Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology by Peter Kline (review)

Kline’s book compares Kierkegaard and Meister Eckhart (1260– 1328) on nothingness. It argues that Eckhart’s “influence on Kierkegaard (directly or indirectly) is as important as it is silent” (5 n21). Kline believes that this nothingness is at the core of Kierkegaard’s negative theology (3, 34). Even so Kline does not believe that it leads to nihilism. Rather it undergirds a life “lived with abandon, with sorrowful longing and bewildered joy” (2). It drives toward “the most profound form of self-denial” (132).

Because Kierkegaard believed that self-denial makes “the essentially Christian . . . so strange” and “difficult” when it “must be believed” (Christian Discourses, trans. Hongs, 146), any use of Eckhart’s nothingness would seem to be on track. But because Kline extends that nothingness into rank indeterminacy, it veers sideways. Kline uses the word “erasure” to knock down limits and boundaries so that to be “different by way of one’s indifference to the objective differences that separate one sufferer from another is to be absolutely, infinitely qualitatively different; different with a difference that cannot announce its difference or form itself into an identity around which a border could be drawn” (130–32).

This indifference and indeterminacy strip Jesus of “any identity” (131), even of “any messianism” (129). But that goes too far (more than just keeping “its edges wild,” 40), leaving in the dust Kierkegaard who argued (contra 34) that Jesus “is the Redeemer, . . . a substitute who puts himself completely in your place” so that on Judgment Day “when punitive justice . . . seeks the place where I, a sinner, stand with all my guilt, with my many sins—it does not find me” (Without Authority, trans. Hongs, 123). Thinking of this sentence as “a perpetual beginning . . . that has no objective telos,” misses its point (38). You will lose Kierkegaard’s witness to Christ if you think that his “aim is to incite thinking and spiritual searching but never to give anybody direct answers” (39). Calling Jesus our substitute who guards believers on Judgment Day is clearly direct.

Missing the salvation Christ brings also enables Kline to call God a “lived whylessness” (22) who “demands or requires no placation, no appeasement” (xvi). Accordingly there is no judgment; Jesus being “an infinite roominess held open to the frailty and suffering of the world,” he sets “absolutely no conditions on his love” (131). At the end, Kline himself does not even follow this principle, saying that “God can shine in with his light” only after we first leave ourselves and utterly extinguish our own light (178). Kline’s roominess leaves out Christ whipping the money changers and castigating the scribes and Pharisees (Jn 2:15; Mt 23:27–33). It also misses Christ’s anger and judgment (Mk 3:5; Jn 9:39). Kierkegaard warned against this laundering of the scriptural account, saying “woe to you if you win them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (CD, 175).

Kline thinks his Christological indeterminacy “repeats Luther’s opposition between a theology of the cross and a theology of glory” by “indicating that Jesus is only ever encountered through the work of his abandonment, his kenotic self-emptying, rather than his elevation into an accomplished object of belief ” (130–31). But Kierkegaard does not drive a wedge between these two. He knows, instead, that the Christian is the one who “clings to Christ” in faith (CD, 284).

An added bonus to this book is the seven beautiful color plates at the end, painted by Kline himself. The last one is especially telling, a version of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece of the Crucifixion (1516) with everything missing but the hands and feet suspended against a black background in their proper place. Without this absence, Kline argues, Christ’s “full and fixed presence” would “petrify” us leaving us in “despair” (153). But Kierkegaard knew differently. He thought true Christianity was “to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that...