KIERKEGAARD AND NEWMAN

September 25, 2006

1. History and Faith

Christ came in the fullness of time, at a unique moment in history, and our faith bears on the significance of his short life. God made man.

a. The eternal and the temporal. In Christ, God and man, humanity and divinity are one. The eternal has come to be in time.

Eternal = temporal?

Divine = human?

In the early centuries, there were Christological heresies: at one extreme, denying the true humanity of Jesus, at the other denying his true divinity. The early councils rejected such heresies (cf. The Athanasian Creed), and this called forth theological efforts to understand the union of natures in the one person of Christ.

Climacus appears to be impatient with such efforts, the net effect of which was to maintain that, while we cannot comprehend the hypostatic union, we can understand that it does not involve a contradiction. Some things are attributed to Jesus as man, others as divine.

E.g. “God came to be in time.” But God has no beginning or end. Jesus came to be man in time; Jesus is God, therefore in some sense God came to be in time. But one is not flatly saying that the eternal became temporal nor that God came to be in an unqualified sense.

Climacus seems to want faith to bear on what we recognize is a contradiction: the eternal = the temporal, God = man.

b. Hegel’s equation of philosophical history, History, with the providential order. The flow of time seems to involve all kind of contingencies; things happen that need not have happened. But Providence suggests that what God wills and intends cannot not come to be. Are contingency and chance illusory? (A correct understanding of Providence sees no conflict between the divine causality and human freedom: God is the cause of our free acts as free.) Hegel suggests that it is the task of philosophical history to see the necessity in temporal events. Not only was the coming of Christ in the fullness of time intended and willed by God, (and thus hypothetically necessary; God need not have willed it, but since He did, it took place) the philosopher can see the necessity of that coming about, when it did, as it did, etc.

i. Christianity thus becomes the speculative problem of universal history. Hence Climacus’s indignant rejection of Hegel and the philosophy of his time, which looks to be an impediment to seeing Christianity as an existential message addressed to each and every human being.

c. Reflections on the nature of history. What precisely is the aim and method of history? Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , in six volumes, lays before us the antecedent causes and the events which led to the demise of the empire declared by Augustus.

**such an effort relies first on the ascertation of facts

***from documents, accounts, inscriptions, etc.

** interpretation or account of such facts, a causal account of why things happened as they did.

i. A first approach to this by Climacus is to point out the limitations of history, first of all in its identification and selection of facts relevant to its particular quest

**not even the six volumes of Gibbon can ride on more than a very modest selection of facts...how is the importance and relevance of facts decided? It is no secret that Gibbon wished to blame the fall of the empire on Christianity...

**but even apart from that, which could be corrected or at least replaced by another aim, how possibly overlook the fact that the vast majority of events and deeds of the relevant centuries have escaped our records...if our records were complete we would need more time than they record to go over them

**does this make the historian’s task ridiculous? Not insofar as it is modest..say you are hired to write the history of General Mills...surely you can bring this off well enough...the fact that you cannot possibly record every deed and decision does not prevent a guarded confidence in the facts that can be ascertained...you would not be trying to give a God’s eye view of the rise of this great company...in your chapter on the floating of stock, the fluctuation in the price of shares, the trend over many decades, you would seem to be on safe ground, and this not least because you do not go into, since you could not, all the Buys and Sells by groups and individuals that affect the price of the shares...would a full account of the fortunes of General Mills require knowledge of all those individual decisions?...doubtless you would say that, as a historian, you must work with what is available...and so you must

ii. Hegel seems to wish to deny this obvious difference between history (our fallible efforts to tell a story about the past on the basis of documents, etc available to us) and HISTORY (the total flow of events and deeds in time, unknowably infinite to us)...

** he seems to mimic the ‘necessity’ of Providence by designating certain individuals as World Historical...we can concentrate on Napoleon and Alexander and other notables in the confidence that they are the vehicles of Reason in History...perhaps they think they are free, and in some sense they are, but they are not free not to have the historical significance they have...the Cunning of Reason uses such World Historical individuals to accomplish its necessary ends which the philosophical historian is able to discern

**Climacus (and SK) regards such pretensions as ridiculous, and doubtless rightly

**the only history we have is the kind of controlled and modest effort you undertook in writing the history of General Mills

2. If History in the Hegelian sense is an illusion, what is the relation of history in the more modest sense to ascertaining the truth of Christianity?

i. The book that tells the story of God’s relation to man is the Bible...over the Old and New Testaments a vast story is told, prophets and kings and others are put before us, with the overall purpose of showing the long preparation for the coming of Christ and his salvific act

ii. What is the ordinary historian to make of this Sacred History? Can he not employ the techniques and methods of his craft to ascertain whether the events and interpretations of the Bible warrant our historical credence? Why not?

