This episode dives deep into the restless brilliance of Søren Kierkegaard — the 19th-century philosopher, outsider theologian, and reluctant father of both existentialism and Christian authenticity. If you've ever doubted the plastic gods, burned out on hollow church talk, or longed for a faith that costs something real, Kierkegaard was speaking to you.
We explore:
- The Self as a Task
“The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.”
You’re not born yourself, you become yourself, and only through brutal honesty, dread, and surrender.- Truth is Subjectivity
“Subjectivity is truth. Truth is subjectivity.”
Faith is not a system of answers; it is an inward passion, lived, suffered, and chosen without guarantees.- The Leap of Faith
Faith is not irrational, but it transcends reason.
You don’t arrive at faith by deduction, you leap, trembling, into paradox.- The Knight of Faith vs. the Knight of Infinite Resignation
The knight of resignation gives everything up. The knight of faith believes he’ll receive it back, impossibly, through God.
It's the difference between giving up and giving over.- The Sickness Unto Death: Despair
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur so quietly.”
Despair is not feeling bad, it’s not becoming who you truly are before God.- Attack Upon Christendom
“The greatest danger to Christianity is… the pretend Christian.”
Kierkegaard savaged the church of his day for being socially safe, polite, and fake, what he called “playing at Christianity.”- Faith Beyond Certainty
“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”
Kierkegaard invites us not into blind belief but a raw, defiant trust that lives without certainty.- Authenticity Through Anxiety and Dread
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Your terror isn’t a sign something’s wrong — it’s the signal that you’re standing at the edge of becoming.
If you're deconstructing — or have burned down the easy answers — Kierkegaard offers you no comfort… only truth, paradox, and the possibility of becoming real before God.
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When he said subjectivity is truth, what he
meant is your relationship toyourself is fundamental, and if
it's real you're not putting on.
You can't do that really unlessyou want to be totally
(00:20):
alienated from yourself and besomebody who doesn't have any
identity other than the personathat you play in society.
He was very big onindividuality, but only that.
Individuals had to have anauthentic relationship with
themselves, whether or notanybody else picked up on it or
(00:42):
whether anybody else thoughtthat was Christian in their
church.
It had to be an authenticrelationship to themselves and
their faith, and so you can'trely on other people, even your
therapist, to tell you who youare, because you could be
telling your therapist what youthink your therapist wants to
(01:03):
hear without authenticallyconfronting your own fear and
trembling and confusion anddoubts about faith.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So that confrontation , that inwardness, is what
Christianity introduced to theworld.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast.
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
(01:51):
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, denmark, in
1813, into a wealthy but deeplymelancholic family.
His father, michael Kierkegaard, was a stern and religious man
who had once cursed God as achild and spent much of his life
fearing divine punishment.
That deep sense of guilt waspassed on to Soren, shaping his
psychological landscape from thestart.
(02:58):
Kierkegaard was academicallygifted.
He studied philosophy andtheology at the University of
Copenhagen and became well knownfor his brilliance, wit and
sarcasm.
But even as he climbed theranks of intellectual society,
he wrestled with a profoundinner conflict between reason
and faith, structure and passion, tradition and authentic belief
(03:20):
.
At 27, kierkegaard was engagedto a young woman named Regine
Olson, but fearing he couldnever offer her a normal life,
plagued as he was by inneranguish and a sense of calling,
he broke off the engagement, adecision that tormented him for
the rest of his life andappeared often thinly veiled in
his writings.
He remained single and lived arelatively isolated life.
He remained single and lived arelatively isolated life,
(03:43):
pouring his energy into his work.
Between 1843 and 1855,kierkegaard wrote a remarkable
series of books under both hisname and pseudonyms, exploring
themes of despair, anxiety,faith, love and the absurd.
His method was unique he didn'tjust teach doctrine.
He created characters, voicesand scenarios that forced
(04:06):
readers to confront themselves.
Works like Fear and Trembling,the Sickness Unto Death,
either-or, and PhilosophicalFragments challenged
conventional theology andoffered a new way of thinking
about what it means to believe.
