with the Greek philosopher Socrates, and he presents it to us as a well-established philosophical position.
Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C.E. in Athens, is considered by many to be the origin of the great tradition of Greek philosophy that included Plato and Aristotle. However, Socrates did not write his philosophy, so most of what we know about it comes from Plato, who gave Socrates the starring role in his dialogues. Plato's Socrates was one of Kierkegaard's heroes. As I mentioned in the previous lecture, Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates. One of the central ideas of the Socrates we find in Plato's writing is that truth is not learned, but rather only remembered. Socrates believed that our souls are immortal — that each soul is continually reincarnated, and that in the period between death and reincarnation, the soul must drink from a river of forgetfulness, and so loses all memory of previous lives and what it knew during that life.
For Socrates, this meant that we always have the truth in us, and we only need a teacher — like Socrates — to spark the memory of it — that is, we don't learn the truth, we remember it. For this reason, Socrates called himself a "midwife" — that is, someone who assists with a birth, with bringing something that is inside out into the light of day — in this case, the truth that we can't remember, but then we can bring out and remember. Thus, the Socratic position on Kierkegaard's question — Can the truth be learned? — is "No, it cannot be learned, only remembered." Kierkegaard presents the second position on this question as a hypothesis, what he describes in the book as a "thought-experiment," and really the book is him playing out this thought experiment — though it quickly becomes obvious and serves as a kind of running joke through the book, though a serious joke, that this position on the truth is the Christian position. The basic position is this: Truth is learned, and it is given to human beings by God. More specifically, it is revealed to human beings by a God who takes human form. So, to go back to the question Kierkegaard poses on the title page of the book — eternal consciousness (that is, salvation) does have a historical point of departure, the point at which the divine enters history.
So, on one level, Philosophical Fragments is about the contrast between Socratic and Christian conceptions of truth and how the truth comes to us. But I want to suggest that much more than this is at stake for Kierkegaard — that the name "Socrates" in the book stands for more than pagan philosophy. Rather, it stands for the general philosophical approach to truth and religion that we find in thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. What is it that connects them to Socrates? Let's back up just a bit. In past lectures, we have seen how Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel set the framework for 19th-century religious thought. These thinkers approach questions of rationality, history, and religion in different ways, but in the end each tries to show that religiousness is an integral part of human nature. For Kant and Hegel, religion is intimately connected to human rationality and human society neither of which can be fully realized apart from religion. For Schleiermacher, religion is intimately related to our existence as feeling, experiencing beings.
So we can know what religion is, what God is, not through revelation, but by thinking carefully about what it is to be human through a careful examination of human rationality and experience. In short, if we truly understand what we are, we will grasp the truth of religion. My point is that this is quite Socratic. Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel are not saying anything about reincarnation and remembering the truth in that kind of Socratic sense, But they are saying that the key to religious truth is to be found in human nature, and in that sense — as in Socrates — the truth is already in us: We don't need it to be revealed to us. Kierkegaard, though, wants to say something different — namely, that truth is a gift that comes to us from a transcendent source — breaks into our lives and our history from outside. Even more, and I' ll explain this as we go on, he will claim that even the capacity for receiving the truth what he calls the "condition," the condition for recognizing the truth when it is right in front of us — even this capacity is a gift. So, Kierkegaard is presenting us with a much more traditional way of thinking about ultimate truth, about revelation and faith, than we find in the defenders of modernity. His is a view that goes back to Luther and beyond that to a view of Christianity shared by most in the tradition before the modern period — that although we were created to be in communion with the truth, with God, we lost this gift through sin — and, as a result, we need to be given the truth again, in Jesus.
So, to be precise, when Kierkegaard asks whether the truth can be learned, the answer he explores in the book, that he contrasts with the Socratic view of remembering, is that humanity was created with the truth, but then lost it and must learn it again — not by remembering it, but by having it revealed to us by God. Moreover, this salvation is not available to human beings, except through Jesus. So, those who either lived before Kierkegaard's historical point of departure — the life and death of Jesus — or those who came after but did not encounter Jesus in their lives, cannot receive the eternal truth.
