Soren Kierkegaard has a most
remarkable sentence in his
work, Concluding
Unscientific
Postscript. He
wrote, "When
faith thus begins to lose its passion,
when faith begins to cease to be faith,
then a proof becomes necessary so as to command respect from the side
of
unbelief."(1) This insight has application to
many areas on the modern
scene, but in this paper it will be seen in relation to how one becomes
a
Christian. The search for security outside the commitment
of faith is a quality
of paganism, not Christianity. "Christianity is precisely an affair of
spirit, and so of subjectivity, and so of inwardness."(2)
Kierkegaard's emphasis on
subjectivity may be offensive to some because
of the influence of Francis Schaeffer, but this is an overreaction to a
needed
influence in Kierkegaard's time, in which he stressed the
subjective because
that was so lacking in his day. Sometimes we make distinctions between
knowing
God and knowing about God. The objective is knowing about God,
and the subjective is knowing
God. The
subjective requires
faith, the objective does not.
Louis
P. Pojman wrote:
All
objective inquiry is finite or relative inquiry and, thus, is relative
to some higher
interest; but Christianity demands infinite interest; absolute and total
involvement of the subject in one's eternal happiness via the
Paradox. Hence if
one is infinitely interested in Christianity, one cannot be finitely
interested
in it.(3)
This infinity of interest is
a requirement of faith, not knowledge.
Kierkegaard was concerned that
if one bases one's eternal happiness upon
the sacrament of baptism one becomes a "comic figure")4
)
How does one know
of one's baptism? Parents
may tell of it, the church has a record, the person may have a
certificate, but
the person himself does not really know, especially when
eternity hangs in the
balance. If baptism is so important it would have been better to wait
until
adulthood so that the individual would know, or even better yet,
it should be
repeated like the Lord's Supper is repeated, and the person would know
for sure
of his baptismal security.
Suppose that a man were
concerned for his eternal wellbeing to the point
that he questioned whether he had any right to call himself a
Christian. If
married
, his wife would say to him:
Dear
husband of mine, how can you get such notions into your head? How can
you doubt
that you are a Christian? Are you not a Dane, and does not
the geography say
that the Lutheran form of the Christian religion is the ruling
religion of
Denmark? For you are surely not a Jew, nor are you a Mohammeda
n; what then can
you be if not a Christian? It is a thousand years since paganism was
driven out
of Denmark, so I know you are not a pagan. Do you not perform
your duties at
the office like a conscientious civil servant; are you not a good
citizen of a
Christian nation, a Lutheran Christian state? So then of course you
must
be a
Christian.5
Kierkegaard rejected this
objective way of viewing life for a subjective approach.
It
is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in
subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively,
Christianity has absolutely no existence.6
Subjectivity
means to encounter the paradox, the God-man in a way of commitment and
faith.
If one knows all the facts of Christianity, one is merely a historian,
not a
believer. To be a believer is only possible through faith. Hence the
task of
becoming subjective is the highest task one faces. 7
Kierkegaard noted: "To
know a confession of faith by rote is paganism, because Christianity is
inwardness."8
With
these comments as a background, Kierkegaard had some pointed words
about
baptism. Infant baptism appeared to be somewhat comic for him.
One can become a
Christian when a child is a week old and the church has "managed to
transform Christ into 'a friend of tiny tots'."9 People
are Christians
before they know what Christianity is all
about. The child has no understanding of the paradox, let alone an
understanding of God. The child cannot understand
the humiliation of God in
the incarnation nor the extent of the wonder that the Almighty was laid
in a
manager and swaddled in rags. Even more difficult is the inability
of the child
to understand that Christ came "into the world in order to suffer. "10 Additionally, one finds
that giving up Christianity is not easy
and living a lukewarm
religious life is quite acceptable. Christianity becomes
important only at birth and at death.
The child is baptized at
infancy and as soon as possible indoctrination
occurs. But one cannot cram Christianity into a child. What is forced
into the
child
is "idyllic mythology. "11 The process, however, involves an
inversion of theology. The sacrament of
baptism involves bringing the innocent
child to God
or Christ.12
But in Christianity it is precisely the sinner who
encounters the paradox. The
child is without sin-consciousness; only the maturing human has
that.
Kierkegaard discoursed on
Matthew 19 where Christ said,
"Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of
such is the kingdom of
heaven." Among other questions he raised, is this:
Why did he not say, "Go out and baptize little children"?13 Kierkegaard went so far as to say that
infant
baptism leads to heterodoxy.
One
accentuates the sacrament of baptism with such exorbitant
orthodoxy that one
actually becomes heterodox on the dogma of regeneration, forgetting
the
objection raised by Nicodemus and the reply to it, because with
hyper-orthodoxy
one decrees that a little child has actually become a Christian by
being
baptized.14
When then does one become a
Christian, according to Kierkegaard? It is
not the age of childhood, infancy, but the more advanced age, the age of
maturity. That is the time when a person
will decide about being a Christian or not. I5 To
force the child's existence into decisive Christian categories is
akin to rape
and great stupidity.
In the early ages of
Christianity the task of the missionary was not to
baptize, but to bring people to faith in Christ. It is easier to bring
people
t
o Christ in the early centuries than in Kierkegaard's nineteenth
century. The
problem is that when everyone is a Christian, no one is a Christian.
