On From Rationalism to Existentialism

First thing on my agenda for this entry is a rant about original intent.   As time goes on, we in class have less and less insight into the original intent of the authors.  We keep defining terms and answering questions based off of our own ideas instead of looking for the ways the authors answer them.  I’m not saying personal opinions are invalid.  It’s just frustrating to spend class listening to personal opinions before we have even established what the author is trying to say.  A prime example is Kierkegaard’s three life spheres and what he means by an aesthetic, ethical, or religious mode of life.  He defines an aesthete as someone whose PRINCIPLES are immediate gratification and avoidance of boredom.   Although we touched on the correct definition in class, we kept reverting to “immorality” as the definition of the aesthetic life, which is not at all accurate.  We also kept working off of a bad understanding of Kierkegaard’s meaning of the ethical sphere.  Ethical life for Kierkegaard wasn’t conformity to traditions, conservatism, and community service.  It was finding absolute truth and applying that universal reasoning to any given circumstance.  It had to do with endurance and commitment to what one thinks is right, not blending in with the crowd.  The religious sphere fared no better, as we kept reverting to the popular understanding of religious life instead of Kierkegaard’s meaning.  When he talks about religion as a sphere of life, he means being confronted by God and being ever-conscious of one’s own sin and guilt.  I disagree with Kierkegaard on at least two points, but I have to get to the end of my rant before I get to my objections.  Okay go:

Pop-culture Christianity in the 1800’s is pop-culture Christianity in the 2000’s.  The reason Kierkegaard can talk about truth in paradox and relating personally to truth is because he REJECTS the attempt to put God in a box and rationalize him, as pop-culture Christianity loves to do, regardless of era.  The reason I point this out is because there was this idea during discussion that Kierkegaard was advocating cookie-cutter Just Submit Christianity, which diametrically contradicts his position.  His refusal to match the church to the New Testament was the entire point of one of our readings.  Jesus, the Gospel, and the New Testament are not what the church systemizes and rationalizes them to be, they are what they are—a hard teaching which no one can accept (John 6:60).  To Kierkegaard, there is no reasoning that can make Christianity’s doctrine make sense. 

Admittedly, I have had rare experiences with Christianity, so I can’t expect people at large to relate to Christianity the way I do.  I acknowledge that even after one has encountered the true Christ, it’s nigh impossible to follow him anyway.  But I can’t take the idea that nonreligious people believe that Christianity is the sum of offensive pop-culture Christianity.  It simply isn’t true. 

Now that I’ve had my rant out, I turn to my two (minimum) objections.  Firstly, I object to Kierkegaard’s idea that the highest sphere is a life of fear and trembling before God.  It cannot be the highest sphere because the movement between spheres is motivated by psychological discomfort.  In aesthetics there is no meaning, so one despairs. In ethics there is no perfection, so one despairs.  In religion there is no righteousness, so one despairs.  There’s no distinction.  The same inability to “live that way” would push a person out of religion just as it pushed him or her from the other spheres.  It is not compelling to be religiously desperate instead of aesthetically or ethically desperate.  My second objection is that Kierkegaard doesn’t understand true Christianity, or else he would have made it past the fear of God.  Kierkegaard thinks he sees the New Testament truly because he won’t rationalize the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, but he misses out on the reason the New Testament was written at all: Jesus Christ.  If he was listening, he would have realized that Jesus “…did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).  Kierkegaard should have paid more attention to Hebrews, which tells that Jesus is the “exact representation of [God’s] being” (1:3).  Being such, Jesus shows us that God does not lord his authority over his people, but he cares deeply about their lives (Matt. 20:25 and John 10:1-18).  I’m not saying that God doesn’t ever want us to tremble before him, or that fear serves no purpose.  I’m just saying that, knowing God, it simply can’t be that the meaning of life is to live in a never-ending, religiously-themed, existential panic attack.