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. He put the charge more bluntly than that in his journals, and it is the sentence this page is named for:

"The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly."

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers

And he names the machinery: "Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close."

Two things about that, said plainly. It is a hard word aimed at people like the ones who build sites like this one, and it should be left hard. And a note on sourcing, because this site holds itself to it: the journals exist in English only in translations still under copyright, so these are short excerpts under fair use rather than something we can set beside the Fathers in our own library. His Fear and Trembling, which we do hold in the public-domain Hollander translation, is quoted at length further down.

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.

The oldest readers split on Abraham, and one of them anticipates him

Everything in Fear and Trembling turns on whether Abraham's act can be understood. Kierkegaard says no: it is a suspension of the ethical, a thing that cannot be explained to anyone, and Abraham cannot even explain it to himself. It is worth knowing that the church had been arguing about exactly this for fourteen centuries before him, and had gone both ways.

Start with the one piece of evidence Kierkegaard has to get past. Hebrews does not leave Abraham without a thought in his head. It gives him a reason: "By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac" (Hebrews 11:17), "Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure" (Hebrews 11:19). Accounting. It is a word for reckoning something out.

Augustine takes that at face value, and it dissolves the paradox. Abraham, "holding fast from the first the promise which behoved to be fulfilled through this son whom God had ordered him to slay, did not doubt that he... would be restored to him when he had offered him up. It is in this way the passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews is also to be understood." On that reading Abraham is not beyond reason at all. He has two divine commitments that appear to collide, he trusts both, and he concludes that God will have to raise the boy. That is a man counting up promises, not a knight of faith alone on a mountain.

And Genesis backs Augustine, in Abraham's own mouth. At the foot of the mountain he tells the servants: "Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you" (Genesis 22:5) (the chapter read whole is in The Binding of Isaac). Come again to you, plural, both of us. And when Isaac, carrying the wood, asks where the lamb is, he answers "My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:8).

That is the hardest fact for the silent-Abraham reading. He is not mute and he is not incoherent. Twice, out loud, to two different audiences, he says he expects to come back down the mountain with his son. Kierkegaard's Abraham cannot speak; Genesis's Abraham speaks twice, and what he says is exactly what Hebrews says he was reckoning.

And here is the decisive thing, in Kierkegaard's own retelling. He rewrites the journey several times in the book, and this is how it goes: "It was in the early morning, Abraham arose betimes and had his asses saddled. He departed from his tent, and Isaac with him; but Sarah looked out of the window after them until they were out of sight. Silently they rode for three days; but on the fourth morning Abraham said not a word."

Silently. Said not a word. That silence is doing the work of the whole book, and Kierkegaard put it there. Genesis has Abraham speak twice on that journey, once to the servants and once to Isaac, and both times he says he expects the boy to live. The text Kierkegaard needs is not quite the text that exists.

To be fair to him, he does not have Abraham expecting to lose Isaac either. His knight makes "the movement of faith... by virtue of the absurd, but, note well, in such wise that one does not lose the things of this world but wholly and entirely regains them." So Kierkegaard and Augustine agree about what Abraham expected. They divide entirely on whether he reached it by reasoning or by something that cannot be reasoned to at all — and Hebrews uses the word "accounting."

Chrysostom leans the other way, and sounds remarkably like Kierkegaard. With Abel and Noah and Enoch, he says, "there was an opposition of reasonings only, and it was necessary to go beyond human reasonings; in this case it was necessary not only to go beyond human reasonings, but to manifest also something more." Something more than going beyond reasoning. He does not say what, and the reticence is the point.

What that does to the argument. Kierkegaard is not an innovation; he is a late entry in an old dispute, and he is on Chrysostom's side of it. But Augustine's objection is the serious one and it comes with a text: Hebrews supplies a reason, and if the reason is real then the leap has a floor under it. That is not a small correction, because a faith that reckons on God's character is available to ordinary people in ordinary trouble, and a faith that must be incomprehensible is not.

This page does not close it, and neither did the fourteen centuries. But it will say where it leans, and why. We lean with Augustine, and the reason is not temperament. It is that he points at something in the text that is easy to read past for a lifetime: Abraham speaks, twice, and both times says he expects to come back down with his son. Kierkegaard has him ride silently and say not a word, and that silence is the load-bearing wall of the argument.

Which is worth saying plainly for anyone who has only met this story through Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard is not a straw man and he is not being dismissed here. He is doing something valuable, refusing to let the story be tamed. But a reader should know that the man he is arguing with had already found the verse.

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.