One traditional version of this idea can be found in Dante's Inferno, in which the author, Dante, travels through the various circles of hell to observe different forms of eternal punishment. Right outside of hell proper, is a place called "limbo." And there, Dante finds the virtuous pagans, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Those are people who were virtuous, and they' re neither damned nor saved, but who did not have a chance to receive the truth. In many respects, of course, I think this is deeply offensive to the modern mindset — and here, I would include not just thinkers like Kant and Hegel, but the many today who believe that this kind of Christian exclusivism cannot be rationally or ethically defended, or who question how a God of love could be a God that excludes from salvation the greater part of humanity.
Of course, this is not the only Christian position. We see Hegel, and Kant, and others expressing a Christian — or at least a religious position where this kind of exclusivism isn't quite there — although they come close in certain ways. But there are also different ways to read Christianity, in which Jesus is not divine in the most radical sense offered here, but more like a teacher in the Socratic mode — or like a teacher who represents a way of living that we can all emulate. There were many thinkers in the 19th century who wanted to see Jesus in this more human way. But Kierkegaard's point is that modern defenders of Christianity have lost sight of one of the fundamental claims of the tradition: Christ did not come just as a teacher, but was God incarnate who, in being crucified and resurrected, redeemed the world and humankind. Those events were not just accidents, but they were essential. He knows that in some way this is offensive — in fact, the category of offense is a key part of the book, Philosophical Fragments, as we' ll see in just a minute. He knew that it cannot be defended rationally or ethically. Indeed, making this point is part of what he's doing in Philosophical Fragments, and it's to this we turn next as we consider some new terms for thinking about what in Fear and Trembling he calls the "absurdity of faith."
I want to return briefly to a point I made earlier — namely, that as Kierkegaard understands it, God not only gives us the truth, but also gives us the condition for receiving the truth. This condition, as I' ll try to clarify here, is faith. From one perspective, this — and we saw this in the lecture on Luther — this is a basic Protestant doctrine — that is, God not only gives us salvation as a free gift of grace, but God also gives us the faith with which to believe that we are saved. When Luther talks about justification by faith, he's not making faith into yet another work in the sense of "if you believe, then God will justify you." That's not how it works. Faith is the awareness of — and trust in — God's saving grace, but it is not some sort of achievement on the basis of which we are granted salvation. For Kierkegaard, like Luther, we are so disabled by sin — which Kierkegaard describes as a "state of untruth" — that we need both the truth and the ability to accept it to be given to us. This is different from simply saying that we don't know the truth or that we have forgotten the truth. It' s saying that we live in such a way that even if the truth was in front of our noses we could not see it — or, even more radically, that somewhere we do not want to see it.
Thus, Kierkegaard says that we are polemical against the truth. It' s not as if we' re all hanging around waiting for the truth with open arms, but that we actively resist it in myriad ways — conscious and unconscious. Kierkegaard develops this idea of our refusal of the truth primarily through his exploration of what is at once the most important and most difficult concept in Philosophical Fragments: the paradox. In the simplest sense, the paradox is this: God has entered history, which means that the eternal, ultimate truth has broken into the temporal — that the divine and the infinite, God, has taken human form: Jesus. The teacher who gives us the truth is both divine and human. Kierkegaard puts it this way: "But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox."
So the paradox — that the teacher is God and human, eternal and temporal — is itself the object of faith. Notice it's not any specific teaching of Jesus that is the object of the faith, but the teacher himself — Jesus. For us, what is most crucial about this paradox is what it says about Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between reason and faith. Where Kant, and Hegel, and, to some degree, Schleiermacher argue to faith — that is, can give us reasons for why we should believe in God or why our experience of God is a natural human experience, and thus argue that faith is rational or reasonable — Kierkegaard, by using the concept of paradox, is saying that reason cannot get to God. God is the paradox — and thus, he' s saying that reason is incapable of defending faith in any complete way. In some sense, then, reason and faith are at odds with one another. Interestingly, though, Kierkegaard also says that they have something in common — both reason and faith, he says, are passions. Reason, for Kierkegaard, is a passion because it wants to know, it pursues, the truth. It wants to make all that is unknown known thus, it constantly comes up against the unknown and tries to know it. It constantly comes up against paradoxes and tries to get beyond them, to make sense of them.
