Kierkegaard's Existentialism

[ITS]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?

[rcantu]

Kierkegaard knew what he believed in concerning his religious beliefs regarding the individual and church. He wanted to the church to come out of the norm of rituals and dead othodoxy. He attacked the Danish church because of its dead orthodoxy. The Church was not in a state of "becoming" as so often that Kierkegaard speaks of the Christian life.
This attack upon the church produced rumbles throughout the established Danish church, although Kierkegaard was going for the heart, Bishop Mynster and Professor Martensen. Kierkegaard expected a reformation. Kierkegaard wanted honesty from the clergy. He wanted truth to prevail.

[PT]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?
Kierkagaard's view affected the church in his day by creating tension between what was and what needed to be towards the truth of becoming a Christian. However, beyond that, I do think that K's existentialist thinking has caused people to look for a church in our time that "meets their needs" or provides "full service ministry" to the family...My concern is the "what is in it for me" mentality, seen even more intensely by people chosing a church for the "worship music" like a teenager choses a radio station....it works for me...with little regard for the truth that Kierkegaard pursued with passion. Though he (K) was committed, his philosophy has been abused to create alot of non-committed church goers. (in my opinion).

[jvalade]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?
Kierkegaard's existentialism benefitted pietistic and mystically-based Christian groups by giving experiential Christianity a rationalized "philosophical" basis for being preferred over more cultically or legalistically organized Christianity. This may have encouraged people to seek the freer, experiential worship styles and egalitarian community life more common in these types of groups, eventually forcing established churches to adopt those styles to compete.

On the other hand, his stance of distrusting "pure" reason makes it very difficult to support any sort of theological enterprise. His existentialism effectively marginalizes theology to the niche of a mysticism in the marketplace of ideas. The church can no longer be taken seriously in the modern world of secular values because there is no common language.

[jvalade]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?
Kierkagaard's view affected the church in his day by creating tension between what was and what needed to be towards the truth of becoming a Christian. However, beyond that, I do think that K's existentialist thinking has caused people to look for a church in our time that "meets their needs" or provides "full service ministry" to the family...My concern is the "what is in it for me" mentality, seen even more intensely by people chosing a church for the "worship music" like a teenager choses a radio station....it works for me...with little regard for the truth that Kierkegaard pursued with passion. Though he (K) was committed, his philosophy has been abused to create alot of non-committed church goers. (in my opinion).
Thank you for this well-thought-out critique. I think that Kierkegaard probably hoped people would get the big picture that you cannot be an individual without interacting with a community. His experience was of a state church that discouraged "competitors". If there is only one church, you hope that it all reforms together. Only in North American-style freedom of religion do you get a multitude of forms to choose from.

Any existentialist philosophy, by the nature of existentialism, should be applied only to its own context. Perhaps we need a North American version of existentialism that somehow finds a way to build community out of almost infinite choices.

I enjoyed your comments. Thanks.
John

[Brain]

Kierkegaard has been called a Christian existentialist, a theologian the Father of Existentialism, a literary critic, a humorist, a psychologist, a poet, and a philosopher. Two of his popular ideas are "subjectivity" and the "leap to faith," popularly referred to as the "leap of faith." The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. It is not so much a rational decision, as it is transcending rationality in favour of something more uncanny, that is, faith. As such he thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt that God exists; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought, without which the faith would have no real substance. Doubt is an essential element of faith, an underpinning. In plain words, to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God.

Kierkegaard also stressed the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection. He argued in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity"; that is, that the self is the ultimate governor of what life is and what life means. He also believed in the infinity of the self, explaining that the self could not be fully known or understood, because it is infinite. In this way his thought reflects the Christian idea of the soul, which is immortal; but Kierkegaard was not speaking about the immortality of the self as much as the depth of the soul, of a person's being.

[kaepp]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?

It is a bit difficult to determine how much of Kierkegaard's own form of existentialism influenced the church versus the influence of later and more radical thinkers such as Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann. Although I agree that his views on subjective truth have negatively influenced later thinkers, I would like to focus here on a few positive influences of Kierkegaard's legacy.

Kierkegaard's radical challenge to the state church was in line with the Reformers who challenged the Catholic Church of the 16th century. Kierkegaard observed a Christianity that was dead becuase it was defined by mere participation in the church and because it excluded genuine life-changing faith. In his challenge to the state church of Denmark, I think that Kierkegaard not only reinvigorated Christianity in his own country, but also left an example for Christians worlwide. He called the church to an Abrahamic faith.

I also think that Kierkegaard's focus on individualism has some positive ramifications for the church. Kierkegaard felt that the individual who went with the status quo was not really existing. There is a challenge there for members of the body of Christ to be set apart from the world and to go against the status quo. I think that this view was partially what contributed to Kierkegaard having the courage to stand up to the State Church. He was willing to sacrifice comfort, reputation, etc. for the sake of a higher cause...that is his definition of true existence.

I don't really have a comment about Kierkegaard's influence on worship because I think that it would be speculation. I don't recall reading anything about his views on worship. There are certainly individuals in the church who champion a certain subjectivity in worship, but I'm not sure that Kierkegaard was directly responsible for such a view.