At the heart of Kierkegaard'swork is the idea that truth is
personal, not merelypropositional.
He argued that faith isn'tabout intellectual certainty but
(04:29):
about passionate commitment,what he famously called the leap
of faith.
For Kierkegaard to be a trueChristian wasn't to go to church
and follow rules.
It was to stand tremblingbefore God with nothing to lean
on but trust.
That made him deeply unpopularwith the religious establishment
of his day, especially theDanish Lutheran Church, which he
accused of dead orthodoxy, andcultural Christianity In the
(04:53):
last years of his life turnedmore openly polemical, launching
scathing attacks on the churchand calling Christians to
embrace the suffering, scandaland paradox of the cross.
He died young, at age 42 in1855, after collapsing in the
street and spending his finalweeks in a hospital where he
refused the last rites of thechurch he had so fiercely
(05:15):
criticized.
And yet, despite his obscurityin his own lifetime,
kierkegaard's influence has onlygrown.
His work laid the groundworkfor existential philosophers
like Jean-Paul Sartre and MartinHeidegger, theologians like
Karl Barth and Paul Tillich,psychologists like Rollo May,
and writers and artists fromDostoevsky to Camus to Flannery
(05:37):
O'Connor.
He is, in many ways, aparadoxical bridge between
classical Christianity andpostmodern thought, both
orthodox and radical, faithfulyet disruptive, often called the
father of existentialism,kierkegaard wasn't just a
philosopher.
He was a theologicalprovocateur, a poetic genius and
a deeply haunted soul trying towake the church, and maybe the
(05:59):
world, from a spiritual sleep.
In this episode, we'll explorehow thought speaks so powerfully
into today's culture, wheretruth feels fragmented, the
church is under critique andfaith often feels more like
struggle than certainty.
But far from pushing peopleaway from Christ, kierkegaard
invites us in deeper to a faiththat's not shallow or
(06:21):
performative, but raw, costlyand real.
And with no further ado, I'dlike to bring on Professor Larry
Inchosti.
Hello there, travis, good tosee you.
Larry, welcome back.
And for those of you who areeither newer to the podcast or
(06:42):
haven't listened to the firstepisode, I did realize maybe
some people do that they jumparound.
This whole podcast is based ona book that Professor N Chostey
wrote.
We call him Professor Larry,and so we've had him on every
episode and we're planning tohave him on every episode going
forth through all the charactersfrom the book, and we have a
bunch of ideas beyond that.
So welcome back.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
So just to give our audience a little more scope on
Kierkegaard's most notable works, just so they have an idea of
what he wrote.
A couple of them were justmentioned, but he wrote most of
these between 1843 and 1850.
In these seven years he wroteEither-Or Fear and Trembling
Repetition, philosophicalFragments, the Concept of
Anxiety, stages on Life's Way,concluding Unscientific
(07:33):
Postscript to PhilosophicalFragments, works of Love,
christian Discourses, theSickness Unto Death and Practice
in Christianity.
Very prolific guy, yeah.
Very prolific years there.
Just the last seven years ofhis life, it looks like yeah.
(07:53):
So some of the interesting factsabout him, before we dig in, is
that he walked the streets ofCopenhagen a lot.
He would take long solitarywalks, and I've actually been
hearing this about a lot of verysmart people through history.
They would have their bestideas on walks.
Nietzsche said the same thing.
So Kierkegaard and Nietzschemust have been two peas from the
(08:13):
same pod coming from completelydifferent angles on faith.
Locals called him themelancholy Dane because they'd
always see him walking and itwould help him think and write.
The next one is that we alreadymentioned.
He broke off his engagement,but he never got over the girl.
So he thought about it the restof his life and I guess appears
a lot in his writings.
(08:34):
Under a veil of not being superobvious, he had multiple
pseudonyms and he wrote wholebooks in these pseudonyms to
debate with himself.
So he would present differentarguments from different
characters.
