Abingdon Pillars of Theology is a series for the college and seminary classroom designed to help students grasp the basic and necessary facts, influence, and significance of major theologians. Written by noted scholars, these books will outline the context, methodology, organizing principles, primary contributions, and key writings of people who have shaped theology as we know it today.S�ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) "foresaw, the power of mass culture to numb the human spirit has only waxed in strength and virulence. The prostitution of religion to legitimate self-aggrandizing ideologies has become a veritable global industry. The reduction of neighbor-love to the most minimal standards of decent behavior has devolved to the point where slightly altruistic celebrities are heralded as Christ-like saints. The deep yearnings of the human heart are being suffocated by trivial amusements, technological toys, and the manipulation of the psyche. Now, perhaps more than ever, Christianity needs an aggravating Socrates to disturb its complicity with a culture of individual self-gratification and corporate self-deification." from the bookLee C. Barrett, III is Mary B. and Hanry P. Stager Chair in Theology, Professor of Systematic Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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Kierkegaard

By Lee C. Barrett III

Abingdon Press

Chronology, 
Introduction, 
1. The Problem of Reading Kierkegaard Theologically, 
2. Kierkegaard's Paradoxical Life, 
3. The Theologian as Poet, 
4. Impediments to Communication: Kierkegaard's Critique of the Age, 
5. Kierkegaard as Unsystematic Theologian, 
6. Kierkegaard's Theological Fragments, 
Conclusion, 
Definitions of Kierkegaard's Essential Concepts, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography of Works about Kierkegaard in English, 
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The Problem of Reading Kierkegaard Theologically

Inevitably, any body of literature as demanding as Kierkegaard's corpus would invite a spectrum of divergent interpretations. The intense vigor and bitter vitriol with which the debate among interpreters is conducted is testimony to the elusive character of his writing. The story of the interpretation of Kierkegaard's work reflects the recent history of theological and cultural fads. Little-known beyond Denmark during his own lifetime, in the late 1800s he was discovered by German literati. Kierkegaard had anticipated becoming a subject for scholarly research and had penned insulting notes to future professors who would build careers expositing his thoughts. After World War I he was appropriated by "neo-orthodox" theologians who resonated with Kierkegaard's suggestion that all human values are relativized by the transcendence of God. By the 1940s Kierkegaard was also being hailed as the precursor to the existentialists because of his demand for authenticity in the face of an absurd universe. Interest in Kierkegaard waned in the 1960s as the enthusiasm for both existentialism and neo-orthodoxy declined, and attention shifted to the pursuit of social justice. As liberation theology captured the imaginations of progressives in the church, Kierkegaard was often dismissed as a proponent of a type of religious individualism that undercut the solidarity necessary for social action. But Kierkegaard once again became trendy in the late 1980s as many cutting-edge thinkers hailed him as a harbinger of postmodernism. A new generation of scholars saw Kierkegaard as the champion of the fracturing of textual meaning, the prophet of the deconstruction of all totalizing ideologies, and the quintessential enemy of all tidy closures. This saga of the vicissitudes of Kierkegaard interpretation should leave the reader wondering if Kierkegaard was a proto-Barthian, an existentialist born a century too soon, or a premature postmodernist. Surely an author whose body of writing can sustain so many divergent interpretations has succeeded in making reading him difficult.

Profound disputes rage not only about the meaning of Kierkegaard's works but also about the proper way to search for their meaning. Some scholars insist upon interpreting Kierkegaard in the light of his own peculiar psychodynamics. These biographically-oriented expositors usually unearth a troubled, conflicted individual whose writing was a form of self-creation. Others reject that approach as a failure to recognize that the meaning of text is independent of the intentionality of its author. Some of these interpreters shift attention to the way that the texts express the broader social, cultural, and intellectual tensions of Europe in the nineteenth century. Others, insisting that texts transcend the context of their production, look for themes that are taken to be objective properties of the texts themselves. Some of these text-oriented interpreters focus on the literary strategies in the volumes and treat them as a kind of poetic production. Others concentrate on the epistemological and ethical arguments that Kierkegaard develops and see him as a philosopher. Others treat Kierkegaard as a theologian, whose primary intention was to advocate for specific doctrinal positions. To add to the interpretive cacophony, these days some readers have even denied that there is any singular meaning in his texts at all; perhaps the writings are simply provocations rather than the communication of any message. Each of these approaches employs a different set of interpretive tools and therefore uncovers a different range of meanings in Kierkegaard's strange literature.

These divergent approaches also argue clamorously about the proper way to handle the different genres of literature that constitute Kierkegaard's corpus. Kierkegaard's work includes at least three different categories of writing: journals and drafts, signed works, and pseudonymous texts. The signed works themselves comprise of a variety of genres, including sermons, edifying and Christian discourses, literary reviews, and aphoristic cultural commentary. His pseudonymous writings include such radically different genres as first-person novellas, treatises on music, lengthy epistles, and philosophical treatises. To complicate interpretive matters, often the same theme can thread its way through all his genres, appearing in different and sometimes contradictory guises in different works. As a result, it is difficult to determine what sort of weight to give to a certain theme in a specific context. For some expositors of Kierkegaard, the pseudonyms are taken as articulating Kierkegaard's own coherent worldview, unless the divergence from the historical Kierkegaard is pronounced. According to others, even the pseudonyms who sound like Kierkegaard may not be articulating his own viewpoint at all but rather are presenting a welter of perspectives that force the reader to construct some kind of significance out of their discrepancies. For yet other interpreters, not even Kierkegaard's signed literature, or even his voluminous journals, should be taken as expressions of his allegedly direct meaning. Perhaps even the writings under his own name are so replete with countervailing voices and so thick with irony that nothing he wrote can be taken as a direct statement of purpose. Even Kierkegaard's journals may contain highly fictionalized embellishments of his own experience. The most exhaustive recent biographer of Kierkegaard argues that Kierkegaard reworked his personal experiences in his journals as a form of auto- therapy, transmuting trauma into art, so that not even his seemingly most candid journal entries can be taken at face value.

The sharp disagreements among Kierkegaard scholars should fill any would-be interpreter with trepidation, as should Kierkegaard's own contemptuous remarks about pathetic scholars who would research him because they had no living thoughts of their own. To add to the interpretive fear and trembling, the fact that Kierkegaard's rhetorical performance contributes to the meaning of his texts guarantees that any straightforward paraphrase of his words would be a gross distortion. He did not simply want to convey information to the reader; rather, he sought to create the possibility that the reader might be transformed through the act of reading. Accordingly, his pages are full of jolting images and fragmentary stories that open up multiple interpretative possibilities, compelling readers to make their own interpretive decisions. If interpretation is the effort to make a text's meaning more transparent and accessible, then any effort to impose an interpretive scheme on Kierkegaard's writings would seem to rob the reader of the opportunity for personal growth. Kierkegaard himself warned, "what I have to say may not be taught; by being taught it turns into something entirely different." Perhaps Kierkegaard's works should not be summarized or...

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