**what historical evidence do we have of, say, the birth of Christ and the deeds of his life (that is, apart from what the Bible tells us)?

**let the work begin...let it proceed and succeed on its own terms...what is the upshot?...well, it may be that, from the point of view of history in this modest sense, we can arrive at probability...it may even seem that historically we arrive at improbability...think of all the excitement created by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

iii. Imagine further that scholars decide to apply historico-critical techniques to the text of the Bible itself...they will want to ask what we can know of when, say, the Gospels were written...such experts have a way of presenting the results of their study with great confidence...e.g. the Gospels were written many generations after the events they record, they rest on an oral tradition, they exhibit the culture of their time, etc etc

**what did Jesus actually say?

**what did Jesus actually do? What are we to make of the account of miracles?

One school will suggest that, since miracles can’t happen, the accounts of miracles in the Gospels have to be explained in other ways...the predilection for the marvelous in those long ago times, for example...The upshot is a demythologizing which removes from credibility for the modern mind the Gospel miracles.

iv one response to this is to point out that such experts are seldom in agreement with one another...e.g. theories on the composition of the Gospels vary all over the place, making it impossible to say that “we now know” this or that about it...Claude Tresmontant has argued that the Gospels are Greek translations of Hebrew originals that are almost contemporaneous with the events narrated...his views have seldom had any effect...but one thing is clear, there is no common “expert” view

3. Climacus invites us to imagine this possibility...you are an historian, you get a grant from the NEH, a real whopper, enabling you to employ all kinds of assistants, and you go to work on an historical appraisal of the basic events recounted in the New Testament on Jesus...two quite different results might be reached

i. From the point of view of history, we can now say with confidence that Jesus was indeed born in Bethlehem, that not much is known of him until he is about 30 and then the story can be historically corroborated in all its main lines

ii Or there might be a negative result...history has now established that none of these events, by historical criteria, can be said to have taken place

Of course it is more likely that such a project would end up somewhere between those two extremes...but here is Climacus’ fundamental question: would such an historical research project establish the truth of Christianity?

This is analogous to the question: could biblical criticism, even if this were some one thing (as it is not) or even if all theories could be harmonized (which they cannot) establish that the Bible is the Word of God, inspired, etc?

Climacus comes at the matter thus. History is the effort to put us into the shoes of an eye witness. Very well, there were many witnesses of the words and deeds of Jesus. But only some believed, others did not. Was the view of the latter obscured? Did they blink and miss the key thing? Apparently not. A and B saw and heard exactly the same thing, yet A believed and B did not. (Say it is Jesus’ calling the dead and buried Lazarus out of his tomb three days later; both A and B witness the event.) Thus if history is the effort to give us what both A and B saw and heard, it cannot account for faith. History leaves the truth (the more than historical truth) of the events untouched.

iii. This seems right...history in the usual sense, the historico-critical method in any of its variants, be it as successful as one could wish, cannot establish the truth of, say, Jesus is both human and divine.

**this is doubtless why believers do not toss and turn sleeplessly every time some expert announces that he has debunked the New Testament account

**it also explains why believers are interested in such approaches, not as providing the foundation of the faith, but as perhaps casting oblique light on events which are for them the very meaning of History, a conviction which could not be reached of course by any research project of the kind suggested

iv but Climacus goes on to conclude that the historical establishment of the non-historicity of the events in the Gospel would matter not at all...that is, imagine that a research project unimaginably more successful than any actual one came to the conclusion that Jesus never existed...

**not only does Climacus say this wouldn’t matter for the believer, he almost expects this to be the result...that would make faith fly in the face of history, ordinary human knolwedge, be antagonistic to it, paradoxical, contradictory, etc.