With regard to community life, Kierkegaard envisioned a group of individuals who were acutely aware of their own existence and the freedom that comes along with that existence, but also with an awareness of other individuals around them. I think that Kierkegaard desired a Christian community in which "flock morality" was abandoned and individuals made radical decisions based in a deep faith in God. That is a very relevant message to the church of the 21st century.

[kaepp]

How has Kierkegaard's existentialism affected the church? The worship service? Community life?
Kierkagaard's view affected the church in his day by creating tension between what was and what needed to be towards the truth of becoming a Christian. However, beyond that, I do think that K's existentialist thinking has caused people to look for a church in our time that "meets their needs" or provides "full service ministry" to the family...My concern is the "what is in it for me" mentality, seen even more intensely by people chosing a church for the "worship music" like a teenager choses a radio station....it works for me...with little regard for the truth that Kierkegaard pursued with passion. Though he (K) was committed, his philosophy has been abused to create alot of non-committed church goers. (in my opinion).

I agree with this post in feeling that the problems of subjectivity with regard to truth, biblical interpretation, and worship style in the modern church are not to be pinned on Kierkegaard. I think that postmodern thought is a more likely culprit than 19th century existentialism. In my opinion, Kierkegaard did not view individualism or subjectivity as an end to itself, but as a means to the end of achieving the "Religious Stage" of the Christian life.

[ContemporaryTheoStudent]

Kierkegaard renewed the focus on individual members of a large state church, an action with both potentially positive and negative ramifications. For individuals who are members of large and especially national churches (such as the Churches of England or Scotland), his message is an important reminder to individual believers that their individual relationships with God must be nourished and characterized by personal passion and devotion. Membership in and communal identity with a body of believers is not sufficient for Christian life; we are each to love to Lord individually and uniquely with our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies. His message can be negatively received by Christians who are overly individualistic in their approach to the faith [American “church-hoppers” come to mind], who neglect investment in a local body of believers. Such Christians might find in Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual believer confirmation of their impoverished version of Christian life.

[ContemporaryTheoStudent]

I agree with many of these posts regarding Kierkegaard's readers' tendency to neglect his underlying call to radical and sacrificial faith and trust in God's Word even when it flies in the face of community ethics, while emphasizing K's portrait of the Christian as a "lone ranger," who does not to be responsible to a community of faith. What would it look like if a modern “Knight of Faith” radically obeyed God’s desire to see the church united as one, and to see local bodies functioning with healthy portions of church discipline, spiritual gifts, community evangelism, and social justice?

[petertan]

Kierkegaard represents a reaction against the whole trend of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. Abstract consciousness and abstract thought is rejected for the concrete spiritual individual, with his inwardness and subjectivity. He objects to Hegel's stress on the Universal, his pantheism, his all-embracing unity of the Logos, his elimination of all risks. He objects to his speculative philosophy as a whole to which the philosopher does not commit himself or in which he is not engaged. Philosophy as well as religion is not something to be talked about, but to be lived. He defends the Particular against the Universal. He is concerned with the individual, the singularity of the individual and the human condition in which he is found. This is the standpoint of the intuitionism of particular situations. For Kierkegaard, the essential truth is subjective or internal; or "truth is subjectivity". Kierkegaard objected to Hegel's all comprehensive World-Mind in which there is little room for the individual. He therefore introduces the category of the individual, by which he means "the single, finite, responsible, simple, suffering and guilty creature, who has to make a decision in face of God and who consequently is more interested in ethical questions and in salvation than in abstract speculations."

Why did Kierkegaard suddenly get a hearing and what accounts for the rise of modern existentialism? The key lies in the fact of alienation. There is a feeling of estrangement among modern man, which has increased considerably with the further development of the Industrial Revolution, the collectivization tied to a machine age and the gradual but definite depersonalization of man. There is a rupture between human beings and their objects, between human beings and other human beings, or between human beings and the natural world, or even between human beings and their own creations in art, science and society.

With the thought of estrangement of Kierkegaard, the church is not separate men but united men who are separated from the rest. This united organization is the result of estrangement and the result of efforts overcoming the estrangement, not mentioning the call by divine power from above. In such understanding, the church should be distinctively standing out from the secular society, which is in the trend of estrangement until fully scattered.

The core value for individual to overcome the estrangement is to reconcile to God, who is the source and destination of life of man. The worship of each Christian to God is the way to establish the constant relationship with God and effective method in keeping the involved individual from re-estranging with God. Also, in the concept of existentialism, the existence is the process of progress, constant worship to God will update each individual's Christian ship in daily basis.

While the community life consists of believers’ and nonbelievers', Christian existentialism stands for the trend leading to the destination God pointed; while the non-Christian existentialism pointed to non-existence. The community life is the territory temporarily existed and subjects to the further estrangement and separation. It is useless to try to keep it unchanged for the long-run; whatever the Christians can do is to recruit as more as possible individuals and make them go along with the trend God pointed.