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115 CHAPTER 14 Søren Kierkegaard Between Skepticism and Faith’s Happy Passion David J. Gouwens In contrast to Augustine, for whom philosophy is a lover drawing the believer to Christ, Martin Luther‘s famous attacks upon reason as ―the Devil‘s mother‖ or ―the Devil‘s whore‖ often raise a suspicion that ―Lutheran philosophy‖ is an oxymoron. The picture is complicated by the fact that Luther‘s attack upon reason was itself philosophical and that Luther could also regard philosophy as a ―handmaid‖ for his own theological reflection. Nonetheless, a quandary still appears : How may a philosopher in the Lutheran tradition negotiate the relation between philosophy and theology, reason and faith?1 Søren Kierkegaard provides a fascinating test case of how a philosopher within the Lutheran tradition thinks through the relations of faith and reason and how this might throw some light on the supposed quandary of the Lutheran philosopher , suggesting positive contributions from Lutheran philosophers to the future of philosophical inquiry. To sketch out how Kierkegaard‘s thought addresses this quandary, I will touch briefly on three related issues: first, two caveats on how not to see Kierkegaard as a philosopher; second, Kierkegaard‘s appreciative yet also critical judgment of Luther on reason and faith; and third, Kierkegaard as one suggesting philosophical trajectories into the present helpful to philosophers in the Lutheran tradition, especially as Kierkegaard develops a Socratic role for philosophy. How Not to See Kierkegaard as a Philosopher First, two caveats should be offered at the outset concerning how not to see Kierkegaard as a philosopher. The first caveat questions the very concept of a ―Lutheran philosopher.‖ Indeed, it would be odd to characterize Kierkegaard in this way, for he never seeks to establish something called ―Lutheran philosophy .‖ Philosophy has its own wide-ranging objects of interest and concern, which may certainly include Christian and Lutheran faith, but Kierkegaard would never say that philosophy in itself becomes Lutheran. Perhaps it would be more accurate and more modest to say, as Jaroslav Pelikan put it sixty years 116 THE DEVIL‘S WHORE ago, that ―Kierkegaard‘s philosophy has much to say to Lutheran theology‖ and that ―the work of the Christian philosopher must also be carried on coram Deo.‖2 The second caveat is that, just as Luther, despite his rhetorical attacks on reason, is wrongly charged with being ―irrational,‖ so, too, Kierkegaard, despite his critique of ―reason,‖ is no irrationalist. The charge often erroneously made against Kierkegaard is that while he may never have said that reason is a whore or the Devil‘s mother, he so celebrates the absurd, the paradox, the will, and the importance of human emotions and passions that he is in truth a philosophical irrationalist. Even some Kierkegaard scholars, as well as general readers, lodge this complaint against him. But just as it distorts Luther to see him as an enemy of reason, so, too, it distorts Kierkegaard to see him as an irrationalist. Luther‘s attacks on scholastic Aristotelianism are not a rejection of reason but of illicit uses of philosophy that obscure the heart of the gospel. With regard to Kierkegaard, C. Stephen Evans rightly says that this charge of ―irrationalism‖ is a ―textbook caricature‖ that does not bear examination. Kierkegaard does not say, for example, that the paradox of the incarnation, ―the Absolute Paradox,‖ the ―absurd,‖ is a formal contradiction, asking a believer ―to abandon the laws of logic and to embrace something which he knows is false, even impossible.‖ Neither is the famous ―leap‖ of faith a ―blind leap‖ that one is urged to make for no good reasons; Kierkegaard is no volitionalist with regard to beliefs, as if beliefs could be directly willed apart from our having ―reasons.‖3 These characterizations fail to do justice to the sophisticated, indeed, rational way that Kierkegaard as a philosopher limns the boundaries of reason and faith. Kierkegaard‘s critique of reason is no more ―irrationalism‖ than is the long history of philosophical attempts to outline the limits of reason, from ancient skepticism to Kant to Wittgenstein and others. The center of Kierkegaard‘s philosophical concern is to expose the conceptual confusions that lead one to think that truth and certainty in ethics, religion, and Christian faith are achievable purely objectively, apart from passionate personal concern. This confusion takes many forms: speculative philosophy‘s claim to ―go beyond faith‖ to ―the System‖; traditional orthodoxy‘s attempts to prove the truth of doctrines by Scripture or reason; Enlightenment rationalist theology...

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