**let me give some reasons why that seems wrong

4. During the crisis of Modernism in the Catholic Church, roughly at the beginning of the 20 th century, brought on by views as to the relationship between biblical scholarship and the faith, Pope St Pius X, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemns the view that the events we believe in were not historical events.

i. I assume that, like SK, he did not think that history could prove the object of faith as such, that is, that Jesus is human and divine

ii. but what we believe is that certain events occurred and thus were historical events...Jesus, the Son of God, was born, taught, wrought miracles, was crucified, rose from the dead. Indeed, these are historical events par excellence, the very meaning of History...to say that they are not historical would sound as if one were saying that they had not happened

The solution, I think, can be found in what may be called the asymmetry of history and faith.

** on the one hand, for reasons suggested earlier, our historical research could not establish the truth of the specifically religious belief that Jesus was both human and divine

**on the other hand, our beliefs about Jesus include and in a sense are grounded in (though not deduced from), historical events in the usual sense; think of the two eye-witnesses mentioned earlier...both saw the same historical event, and when the one believes that it conveys the truth that a man who could raise someone from the dead is what he claims to be, the Son of God, his belief incorporates the event he shares with the non-believer...that is, faith entails history, but history does not entail faith...that is what I mean by their asymmetry

***this must be what Pius X meant when he condemned the idea that our beliefs are not historical

4 What would Climacus say to that?

a. if historical research can only arrive at probable results, however highly probable, it would seem that these results can never compete on the same level as the believer’s acceptance of the biblical account

b. Thus he can compare the probability of history with the certainty of faith...and, since the historical is only probable, no historical research could definitively undermine the historicity of biblical events...perhaps that is why Climacus can be so insouciant about the possibility that they could be in conflict

and even on the assumption that the historian might conclude that it is highly probable that the events recounted in the New Testament occurred as narrated, all he could be doing is putting us in the position of a contemporary eye witness, and not every contemporary eye-witness was a believer

5. History and the Church

a. Climacus wants to stress the moment at which one accepts as true the claims of Christianity...and, just as history cannot ground those claims, so neither can the fact that many others have accepted them be the ground for my accepting them

b. The believer thus emerges as a lonely individual whose faith is unmediated by others...Climacus (and SK) are foes of mediation...there must be an immediate relation in faith, me and God...this seems to be an instance of taking a partial truth and attempting to make it the whole truth

the church, the community of believers, would seem on this view to be simply an accidental conjunction of discrete individual acts...just as modern political theory is said to be grounded on the isolated individual, so too is SK’s ecclesiology

**the clinker in this is that faith is a response to the Gospel message, it presupposes Scripture...but the canonical books of the Bible are so designated by the Church...many accounts had circulated and eventually some were judged to make up the true account...the Bible did not just drop out of the sky: it is in the sense just suggested a product of the Church, of the community of believers

**furthermore, that community is the authentic interpreter of the Bible... the Councils most often functioned as the adjudication of rival interpretations of the meaning of Christianity, of the Bible...one of conflicting views was judged to be true, de fide, and the other to be a distortion, therefore, anathema sit....

***the inescapable problem with the Protestant notion of private interpretation is that, for example, both the Arian and non-Arian view of Christ would seem to have equal status, to be true for those who held them...but this would make the truth Christ came to proclaim a mishmash...

As it happened, the history of Protestantism does not seem to take seriously its notion of private interpretation...churches were formed, there were doctrinal tests of orthodoxy in each of them...each Lutheran did not have to invent Lutheranism: he accepted it...but that entailed, within Protestantism, competing orthodoxies and the bewildering proliferation of churches...and always there were those called Evangelicals who criticized established churches by appeal to Scripture...but this, as indicated above, is a covert appeal to the authority of the teaching Church

Kierkegaard would seem to be such an evangelical critic of the established Danish Lutheran Church...he wanted it to admit that what it taught had nothing to do with the Christianity of the New Testament...the logic of his revolt has seemed to some to point him in the direction of the Church, of Catholicism, of which alas he knew little...his dissatisfaction with the established church reposes on the accuracy of his own interpretation of the New Testament...he seems remarkably optimistic that any honest reader of the NT would agree with his own reading and with his estimate of the established church...and if they didn’t?

We can see here the link between Kierkegaard and Newman; the latter saw that the only sure basis for what Christianity is was the Church in whose custody the faith and its passing on has been placed.

This does not detract from the truth of SK’s insistence that each of us must by himself accept that truth. But is there an objective truth to accept?

Next week we will be looking at Climacus’s effort to put the full burden of truth on one’s subjective acceptance of it.