Read *CUP* Part 2 Section 2, 5.

What is it to be an objective Christian?  What does it look like played out? Christianity as an objective truth will manifest, says Kierkegaard, in an outward, defensive stance.  He says “The task is to become a Christian and to continue being one… [one is not to] defend the whole of Christendom against the Turk— instead [the Christian is to be] protecting one’s own faith against the illusion of the Turk”=Perhaps I have the wrong read on this, but it seems in this case that the message of Christianity for the individual thus must be translated into a polemic instead of an evangelistic message.  If so, this stands quite contrary to the last command of Christ to “make disciples of all nations” If this be the case, Christianity has some major problems within it’s sectarian nature. At what point in this schema do denominational differences become not simply preferential, but rather excommunicable? It's a hard question to answer.  Certainly when there's a difference in passion or subjectivity in relation to God. This doesn't seem to be the whole story though.The problem with a cookie cutter religion is that 1) the goal of the religion is no longer to be changed but to change yourself to fit the mold of it's morality and standards and 2) if you somehow manage to meet the requirements of all that is Christianity, anyone who falls short is a total failure in the whole faith. It looks pretty difficult to build a church, since everyone has to be orthodoxically and orthopraxically perfect (or near there).

            What objectivity does to doctrine is makes it not a set of principles whereby faith is strengthened or explained in part,  but, as Kierkegaard states, “it will be the ‘what’ of faith that decides whether or not one is a Christian”.  In this stream, the Christian must work to bring himself out of error, whereby he sees his fault in doctrine and seeks to conform himself in order to be a Christian.  Nay, he does not conform his doctrine because he is a Christian.  He is corrected in doctrine so that he may maintain his Christianity. It is then, not so important what has gone on in the individual, but rather with the individual (if baptism, doctrine, or another objective truth, act) is that which Christianizes you. Christianity, under this system, is impossible. At any given moment you may flow in and out of Christendom, simply based on if you have purposely or accidentally believed, thought, or acted wrongly. Much can be be said of Kierkegaard's formulation for the subjective faith's rightness or wrongness in formulation; however, Kierkegaard seems to have nailed it on this, in that there is no true possibility of objective Christianity.

Tertullian's Paradox

Reading Tertullian's Paradox, I stumbled upon a quote that I found incredibly intriguing in light of the entire semester in Philosophy of Religion.  Williams says, 

"For here again the initial faith is in a belief that is itself comprehensible: the belief that the poem has a meaning, if one can only find it. But in the case of religious belief it is just the belief itself, and not a prior belief about its comprehensibility, that one has, on the position being discussed, to take on faith, in the hope that afterwards it will become clear what it means. Here again I encounter the same difficulty: for if you do not know what it is you are believing on faith, how can you be sure that you are believing anything? And a fortiori how can such belief be the means to something else, viz. coming to understand?"

What Tertullian proposes is that we must engage a paradox. Tertullian's Paradox has a lot to do with the idea that we are to be like Christ by not being like him. He was put to shame, we are no longer shameful and examples of the like.  It is that to be as Christ wants us to be, we need not be like Christ necessarily. The paradox extends into knowledge. Simply because the resurrection is impossible to believe by any type of evidentiary proof we must believe it! He says of the resurrection, "It is certain because it is impossible!"

Now what I find here is that Williams takes this claim, that on faith one must accept the tenets of Christianity to understand Christianity at all, and 'pulls an Anselm', so to speak.  I have found myself incredibly frustrated in the mire of Anselm's writings.  In my estimation, Anselm sees faith as a starting point to a greater understanding and knowledge whereby faith is no longer needed, but simply was a prerequisite to something much greater.

I see much of that thought in Williams' interpretation of Christianity and the paradox here. What Williams'
want is a prerequisite of believability or credence before he would accept anything like a resurrection.  As we have seen with Kierkegaard, his willingness to believe based on scholarly deliberation is useless.  However, if he is right that Tertullian is Anslem-like in his paradox, I am again perplexed. Williams does say in the aforementioned quote that faith is to believe in the incomprehensible.  How he manages to move from that to "if you do not know what it is you are believing on faith, how can you be sure you are believing anything?" in two sentences is beyond me.  To answer his question, it's not a matter of believing that, rather a believing in (excuse my ending in a preposition). Williams disregards that to believe, for the Christian, is to trust there is a God who saves. Williams clearly wants a Christianity who believes there is a God, empirically proven.  I find it truly frustrating that he can not comprehend that faith is not an empirical proof and we do not move from faith to knowledge, casting faith aside.