But it was all him writing andsome of those pseudonyms were
Johannes de Silentio, vigilis,hoffnines and Anticomachus.
(09:00):
So these are some of hispseudonyms.
Komakis so these are some ofhis pseudonyms.
But it wasn't deception, it wasart.
It was almost like a form of anauthor's performance, art, and
it allowed him to attack weakfaith of feeling like he was
preaching doctrine or theology.
His biggest masterpiece of fearand trembling he wrote in two
(09:21):
weeks.
That's a fun fact.
He waged a one-man war on thechurch.
He was calling the church out.
Actually sounds stuff thatwould be relevant today.
To call the church out forThings like being too cozy with
power and afraid of suffering.
So political power and comforthe was calling them out for us.
(09:42):
How relevant is that?
And he said they haveChristianity without the cross
was a part of his critique.
And he once tried to publish abook without his name at all and
even with all of the pseudonymspeople knew it was him.
So it was similar to Banksy.
If Banksy tried to do somethingand not let anyone know it was
(10:03):
him, people would probably stillfigure it out.
So that's the clout he had.
And the last fun fact is henever traveled outside of
Denmark.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Those are fun facts this morning as well.
How would you frame bird's eyeview not zooming in yet how
(10:32):
would you frame Kierkegaard,what he meant to you and to your
book, subversive Orthodoxy?
Kierkegaard is the patron saintof subversive orthodoxy.
Did you mean original, or didyou mean orange juice?
(11:06):
He was the original gangster ofthe subversive orthodoxy, in
that he wasgaard's perspectivewouldn't really be a fiercely
intellectual defender ofChristianity, but more of a
humanist cultural critic thatfound interesting things in the
(11:30):
Christian mythology but didn'thave an existential commitment
to the faith per se in the sameway that Kierkegaard thought was
necessary.
If you wanted to live theChristian life.
You couldn't just rely onhumanist standards and see
(11:52):
Christ as a humanist, but youhad to make an existential
commitment and he was the firstperson, because his writing
seems so original, he was thefirst person, because his
writing seems so original, toexplain what an existential
commitment is or what it meansto want to live the truth and
(12:13):
not just simply know the truth,how that would play out
psychologically and spiritually.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Yeah, so there's so much we get from Kierkegaard and
I think also from Nietzsche,and we get so much of it in our
modern American worldview thatwe don't even know came from
them, and I think when I'mreading about Kierkegaard and
reading some of his quotes andstuff, it's like he actually
created a bunch of mindsets thatwe do have.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Like it's just me and my personal relationship with
God.
That came from Kierkegaard,pretty much, yeah, and you could
see how having a radical faithcame from Kierkegaard, because
everybody around him seemed,from his perspective, very
lukewarm and like the church hadbecome very cultural.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yes, conventional, everybody believed the same
thing.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, kind of like when you're in Texas now and
it's like everyone's a Christianin Texas, like that's the joke.
It's not really a joke, butit's like sure, like everyone
goes to church.
It's more normal there, but ifyou're in Boston, very few.
So there's a cultural norm thathe was speaking at, obviously
in Denmark.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
The thing with Kierkegaard, and I think you're
right to point out how a lot ofhis ideas have made it into our
culture, like authenticity andbeing real and having a personal
relationship to Jesus and allof those things, but they've
also been bastardized and notreally understood in the deep
(13:43):
way that he intended as aphilosophical critique, and so
it's good to go back to him andlook at what he actually said
and the context of what she said.
These things yeah.
So that's what.
Maybe we can do a little bit ofthat today.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah, and that's what you're here for.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
She helped take me back to the source.
One thing off the bat I see inhim is a double edged sword.
So there's one of his critiqueswas against the dogmatism and
theological certainty of thechurch and certainty in general,
not just the church but justcertainty in general, the
enlightenment.
And then I think challengingthat is good.
(14:22):
And then I think where it has anegative it can be too far of a
negative swing is where youlead into a relativism of just
total subjectivity.
I think the truth is somewherein a balance of the two.