For Kierkegaard, God is the ultimate unknown because God is transcendent — that is, God is utterly different from us and from what we can think. In other writings, Kierkegaard will use the term "infinite qualitative distinction" to describe the difference between God and human — or, as he will put it in Philosophica/ Fragments, God is the "absolutely different." To make a long story short, Kierkegaard examines the ways in which passionate reason tries to grasp the unknown that is God — tries in its passion to know what is unknown, to exceed its limits. Examples for this that Kierkegaard explores are the arguments for the existence of God, which he shows to be misguided. He also argues that in our insistent efforts to know the unknown, our reason inevitably domesticates God, turns God into a human project and interest — it names as God that which is really human. In this sense, Kierkegaard is arguing that reason's passion, its need to know, is bound up with our sinfulness—with our insatiable need to master or control through knowledge, explanation, and definition.
It's as if, faced with the absolutely different, with God, reason falls into a kind of vertigo — it drives itself crazy, where it can't tolerate the fact that it has come up against its limits. So, Kierkegaard's point is that reason must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox. It must cease its efforts to grasp God with the understanding. It must let God show God's self through revelation. We can't comprehend the difference of the absolutely different — it must be revealed to us; but, in our sinful state, reason does not do this. In the face of the failures of the arguments for the existence of God, or in the face of testimonies of the faithful who say: "Well I just believe that God has been revealed" — in the face of these, reason takes offense. It demands that God be proven — or, if that is impossible, it demands that God must be rejected. It keeps insisting that theological paradoxes become probable, or it starts to denigrate them by calling them absurd. Of course, for reason to say that something is absurd is pejorative. But Kierkegaard points out — employing his taste for humor and irony, and he has some very funny passages on this that's the whole point: Of course, by definition, the paradox is absurd. He writes:
The offense [and this is reason, refusing to accept the paradox] remains outside the paradox and retains probability: whereas the paradox is the most improbable.... When the understanding wants to have pity on the paradox and assist it to an explanation, the paradox does not put up with that but considers it appropriate for the understanding to do that, for is that not what philosophers are for — to make supernatural things ordinary and banal?
Kierkegaard's point is that for reason to avoid the unhappy consequences of offense, it must recognize its limits and surrender to the paradox — it must accept the paradox happily. This, for Kierkegaard, is the passion of faith. He puts it this way:
How then, does the learner come to an understanding with this paradox, for we do not say that he is supposed to understand the paradox but is only to understand that this is the paradox.... [This] occurs when the understanding and the paradox happily encounter each other in the moment, when the understanding steps aside and the paradox gives itself, and the third something, the something in which this occurs, is that happy passion to which we shall now give a
name.... We shall call it faith,
As Kierkegaard says here, we do not grasp or understand the paradox, but the paradox gives itself and, as he also says here, it gives us the condition for receiving this gift — that is, it gives us faith. Faith is the passion, then, in which we embrace the paradox, the absurd, and in which we come to understand that it is the absurd, not a puzzle to be solved, not a question to be answered or a claim to be proven, but a gift to be received. Kierkegaard, therefore, in a way that cuts against the grain of almost all the thinkers we have discussed to this point, posits a gap between reason and faith that cannot be crossed but must be accepted. This is not to say, however, that we can't make any efforts to come to a better understanding of what this passion of faith is, so what I want to do now is to make the completely unoriginal suggestion — though it is perhaps a useful reminder — that faith, as Kierkegaard describes it, is a kind of love, and we can think about this from two perspectives: God's love for us and our love for God.