At a loss for a better conclusion, I will leave these as the Barthian in A.N. Pryor's dialogue, with a Scripture:

...They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written,
“Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”
(Romans 9:32-33 ESV)

A.N. Pryor's Dialogue

In A.N. Pryor's dialogue on religion, Psychoanalyst says something very interesting, something I think is worthy of a bit more inspection.  He says:

Only in this way are genuine atheists made. Atheists by pure persuasion are usually, perhaps always, afflicted with a guilty conscience; the urge to believe is still in them, and they either try to quench it by becoming violent or unfair in their attacks on religion, or try to satisfy it by inventing milk-and-water religions like that of Modernist here, using religious language to describe anything they find impressive or moving or mysterious. Barthian and Catholic may be mad, if you choose to use the word that way; but there are many worse forms of insanity, even among atheists.

Psychoanalyst thinks that everyone has an insatiable urge in them to believe; whether it be to believe in God, or the supernatural, or that which can not be seen is hard to say. Generally, he thinks this feeling results in belief in God. You can not escape the feeling, it seems.  The atheist by pure persuasion is the one that when driven to crisis is forced to see the roots of his beliefs; he sees that his beliefs simply come from this inner urge to be religious not from any true God or created desire from God.

What I find most interesting is the result of the urge to believe.  It can result in belief, clearly. It can also result in non-belief, such as the purely persuaded atheist cited from Psychoanalyst above. The result of the purely persuaded atheist can result in unfair attacks on religion.  This is not so hard to believe when you consider the works of men like Richard Dawkins, who have moved away from the polite discourse of Bertrand Russell and into an über-Nietzsche like snarkiness that discards all religious feeling or sentiment and declares the religious person insane or stupid.

With that said, none of these are nearly as interesting or though provoking as what Psychoanalyst says of Modernist. He says he is one who uses "religious language to describe anything they find impressive or moving or mysterious" and calls his religion essentially watered down. Ouch. What is most compelling is that he does not lump the Modernist in with the religious.  Instead, if you look at the syntactical form, you see instead that Modernist has been labeled an Atheist by Psychoanalyst himself (also an atheist). It takes one to know one, right? It is reminiscent of Donagan, way back when in the semester, speaking of the demythologizing of religion. There's a point at which Scripture loses it's authority to a group of people and they then demythologize religion so much so that it ceases to be religious at all and instead becomes more of a social organization united in faithless social justice or 'religious talk'. Psychoanalyst says they call anything they find especially moving or mysterious religious, which doesn't seem far off from the truth.  I wonder if Psychoanalyst would not accuse the Modernist of a functional pantheism. Again, not unlike Donagan, I find Pryor's describe here (via Psychoanalyst) of Modernist to be especially damning to the point of saying you would be better off abandoning religion altogether and being a purely persuaded atheist, than to be a Modernist (aka Mainline Protestant, Liberal Protestant).

Confessions, Books 4,5,7

Book 4 of the Confessions drips with the blood of Ecclesiastes. In the book of Ecclesiastes, it is said "better is a house of mourning than a house of prayer". The preacher calls out that "All is vanity"! Nearly the entire book is a call to see that every man's end is death, and everything in between birth and death is worthless eternally. It has been said by many a Christian that the point of Ecclesiastes is that death looks down upon us all, and we can do nothing but cry out to God.

It seems that Augustine himself begins to feel the same sentiment in the face of death. Augustine says:

With this grief my heart 'was steeped in shadow.' Look where I would, I saw only death...The soul had nothing to answer.  And if I urged it to 'have hope in the Lord,' it remained inert-- rightly, since the man it had lost was more real and cherished than that wraith it was asked to rely on.

We can see that upon his death,  Augustine felt pushed away from the Lord.  It is interesting to note that he, for some reason, urged his soul to 'have hope in the Lord' and yet was unable. The sight of death seemed to have told him that his only hope was the Lord. He saw that to trust in the Lord may could save him from his sorrow, even his own death.  Yet he was unable, deeming the man who had just passed more real that God ever was to him.

Augustine goes on to say this:

My weariness with life was weighty, but so was my fear of death. The more I loved my friend, the more I hated and feared as the most obscene enemy of all the death that had taken him from me-- it seemed about to gulp down all of humanity, as it had him.

We see Augustine in this deep pit of despair wherein he feels as if all of humanity itself is but nothing. Death swallows up all, consuming everything in it's path.  Perhaps this is hyperbole but it seems to be the route Augustine is on in feeling.  As one who has lost, I can personally testify to the destructive feeling of death. Death, says the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, is all of our end. "Remember your creator in the days of your youth!" cries the Preacher.  Augustine is an good example of this.  Though he would in his sin push away God, seeing death made it to where he could not forget him, even calling out to him to give him hope.  This experience certainly had to have played a major role in his conversion.  AFter all, in Christianity, to see death is to begin to see sin or at least it's affect.  I think it no coincidence the next part of the book is about Materialism..

Read *CUP*, Part 2, Section 2, 1-3.

In Part 2, Section 1, there is an interesting bit by Kierkegaard bit on immortality in which he calls immortality subjectivity's most passionate interest. He has an ironic quote as well:

"When, with perfect consistency from the systematic point of view, one abstracts systematically from the interest what that makes of immortality, God only knows, or even what the sense is in wishing to prove it, or what kind of fixed idea it is to bother oneself about further."