Even
the
clerics complained
that
among the baptized there are so few Christians, that almost all, except
for an
immortal little band, are spiritless baptized pagans--which
seems to indicate
that baptism cannot be the decisive factor with respect to
becoming a
Christian, not even according to the latter view of thos
e who in the first form
insist upon it as decisive with respect to becoming a Christian.16
Rather than believing a creed,
or the doctrines of the church, or being
baptized, Christianity is something different. It is related to
faith and
an
infant cannot have faith. It cannot make a commitment that is required
by
Kierkegaard for inwardness. He had a rather unusual definition
that fits only
the believer. "Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion
of
the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness, which in
this instance is
intensified to the utmost degree. "17 Faith in the paradox does not
have the certainty of math,
but its own certainty.
The absurd--the fact that God became man--seems
repelling to the mind of man, but it is held fast by commitment and
intensified
in man's life.
That is what it means to become a Christian. Nothing else will
do for Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard placed a comment
in one of his brief imaginary conversations
that defended his orthodoxy in an unusual way.
He claimed: "It is certain
all the same that I am a true orthodox believer, one who abominates the
Baptists."18 In spite of this comment
Kierkegaard
operated in a position that is quite
consistent with the Baptist emphasis.
Concluding Unscientific
Postscript was
published in 1846. In the last year of his life, 1855, Kierkegaard
became increasingly critical of the
established church and its theology. It was his intention
to re-introduce
Christianity into "Christendom." The church was in a process of
making a fool
of God. It was playing Christianity. He even raised the question
of whether it would not be better for a child to be ignorant of
Christianity
until an
appropriate age is reached so that the child would know that
Christianity
is something qualitatively different from "Christian" culture.
In August 1855, he described a
typical man who had no religion and even
believed that reading God's Word at home would make him
ridiculous in the eyes
of anyone who could know. But he married a wife, had a child and a
crisis came.
Suddenly, he must have a religion. They took
the child to the priest who
sprinkled the child with water three times, "and this they dared to
present to God under the name of Christian baptism. "19
Kierkegaard contrasted this to the disciples of Jesus who had reached the age of discretion and who
"promised to be willing
to live as sacrificed men in
this world of falsehood and evil."20
Why
did the priests baptize before the age of
discretion? Kierkegaard charged that the priests understood that
their
"trade would not
amount to much “ 21 This is to say that many
people would not be baptized if they were given the conscious decision
to make
for themselves.
Since everyone was baptized in the state church, then it could
not but be true that many uncommitted people were merely
. baptized pagans. Infant
baptism made about as much sense as infant
marriage to Kierkegaard. Infant marriage does not have the most
important
ingredient, which is commitment. The same holds true for infant
baptism.
When a person presumes that
one has been a Christian from two weeks after
birth, it becomes more difficult to become a Christian later.
But Kierkegaard
insisted that it is possible and necessary. The child cannot have a
consciousness
of sin although it is required in the New Testament. 22
Baptism of infants leads to
another problem, confirmation. Since infant
baptism does not involve the infant personally, confirmation assumes
the
presence of a real person. The age of fourteen or fifteen
is chosen because it is
assumed that he is a man of sorts. But from the standpoint
of the father, when
it is a question of money, the child is not dry behind the ears. On
this
Kierkegaard noted:
Confirmation
then is easily seen to be far deeper nonsense than infant baptism,
precisely
because confirmation claims to supply what was
lacking in infant baptism: a
real personality which can consciously assume responsibility for a vow
which
has to do with the decision of an eternal blessedness.23
If this decision were left
to a more mature age, a person may make the decision not to be
"feignedly
Christian. "24
According to Kierkegaard, the
priests were regarded as responsible for
this. They had misled people even though they took an oath
on the New Testament.
They were perjured liars, people who made a joke of God. In
Denmark,
Kierkegaard claimed, Christianity did not
exist. Instead the "little
religiousness there is in the land is at the very most ... Judaism."25
Kierkegaard's intense desire
to introduce Christianity into Christendom
led to radical statements about the lack of real commitment to
Jesus Christ in
a personal way. He wrote: "I hereby repeat my protest, not softened but
sharpened: I would rather gamble, carouse,
fornicate, steal, murder, than take
part in making a fool of God."26 For Kierkegaard, baptism of infants
and
confirmation were two ways
that people side-stepped commitment to Christ and
participated in making a fool of God:
NOTES
lSoren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, trans.
David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941),31.
2Ibid., 42.
3Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity, University, AL:University of
Alabama Press, 1984),
46.
4Kierkegaard,
42 ..
5Ibid., 49.
6Ibid., 116.
7Ibid., 146.
8Ibid., 201.
9Ibid .• 521.
10Ibid .• 529
ll Ibid .• 523.
12Ibid .• 524.
13Ibid .• 525.
14Ibid .• 527.
15Ibid .• 532.
16Ibid .• 539.
17Ibid .• 540
18Ibid .• 426.
19Soren Kierkegaard. Attack upon "Christendom" (Boston: The Beacon Press. 1956). 205.
2O
Ibid.
21Ibid
206.
22Ibid .• 213.
23Ibid .• 218.
24Ibid.
25Ibld
190.
26Ibid .• 20.
This article appeared in The Theological Educator, Fall,
1990, pp.5-11