One reason it's so hard to believe, for Kierkegaard, that God would have entered time to save us — would have lowered himself to take human form and undergo a painful and humiliating death — one reason he would do this, or that we find it hard to accept that he would do this, is that it contradicts human self-understanding. That is, it contradicts the experience of love as it tends to be understood and lived by sinful human beings, love as something in sin that is intimately bound up with self-interest. Part of this is the sense that as sinners we do not deserve God's love, but more important, I think, it's that we self-centered human beings can't really credit this kind of self-sacrificial love. We can't really imagine the kind of sacrifice involved in God taking human form and being crucified for our sins. In our sinful state, something like this — some sacrifice like this contradicts our view of love and motivation. From the other perspective, we can think of faith as a kind of falling in love. How does falling in love happen? It's very difficult to say — it's certainly not controlled by reason or will, even if they are involved to some extent. It's more like a gift that is given to us — or it's like something that happens to you over which you have little, if any, control. It is, of course, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make yourself love someone or not love someone. So, for Kierkegaard, we fall into faith in an encounter with Jesus Christ.
This encounter can happen whether we happen to be what he calls a "follower at first hand" — that is, someone who lived at the time of Jesus Christ and actually encountered him in the flesh — or if we are a "follower at second hand," who, perhaps living 1,800 years after the crucifixion, is so taken by the testimony of this event in the Bible that he or she finds Jesus to be present in his or her life. So faith happens — though it's impossible to make it happen or to know why, in any given instance, it happens. Some sort of historical encounter with the teacher directly, or with the teacher through testimony, must take place — but Kierkegaard is also clear that such an encounter does not necessarily make for faith. In his reflections on what it means to be a follower, Kierkegaard insists that it is not a matter of knowing Jesus Christ: Someone could have known him; someone could have watched every moment of his life; or someone could know the words of the Bible back to front and still not "encounter Jesus" — that is, believe that he is God — and so someone who did all of this might still not have faith. This is why, again, Kierkegaard argues that we need to be given the condition — we must be given faith.
The basic point is that no matter how close we get to the teacher, unless we have been given the condition, we cannot see that this teacher is the God. Something in this encounter — and again, it is mysterious and does not happen to everyone who meets or hears about Jesus Christ — something in this encounter makes it possible for the person to have faith. We can compare this to love in the sense that it is always possible for one to turn away from the gift of love to refuse to accept the gift or refuse to trust what is happening. What makes it possible for someone to take the leap of love and trust or the leap of faith that receives the paradox as paradox — and so surrenders the passion of reason? This is one of Kierkegaard's main questions. Involved in this reception is not just the belief that God became man — not just the acceptance of the paradox as, indeed, the truth but also the ability to live this love.
Recall that in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard described faith as a task for a lifetime, and then goes on to show that the life of faith, for Abraham, was a life of ordeal or trial. To accept the paradox is to accept the fact that the passion of faith opens one to risk and insecurity — to the risks and contingencies of actual life. To love Christ, on Kierkegaard's terms, is to follow Christ — that is, to love one's neighbor; to live as the birds and the lilies without a care for where your next meal is coming from; to suffer ridicule and persecution; to have your sin, your deepest desires and fears, exposed. Throughout his writings, Kierkegaard identifies and analyzes many of the different ways that we avoid such love and such faith — the dependence on reason is just one of them. In this, as many have noted, Kierkegaard showed himself to be a brilliant depth psychologist. He also anticipated the topic of our next four lectures: the new form of the criticism of religion that we find developing in Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud—and I'll call this form of suspicion "the hermeneutics of suspicion."
Kierkegaard, as we have seen, is not primarily interested in rational defenses or criticisms of faith, but rather in uncovering, by peering into the human soul, the strategies by which we avoid faith — either by living a Christian life that is too easy and finds its goal in security rather than in God, or by dismissing faith through an over-reliance on reason or other kinds of avoidance strategies. Where Kierkegaard, though, employs this kind of depth psychology, this suspicion, this examination of the soul to articulate a richer and deeper form of faith — we will see in these next lectures how suspicion was employed to argue that faith, per se, involves a flight from reality.
