KIERKEGAARD, CHRISTOLOGY, AND THE NEW AGE
 
Dallas M. Roark Professor of Philosophy, Emporia State University

        There used to be an old song about the "music going 'round and 'round, and it comes out here." Somewhere in my youth, about fifty years ago, I heard the song. Ideology also goes round and round, but I am not sure that it comes out anywhere. Ideologies come and go and come again. Linking together the three terms of the title of this paper appears strange, but the ideas Kierkegaard confronted in his culture now come up again under new disguises; however, the same issues are involved.
        Much of what Kierkegaard said about Christology comes in a little book called Philosophical Fragments and although the word Christ does not appear in the work, it is unmistak­able in its application. (1)   Kierkegaard was a master of indirect­ness; in spite of this it is impossible to read the work without asking the question concerning the person involved.
The New Age thought, on the other hand, not existing in its historical form in Kierkegaard's time, yet has great similarities to the view of Hegel. Therefore many of the questions Kierkegaard raised about Hegel are also relevant to the New Age ideology.
        The real issue of life is: How is knowledge of God possi­ble? The answer of Kierkegaard is that it comes from outside of man, and the answer of Hegel, and the modern New Agers is that it comes from within man. The New Agers turn anthropology into theology.
        The Fragments set forth two contrasting proposals on how knowledge of God is possible. The first reflects on Hegel but Socrates is used as the front illustration. For the Socratic mode, recollection was the answer. Man is born with all knowledge, and the role of a teacher was merely that of a questioner, an examiner. As the process of questioning continued the examined (peerson)  recalled the answer to the questions. This knowledge came from man's pre-existence and since man's pre-existence comes from the God, the man's "self ­knowledge is a knowledge of God" (2)   Consequently, a histori­cal point of departure is irrelevant.3
        Shirley MacLaine has written, "If one says audibly 'I am God,' the sound vibrations literally align the energies of the body to a higher attunement."(4)   One cannot help raising the obvious question, why would human beings who are gods even need channelers or teachers or advisors? It is obvious to the gurus of the New Age since it is a source of immense income. If you hold a seminar with one thousand in atten­dance, each paying $400 for a chair, then one would find the promotion of channelling to be very profitable. But if everyone is God and has the highest reality within himself, then it is stupid to submit to a fellow God for instruction. Socrates was an honest man, he did not take money for enlightening others.
        While we are dealing with Soren Kierkegaard's use of Socrates, it is really Hegel who is under attack. Hegel's tendency toward pantheism made man a sub-unit of the Divine. The Absolute became conscious in man, everyone is a little Christ, and hence everyone knows everything about God. One only needs to meditate to know what God is like. Truth about God is not related to a historical point 'of departure. It is not time-bound and is continually in a process of rediscovery. As long as man is conceived as divine, religious historical events are unimportant. The New Age ideology has reconstructed the pantheistic tendencies in philosophy and they focus on the inner being of man; man is his own source of information of the Absolute. Some are better than others because they have been trained to medi­tate, but all have the potential of declaring what the Absolute is like.
        In contrast, Kierkegaard poses that a historical point of departure is important only if one is in error. There is good sense in the use of the word "error" for it implies a willfulness that is developed later in the application of the idea of the Teacher, but for the moment it would also make sense to say that man is in a state of ignorance. There are no references to Locke in the Fragments, but there are some similarities between Kierkegaard's position and Locke's idea about being in ignorance and the blank mind analogy. At any rate, Kierkegaard stresses the "moment." The moment relates to the before and after of knowing, particularly knowing about God. "The seeker must be destitute of the Truth up to the very moment of his learning it ..." 5
        If the learner is in a state of error (ignorance), there is no way for the learner to learn the Truth unless the Teacher brings it to him. The Teacher is more than a teacher, a Socrates who asks questions. This teacher is God and he gives the condition for understanding the truth. The condition supposes several things for Kierkegaard: (1) the learner becomes aware of sin, a condition in which the learner has at one point chosen badly and is now in bondage and cannot free himself, (2) he has to have a deliverer from this bondage who is a Savior, (3) this person is also called Redeemer because he redeemed the learner form his bondage, and (4) since there is guilt, the Teacher involves himself in taking away wrath from the learner, now described as Atonement.
        In pantheism in its various forms, most of the above points are rejected. Pantheism means that All is God and God is All. There is no real sin since there is only one reality that is good, the Absolute. There is no deliverer, you are your own deliverer. If there is a teacher, he/she is only a way-shower not a way-maker. No teacher, channel er, or guru would be a redeemer in the traditional sense of the term. But more alarming is the New Age proclamation that there is no evil. J. Z. Knight, the channeler who claims that a thirty-five thou­sand year old man named Ramtha speaks through her, claims that there is nothing wrong, not even murder. Henry Gordon quotes Knight's biographer, "Suppose a man feels the need to rape and kill a child? You might expect Ramtha would invoke karma to explain how such crimes are pun­ished, but no--he is down on karma. It no more exists than hell or Satan. You never have to pay for anything." (6)