God only knows, he says.  It seems Kierkegaard is humorous. Immortality, he thinks, is the most subjective of points whereby we have passionate interest.  What is it about immortality that makes it more passionately interested than anything else? Life is one of the highest goods in the universe.  Thus, eternal life would seem to be among the highest things of which one could have interest. Kierkegaard thinks the the ethical culminates in immortality as well.  He says that without immortality that the ethical simply leads to 'use and wont', a truly utilitarian view.

I wonder about how he is using immortality here, though.  That, I suppose, is the purpose of this journal. He says that immortality is subjectivity's most passionate interest and as the quote above shows, can not be proved, per sé.  He speaks of immortality as that which can not be proven, as that which is ultimate, as that which one must most subjectively relate or else the ethical itself is without meaning. If I am not mistaken, it looks on the surface as if Kierkegaard is using immortality in exchange with the idea of God himself.

If that is the case, I think Kierkegaard has a major problem, which is this: if immortality is interchangeable with the God, then what we are subjectively relating to is not God but ourselves. What if the gift of God were not immortality? Would we still not have an ultimate duty to truth? Does one only desire truth because it will give him immortality?  If that is the case, it seems that immortality has usurped God in our passions. This seems to be a major problem for Kierkegaard if it is indeed what he is doing, am I am at a loss to figure out how to respond.

CUP Part 1

Kierkegaard:

Faith does not come from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come straightforwardly.  On the contrary, in this objectivity, one loses the infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness that is the condition of faith, the ubique et nasquam [everywhere and nowhere] in which faith can come into being.

If there is a quote which gives you the general drive of the book Concluding Unscientific Postscript, this is it. There's something about it in particular that when I read it I immediately circled it and wrote EXPLORE THIS beside it. To many, apologetics is an essential skill for the Christian. We must be able to give a defense for our faith, not just to talk about it, but to convince people. Kierkegaard, frankly, thinks that's utter garbage. Of course you can not argue someone into Chrisitanity, and you can never defend it enough that someone would believe it.

So if you can't argue someone into faith or defend it so that they see faith not only as something plausible, but so that they begin to have it themselves, then what is it to have faith? Kierkegaard thinks objective talk about faith loses the infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness that is the condition of faith.  With that said then, clearly to have faith is to have the infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness. Infinite; what does it mean to be infinite? It seems like it means to live in some sort of infinite relation to God. Personal seems to be to have personal relation to God. This are trite definitions, but I think they are really wrapped up in the last one: Impassioned interestedness.

Kant's idea of interestedness is one I studied a decent amount in Aesthetics with Dr. Shelley.  One of the commentaries on the theory gave an example about a theater own who went to the show in his theater but sitting in his box with counting the amount of people and drinks sold to figure out how much money he had made that night. The writer said that this man was not truly attending to the show but was rather attending to his money. He was there and cared about the show, but his attention was really on something else.  I think that is a point that can be made here with what Kierkegaard is saying.  If one is concerned with constant defense of the idea of God, with objective talk, or scholarly deliberation, he is not really attending to God at all.  He may be attending to the idea of God; perhaps he is attending to winning an argument, or scholastic achievement.  To attend to God, however, one has to be relating to God himself with impassioned love, not some other object, topic, or scholastic goal. If God is not central to any talk of God, we aren't dealing with God at all, only the idea of God.

CUP, Appendix and Declaration

In the Appendix and then Declarations to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard does something pretty peculiar-- he disowns the text. He says that the work isn't worth being considered authoritative since he is but a mere humorist. Next, he comes back again as Kierkegaard as renounces his former renunciation (made under the pseudonymous Climacus). It all begs the question: "Why?"

Kierkegaard is certainly isn't saying that the theory is wrong, in fact, he never says that.  Nor does he say that it needs fixing. At no point does he say that it is a joke or comedy, as the work of a humorist, or that it needs work in any way.  So what is he doing?  It seems the only thing he could possibly be doing is to let the argument stand on it's own merit. To disown the idea is not to say it is wrong.  Instead, it is simply to let the argument itself stand by itself, inviting anyone to engage with the argument on it's own merits.

It's hard to say why Kierkegaard does this.  I think he does it because writing pseudonymously is tricky.He is writing as a non-believer to "so-called believers" who really are 'objective believers' to show them that if there's a Christian faith, they aren't a part of it.  However, all along it's Kierkegaard.  The dialectic doesn't progress the same written as theologian Kierkegaard, but nor does it have great credence from the humorist Climacus.  It looks really as if Kierkegaard is simply letting the argument stand on it's own merits. He allows for Climacus to disown the theory, then refutes that it shouldn't be taken seriously.  So rather than allow people to wonder if this is what Kierkegaard thought, or if he's saying that a non-believer who doesn't understand would say as Climacus did, he lets the idea go altogether.  Now, regardless of authorship, we are free to engage the text without such questions.  Such is my best guess.