Introduction to Part One
The first sequence in this work has to do with God—a voluminous topic if there ever was one. Indeed, Kierkegaard employs the word God (Gud) almost nine thousand times in his authorship, and he uses the more prosaic terms “the God” (Guden) and “the god” (guden) hundreds of additional times. Furthermore, these figures say nothing about supplementary allusions or references to God in his oeuvre, whether indirect (as in mentions of divine providence) or particular (as in mentions of trinitarian theology). It stands to reason, then, that a comprehensive overview of Kierkegaard’s conception of God is simply not possible in this context. Thus the aim of this section is more modest—namely, to introduce the reader to a few writings that indicate the Dane’s most consistent and enduring insights regarding who God is and how human beings ought to relate to God.
The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth once wrote, “If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity.” Barth goes on to explain this distinction by way of a passage from the Bible: “God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.” For Barth, as for Kierkegaard, this point has been all too easily misunderstood in the modern, secular West, where God is often treated either as the otherworldly object of a purely private faith or as the immanent benefactor of a given community’s sociopolitical program. In fact, Kierkegaard might be seen as one of the first, and certainly one of the most outstanding, modern Christian thinkers to criticize this ostensible dichotomy—thus his influence on Barth and on a host of other twentieth-century Christian authors, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Thomas Merton. And yet, while such an impact suggests that Kierkegaard was an innovator, he actually saw himself as a kind of traditionalist, whose mission was to remind persons of the intellectual-cum-spiritual challenges always already present in what he liked to call “New Testament Christianity” (nye Testamentes Christendom).
Kierkegaard’s understanding of God—what Barth refers to as the “infinite qualitative distinction”—does indeed follow this pattern. In an 1849 journal entry, he writes that the “major premise” of Christianity is that there “is an infinite, radical, qualitative difference between God and man.” What he has in mind here is parallel to the statement of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which, in repudiating univocal language about God and humanity, famously proclaimed, “For between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude.” God’s otherness is so absolute that human beings, in and of themselves, are incapable of delineating the divine nature. Hence, as Thomas Aquinas later put it, “We have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.” Traditionally, however, this realization has not foreclosed on theological reflection but, rather, encouraged thinkers to explore the implications of God’s indefinable nature—an exploration that has centered on several negative attributes, including God’s eternity, immutability, infinity, and simplicity.
In works such as Thomas’s Summa Theologica, these characteristics stand primarily as objects for philosophical consideration. But Kierkegaard tends to take a different approach. That is to say, he presupposes the classical tradition’s insistence on the negative attributes of God—indeed, one will search Kierkegaard’s authorship in vain for systematic demonstrations of why God should be viewed as impassible rather than passible, immutable rather than mutable—and instead concentrates on what these attributes mean for human existence and for its relation to the infinite and qualitative otherness of God. As he explains in another 1849 journal passage,
First the infinite conception of God’s infinite sublimity, and then, then the next, the childlike openness to become involved with him earnestly and in truth. But Christendom has made God so sublime that in the long run we really have spirited him away or smuggled him out of life….
In the conversation of the apostles one continually gets the impression that they had been personally in the company of Christ, had lived with him as with a human being. Therefore their speech is very human, although they never do forget the infinite qualitative difference.
For Kierkegaard, in other words, it is not enough simply to acknowledge the infinite qualitative difference; one must relate oneself to it and find upbuilding in it.
Each of the writings in this section works toward that end. The first is taken from one of Kierkegaard’s earliest and most famous books—Either/Or. Published in 1843, it might be considered a philosophical novel, in which Kierkegaard, writing under a variety of pseudonyms, juxtaposes an aesthetic worldview on the one hand and an ethical one on the other. And yet, as this sprawling opus comes to a close, Kierkegaard appends a final pseudonymous text—this one supposedly penned by a pastor from Denmark’s rural Jutland peninsula. The overarching title of the pastor’s section is simply “Ultimatum,” and it does indeed have the character of a “final proposition.” For in a way that refines (if not contradicts) the preceding reflections on the ethical, the pastor’s “sermon” (Prædiken), prosaically named “The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That Compared to God We Are Always in the Wrong,” highlights both the moral humility and the gracious comfort that comes from contemplating the absolute difference between God and human beings.
The second piece in this section was first published in Two Upbuilding Discourses—a slight and then overlooked volume that appeared in May 1843, just a few months after the popular Either/Or. Moreover, also unlike Either/Or, Two Upbuilding Discourses was issued under Kierkegaard’s own name, thereby beginning a trend that would come to mark the Dane’s authorship, namely, the near simultaneous publication of both pseudonymous and “signed” works. Kierkegaard himself later described this approach as a “duplexity” in which his own writings “offered with the right hand” what the pseudonymous ones “held out with the left hand.” This difference is often taken to refer to the mode of transmission, since the pseudonyms represent maieutic, or indirect, communication, whereas the signed works epitomize direct communication. Of course, such distinctions are rarely so neat, and, indeed, there is a great deal of similarity between the Jutland pastor’s “sermon” and the discourse included here. Entitled “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above,” words taken from one of Kierkegaard’s most cherished biblical pericopes (Jas 1:17–22) and on which he would continue to base further writings, this discourse is not only a meditation on God as the eternal and immutable giver of gifts, but also a dialectical rumination on the various ways persons struggle to accept and to profit from these gifts.
Part 1’s third and final selection came out in September 1855, just a short time before Kierkegaard’s death in November of the same year. Kierkegaard had been working on this discourse since 1851, however, and he bases it on the familiar passage of James 1:17–21. Thus this exposition, aptly named “The Unchangeableness of God,” might be seen as the consummation of Kierkegaard’s authorship, since it recapitulates, right at the very end, Kierkegaard’s longstanding interest in the “infinite qualitative distinction.” Indeed, Kierkegaard is at pains here to remind the reader that, even though the notion of divine immutability heightens the difference between God and creation, this difference is not alienating but is the very source of human hope. For, as unchangeable love, God is eternally available to persons in need.