Kierkegaard: The Swindlers Who Understood

Soren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855) was a strange, brilliant, sorrowful Dane who spent his short life attacking the one thing almost no one else would: comfortable, official, everybody's-already-a-Christian Christendom. He is often called the father of existentialism, but underneath the philosophy he was a deeply Christian writer with a single burning question: not "is it true?" but "will you actually live it?" His most famous jab still lands like a slap, because it names something we all do.

That is the whole man in one paragraph. The problem with the faith was never that it was too hard to understand. The problem was that we understood it too well, and dodged. It is the same thing James said, "be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves" (James 1:22), and the same thing this site keeps returning to (see Faith Is a Verb): a faith that does not act is not yet faith.

The mirror you will not look into

His sharpest book on this is For Self-Examination, where he takes up an image straight out of James: the Word of God is a mirror. The whole danger, Kierkegaard warns, is that we slowly learn to look at the mirror instead of seeing ourselves in it. We become connoisseurs of the glass, its history, its framing, the endless debates over its translation, anything at all except the face it is showing us. James had already drawn the same picture: "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was" (James 1:23-24). Kierkegaard's one rule for reading Scripture was brutal and freeing: read it as a letter addressed to you, by name, and then go and do the first thing it tells you, at once, before the cleverness has had time to talk you back out of it. It is the same instinct behind this site's Story page, to stop arguing with the text long enough to actually hear it.

Faith as the leap of the whole self

For Kierkegaard, faith was never cool, detached agreement. It was a passionate commitment of the entire self, a "leap" made without the safety net of proof, the way a marriage or a vocation is chosen. He saw that freedom itself is dizzying. In The Concept of Anxiety he described our anxiety as a kind of vertigo of freedom, the swimming head of a creature that can choose and knows it. Standing before God, able to decide and unable to escape the deciding, is its own quiet terror; and the easiest escape is to dissolve into the crowd, where no single person ever has to answer for anything. Kierkegaard spent his whole life refusing that escape.

His psychology: despair is not being your true self

Long before modern psychology, Kierkegaard mapped the inner life with terrifying precision. In The Sickness Unto Death he defined despair not as ordinary sadness but as a broken relationship of the self to itself and to God: the refusal, or the quiet failure, to become the self you were actually made to be. A man can be in despair, he argued, and have no notion of it, mistaking a comfortable numbness for health.

And the loss happens almost without a sound. Lose an arm, a leg, a sum of money, a spouse, and the whole world notices and sympathizes; but a man can lose his very self, the deepest thing he has, and go on for years as though nothing at all had gone missing. This is the gospel's own concern in modern dress: "what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). The self is not finally healed by self-help, but by being grounded, transparently, in the God who made it.

Fear and Trembling: the knight of faith

Nowhere did Kierkegaard press the leap harder than in Fear and Trembling, his long, circling meditation on Abraham climbing Moriah with the fire, the knife, and his only son (Genesis 22). The ethical law could not be plainer: a father does not raise the knife over his child. Yet God commands it, Abraham sets out to obey, and in that obedience he becomes for Kierkegaard the one figure who shows what faith truly costs. He gave it a forbidding name, the "teleological suspension of the ethical," the dreadful possibility that the same God who gave the moral law can, for a purpose of his own, require of one man something the law itself forbids, so that the man of faith must answer to God before he answers to the rule. The tragic hero, Kierkegaard said, the general who sacrifices his daughter to launch the fleet, can at least be understood; the nation weeps with him and calls him noble. Abraham can explain himself to no one, because faith is not a position you argue, it is a thing you do, alone, before God. And here is the part that is easy to miss: Abraham does not trudge up the mountain already resigned to his loss. He believes, against every reasonable expectation, that he will have Isaac back, "by virtue of the absurd," trusting that the God who gives the command is the God who keeps the promise. The letter to the Hebrews says the same thing in plainer words, that Abraham believed "God was able to raise him up, even from the dead" (Hebrews 11:17-19). That is the knight of faith: not a man who has stopped loving what he is told to give up, but a man who gives it up with open hands and trusts God for what comes next.

Marriage and the weight of choosing

In Either/Or Kierkegaard set two whole ways of living side by side: the aesthetic life, which chases pleasure and possibility and never commits, and the ethical life, which chooses, binds itself, and in marriage and duty actually becomes a self. His famous warning to the man who will not commit, "do it or do not do it, you will regret both," is a satire of the aesthete who keeps every option open and so never truly lives. For Kierkegaard, marriage was not the end of freedom but its fulfillment, the place where a wavering self finally stands somewhere. It is a strikingly biblical instinct: love is proven not in feeling but in covenant kept (see Marriage, and the Love That Fulfills the Law).

Where this lands

Read Kierkegaard when your faith has gone comfortable, when you have started understanding the Bible a little too conveniently. He will not let you stay a swindler. "Life can only be understood backwards," he wrote, "but it must be lived forwards." You cannot wait until it all makes sense to obey; you obey, and walk, and the understanding comes behind you. That is not the enemy of grace. It is what grace, once it has truly gripped a person, looks like from the inside.

Related: the Story of the whole Bible, Faith Is a Verb, Marriage, C.S. Lewis, and The Screwtape tribute. Kierkegaard died in 1855; his works are public domain in the original Danish, and the short English quotations here are offered under fair use, attributed to their works, in the translations Chris has long kept. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.