But yeah, I think is thatsomething in him is like a
double edged sword in that way.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
No, I think the consequences of his popularity
and fame after he died andeverything, and him being taken
up by the French existentialistsand the German, like Heidegger
and those folks and Jaspers,took him out of his Christian
context and turned a lot of hisbest ideas into slogans.
Turned a lot of his best ideasinto slogans.
(15:09):
And so if we could put some ofthese ideas, like truth is
subjectivity, put that into itscontext of what he was trying to
talk about when he said that,and also the crowd is untruth,
that famous quote.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah, that has a huge implication here in your book
yeah where he talks about that.
It sounds like it sounds likesuch a critique on social media
culture yeah like house ofmirrors.
I saw this line.
This is how the world it'stalking about the crowd.
They look at, people look at.
I'm sorry, let me back up.
Modern christendom had become acivil order, given over to
(15:46):
various hypocrisies and biblicalpieties, but lacking any
authentic relationship to theabsolute.
In other words, a sense ofcentered and coherent
self-consciousness is preciselywhat individuals lack.
Therefore, they look around atothers, the crowd now.
Think of social media here.
They look around at others, thecrowd, so that media.
Here.
They look around at others, thecrowd, so that they might
pattern themselves after thecollective reality, but all they
(16:09):
learn is what the others are.
This is how the world seducesindividuals from being
themselves.
The others, in turn, don't knowwho they themselves are, but
only who the others are, and soeveryone lives in a house of
mirrors, seeking essential lifein a world of appearances and
never finding it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
That's Kierkegaard in spades, but Kierkegaard himself
like in the actual text.
The concluding post-scientificpostscript.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Concluding unscientific postscript to
philosophical fragments.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Concluding unscientific postscript to
philosophical fragments, thatone is his mighty tome, in which
(17:06):
he philosophically tries toexplain what it means to be a
Christian from a psychological,spiritual, anthropological point
of view, that really you can'tcopy your Christian faith from
anybody else, because it'sreally a dialogue with yourself
in terms of the absolutes inyour life.
Your relationship with yourselfis defined by it, and so that's
the point that he's trying tomake is that the self is a
(17:26):
relation in which the self haswith itself, and so he meant by
that is that subjectivity.
When he said subjectivity istruth, what he meant is your
relationship to yourself isfundamental, is your
relationship to yourself isfundamental, and if it's real,
(17:49):
you're not putting on.
You can't do that really unlessyou want to be totally
alienated from yourself and besomebody who doesn't have any
identity other than the personathat you play in society.
And so he was very big onindividuality, but only that
(18:13):
individuals had to have anauthentic relationship with
themselves, whether or notanybody else picked up on it or
whether anybody else thoughtthat was Christian in their
church.
It had to be an authenticrelationship to themselves and
their faith in order for it tomatter at all.
(18:35):
To them.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
I think I hear what you're saying.
That he's saying is thatbecause he's looking at a world
that has been very conformistand he's getting really critical
of it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yes, and one way of thinking of it.
One of his famous quotes wasthat you can understand your
life looking backwards, but theproblem is you have to live it
going forward.
Understanding conceptually isapplying categories to past
experience, but unfortunately,life unfolds in new contexts and
(19:14):
in ever new relationships withyourself, and this can't be
formulated before the fact forindividuals or for people living
in time, and so faith comes inpieces.
(19:36):
Sometimes.
It doesn't come in terms of acomplete theology and dynamic.
It's dynamic and as you piecetogether your identity, you're
piecing together yourrelationship to God and your
faith.
So it's a process that only Godand your soul really have a
(19:59):
front seat to, and so you can'trely on other people, even your
therapist, to tell you who youare, because you could be
telling your therapist what youthink your therapist wants to
hear without authenticallyconfronting your own fear and
trembling and confusion anddoubts about faith.
(20:20):
Fear and trembling andconfusion and doubts about faith
.
So that confrontation, thatinwardness, is what Christianity
introduced to the world.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah, it relates to one of his quotes you have in
the book about knowing oneself.
