God is not “a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind.”[1] And yet, enter the fray of theological social media, enter the faculty lounges across many seminaries and divinity schools, or simply attempt to learn of God with more depth by reading theology books unawares (i.e., without critical resource to know otherwise), and you will end up coming up against a notion of God that has nothing do with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. Whether that notion be informed by the scholasticism of Aristotelian or scholastic vintage, or it be of more modern flavors, of the type that Hegel provides; what the would-be thinker and knower of God comes up against is an atheistically impersonalist god (that’s a rip against the critics of a so-called theistic personalist God). This god is either the self-projection of a universalistic self-moved and collectivist mind of the society at large; or, it is the god of the philosophers, writ large, that, in the end simply ends up being a negation of the finity of human being extrapolated out to a prior pure being who stands at the head of all being (namely, in this frame: God). But again, this is not how the Christian has ever known God; that is, the Christian, de jure, only has first come to know God as Son of the Father; they have come to know God evangelically, and/or kerygmatically.
The aforementioned was essentially Kierkegaard’s critique of the God being worshipped in his own Daneland back in the day. A god, by Kierkegaard’s estimation, who had taken shape under the pressures of Hegelian formation. Here is how father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance, engage with Kierkegaard on this front:
For Kierkegaard, God was not being taken seriously for who God is. When one considers what Abraham was willing to sacrifice, what the martyrs were willing to give up, he thought it was shameful that persons were not willing to sacrifice far more in the name of God. Instead, God was reduced to a concept to be used in service of the so-called progress of society; this was a cultural Christianity’s God, treated as a conceptual postulate by philosophers, a part of Christian doctrine by theologians, and the inaugurator of religious culture by society.
By contrast, how did Kierkegaard view God?
God is the sole bestower of grace. He wants every person (educated up to it through proclamation of the requirement) to turn, each one separately, to him and to receive, each one separately, the indulgence which can be granted to him. But we men have turned the relationship round, robbed or tricked God out of the royal prerogative of grace and then put out a counterfeit grace.
For Kierkegaard, God is first and foremost a personal agent who delivers us from error, who calls us to die to ourselves and be born anew. Humans are called to relate to God as one who cannot be reduced to an object of their speculation—a datum or factoid that is best understood with the scrutiny of a scholarly mind. Instead, faith in God must be characterized by a humble recognition of its inability to command God in the way that a person might develop an intellectual command over worldly phenomena. In sum, what the Hegelian theology of Denmark invited, in Kierkegaard’s less-than-subtle judgment, was (functionally) an “impious, pantheistic, self-worship,” according to which God ends up being worshiped as an object of society’s mind. What had emerged was the disastrous confusion of a worldly vision of progress with Christianity’s development. This happened because society, particularly its “upper” echelons, had become so absorbed in immediacy that it was failing to revere God, allowing God to be worshiped as something akin to the Spirit of the immanent order.[2]
Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, as encountered in the Gospel Hisself, contradicts the folk god, the culturalist god, the nationalist god, the god constructed purely by the immanentist social imaginary wherein God is sublated by “our being” (as the priority) to His. This is the constant temptation of the ‘flesh’: viz., to shape God into our image, instead of us submitting, mortifying, and being transformed into His (who is the Christ).
Not only does Kierkegaard’s critique have infliction towards the modern and the Hegelian, but it also contradicts any notion of godness wherein God is thought of out of the speculations of our own imaginations and abstractions. Either God is cruciform, and thus concrete for us, in shape, or He is not the Christian God. That is the plain and simple of Kierkegaard’s critique, and it is one that I gladly sign onto; and have signed onto for many decades now. May God be true, and every man a liar.
[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 48.
[2] Ibid.