        In Kierkegaard, the moment is so important and the Teacher does for the learner what he could not do for himself. The learner becomes a person of a different quality, as in a new creature. His life goes in a different direction and this Kierkegaard calls conversion. His sadness in remaining in the old life is called repentance. This dramatic change of knowing and understanding is like moving from non-being to being and is called the new birth. This transition is something that a human cannot do by oneself. and hence is only possible by the means of the Divine Teacher.(7)  The Socratic admonition to "know thyself' is not possible without the Divine Teacher. Moreover, it is not possible to know the Divine Teacher by mere inward reflection.
        The heart of Kierkegaard's Christology is developed in chapter two of the Fragments under the title "God as Teacher and Savior: An Essay of the Imagination." What is so patently obvious upon reading it. is its indirect reference to Jesus, the Christ. the incarnate Word of God. The incarnation is motivated by love. God is not in need of the learner, the human. and cannot be moved by some "need" to reveal himself. Love is the motive and has the goal of winning the learner.8 Soren Kierkegaard claims that love seeks equality and it is triumphant "when it makes that which was unequal equal in love" (9)  Love is the motivation of the incarnation, because it seeks equality between two unequals, God and man. The equality is realized in the form of a servant so that in Jesus one can say that God walked the shores of Galilee. he raised the dead. he wept over the death of a loved one; moreover, he suffered hunger, thirst, and even death. His whole life was one of suffering borne in love.
        In contrast, New Age style of thinking starts with the importance of thinking equality in a different way. In the New Age God and man are the same. Man knows God by inward­ness, rather than outward revelation. There is no separation between the Absolute and man, hence there is no redemption needed.
        Kierkegaard tells a wonderful story illustrating the power of love to bring equality. It is a two-tiered story moving on two levels between God and his love, and man and his love. A king falls in love with a commoner. He wants to marry her, but his kingly thoughts begin to disturb him. What is at issue is the difference between them: he is a king and she is a commoner. Three solutions exist for the problem. First, the king can marry her, but he is afraid that the memory of their inequity will always be a problem for her, and the lover desires most of all the happiness of the beloved. Second, the king could display his greatness, power, and glory to her and she could do homage to him as her king. Anyone suggesting this to the king would probably lose his head because of committing treason against his beloved. The third option is only implied in the story. The king can become a commoner and love her as an equal.
        The second level to the story is that the king is God who loves man and seeks a relationship of love with man. God could accept man as he is and the "marriage" would take place. There is always suspicion about the Lover. The second solution for God would be to show his greatness, power, and glory and man would worship him as his God. This was not satisfactory to the king nor to God because what is desired is the glorification of the Beloved, not the king or God. In the case of God, there is an additional problem. It is seen in the marvelous statement: "There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought that no man could see God and live--Who grasps the contra­diction of sorrow; not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved!" (10)
        If God does not reveal himself, we do not know of his love at all, and for that matter it is true of humans. If a boy does not tell a girl he loves her, she will probably go marry someone else. But if God does reveal his greatness, power, and glory, then it is the death of the beloved. The solution is another way of declaring God's love--the way of self-revelation in the incarnation. God is the teacher in Jesus Christ who teaches us what no human being can teach about God. Only God can reveal God. But it is God in human form, a true form, not an illusion, or mere outer garment, but God incarnate. Jesus taught about God whom no man could really know.
        Underlying this concept of God and the incarnation is the almost forgotten idea of God's holiness. Modern thought in its pantheistic tendencies is without a doctrine of holiness. Holiness means two things: God is morally pure, and he is not identified with the material world. When the geography of reality and God, or God and the world, are regarded as two different ways of talking about the same thing, then there is no holiness possible. Given this framework of geographical identity of God, then whatever goes on in the world of God is part of his reality and evil must be accepted as part of that reality. Frequently a doctrine of illusion, or maya, is accepted to deal with evil. Such a move may be acceptable to the New Age thought, but it is not compatible with any idea of holi­ness. Evil is too serious to whitewash as an illusion. The Holocaust can hardly be called a bad case of erroneous thinking.
        New Age thought has greater popular appeal than Hegel ever did. But at least he appealed to rationality. Much of the New Age is simply "mumbo-jumbo." Kierkegaard has not exactly become a household name, but he raised issues concerning knowledge about God that still stand as a challenge to New Age concepts about God. We have a crisis in the theological world today concerning which conception of God we will accept. Will it be a pantheistic world view with all the implications of turning theology into anthropology, or will it be a theistic view in which we confess that we do not know anything really significant about God until he reveals himself? The Christian maintains, along with Kierkegaard, that this has happened in Jesus. We have meaningful knowledge, knowledge that involves demanding moral standards, and a New Covenant that is established to guarantee the believer of forgiveness of sin and the gift of everlasting life.

NOTES
lSoren Klerkegaard. Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1936).
2Kierkegaard. 7.
31bid .. 8.
4Shirley MacLaine. Dancing in the Light (New York: Bantam Books. 1985), 119.
5Kierkegaard.9.
6Henry Gordon. Channeling into the New Age (Buffalo. New York: Prometheus Books. 1988). 96:
7Kierkegaard. 14.
8Ibid .. 19.
9Ibid .. 20.
lO Ibid .. 23.

This Article appeared in the Spring, 1991, issue of the Theological Educator.