Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue by Sylvia Walsh (review)

Sylvia Walsh wants to do more than conceptual analyses of Kierkegaard's key ideas. She also wants to show how Kierkegaard cared about "becoming the truth rather than knowing the truth in an objective manner" (5). That truth is that God is "the measure of what it means to be a human self, concrete personality, and person of character in Christianity, the model for which is given in the divine incarnation of the deity in Jesus Christ, who constitutes a living prototype of the infinite reality the human self essentially has in likeness to God and ideally can become through the imitation of Christ's lowliness, suffering, and boundless love for others" (15).

At the end, Walsh explores the possibility of becoming a person of character in Christianity. "Like Luther," she writes, "Kierkegaard affirms the possibility of progress and sanctification in the Christian life, but in accordance with the inverse dialectic that governs everything in his thought, the road to perfection for him is paved by hardship and suffering in the recognition that the highest perfection of a human being consists in one's need of God inasmuch as we are capable of doing nothing without God and are indebted to him for everything." So whatever progress we make, it will not be based on "the perfection of our striving" (177–78).

But will we succeed—even with God's help? There is reason to wonder—since our "prototypes for self-improvement are sports heroes, entertainment stars, gun-toting Rambos, and corporate CEOs, not Jesus of Nazareth. We are sympathetic toward others, especially in times of crisis, but only to a certain degree. Violence plagues our cities, schools, and homes, while corporate and personal greed and the discrepancy between the haves and havenots, the affluent one percent versus the millions of people living below the poverty line, grow worse in our country and around the world" (178–79). But if we "obey the Christian command to love our neighbors as ourselves through the power of the eternal or divine working within us," then it can happen (179). But is this likely to happen?

Walsh closes by quoting Kierkegaard that this "can happen often and it can happen to every human being." She adds that "many if not most persons will lack the courage" to do so, because of the "self-denial it surely entails" (179). The fuller passage from which she draws says, "Rarely, indeed, will it in our day be the case that a person truthfully dares to say that he suffers for Christ's sake. . . . But even though this were to become a greater rarity, it nevertheless can happen often, and it can happen to every human being, provided he does not want to 'shrink back to his own destruction' [Hebrews 10:39], that he can come to suffer for a conviction. But it is impossible to fight this battle of conviction in the right way without the assistance of bold confidence. . . . Therefore, whoever you are, if you . . . are required to fight for it, do not seek aid of the world or of people" (Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Hongs, 340). Luther comments that the shrinking blocking the suffering for Christ noted in Hebrews 10:39 goes on until we "divest [our] affection for temporal things" (Luther's Works 29:231).

The provisions and qualifications in the fuller passage make it look like Kierkegaard is not as sanguine as Walsh suggests, and that it is far less likely that anyone will ever move beyond the worship of sports heroes and the violence in our cities. Maybe these words from the end of Kierkegaard's authorship are more suitable: "Water is something that can be obtained in the hard way by fetching it from the pump, but it also can be obtained in the convenient way by high pressure; naturally I prefer the convenient way. But the eternal is not something like that, indifferent to the...