Yeah, it's Sykegaard and you'resaying it's from the Christian
discourses.
It says there is only one whoknows what he himself is, and
that is God.
And he also knows what everyman in himself is.
For it is precisely by beingbefore God that every man has
(21:00):
his being.
The man who is not before Godis not himself.
A man can be himself only bybeing before him.
Who is in and for himself.
If one is oneself by being inhim, who is in and for himself.
One can be in others or beforeothers, but one cannot be
(21:22):
oneself being merely beforeothers.
It's almost like Dr Seuss,right there.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's similar to that mirrors passage you read a
little earlier.
Yeah, it was right after that,except it's a little bit more
philosophical, because the twophilosophers that were big in
his youth, that he read andadopted language from One was
Hegel the Mythology of theSpirit, and for him Hegel got it
(21:54):
exactly where philosophy wasaiming at the ultimate
abstraction that would explainthe dialectic of human history.
No, it was that each individualwas searching for their
relationship to the absolute,and that was a person-by-person
(22:19):
activity.
It wasn't a historical abstractactivity and it was concrete in
the present tense, unfolding,not something that you could
look back and understand allhuman history from this abstract
point of view.
Absolutely ass backwards.
(22:41):
You know the beginning ofDescartes' philosophical
meditations.
He talks about how he's goingto live a conventional life and
believe what everybody elsebelieves as a practical
expedient, and then that'llallow him to be a true thinker
(23:03):
in his professional work as aphilosopher.
And Kierkegaard, whosephilosophical ideal is Socrates
no, you either live the truth oryou're not a lover of wisdom.
You want to live your wisdom.
You don't want to just play theconventional game of the
(23:25):
culture you're in and then onyour days, in your writing, den
be a philosopher and write aboutthese abstract truths that are
impossible to embody.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Did he think of himself as a philosopher?
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, I think he did.
I think he thought of himselfas a Christian apostle who wrote
philosophy.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I think there's a bunch of reasons why I love this
guy yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
But there's one other quote, and this is another
abstract quote, but I think itmight help again to connect the
concrete to the abstract herefor us a little bit.
Kierkegaard wrote an essay inwhich he made a distinction
between the Christian apostleand the cultural genius.
(24:15):
A genius was somebody whoactualized the full potential of
any great science or art form.
So the genius was somebody likeBach, who took German music and
ran it through its paces toessentially complete all the
(24:39):
possible counterpoint that wasimaginable, right?
Or Einstein, who took physicsto its ultimate conclusion and
then one step further, and sothey were great embodiments of
human potential, but it wasalways at a human level, whereas
(25:02):
the apostle, he said and thenthis is his definition, which is
another one of these headspinners he said the genius is
only whose ends are only eminent.
They're ends that are onlywhat's possible now for a human
(25:27):
being in history, where anapostle is absolutely
paradoxically teleologicallyplaced.
Paradoxically teleologicallyplaced.
Now, when I read that, Ithought that was a perfect
description.
I was writing my book on ThomasMerton at the time, and Thomas
(25:52):
Merton is a creature of paradox.
He was like a world-famoushermit, right.
He was a writer who believedthat silence was the ultimate
eloquence.
Yeah, he was famous for being apoet, but he wasn't a very good
poet, so he had all thesecontradictions, a lot of
paradoxical facets of him, likeKierkegaard, and so why was he
(26:18):
so influential?
Why was he a bestseller in the50s and why does he continue to
influence people in his books onspirituality?
Because he really he wroteabout spirituality more than
theology and he really wasn't avery good theologian.
He's probably a good theologian, but he wasn't a very original
(26:38):
one.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Now are you connecting Merton to the concept
?
You just read that Kierkegaardwas saying about apostle yeah,
about apostle.
So can you say it again,Because it was pretty heady and
I want to try to capture themeaning.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And I think it's why maybe Goethe wouldn't fit the
Kierkegaardian, except incertain phases of his life he
would.
Okay, this is the Kierkegaarddefinition of an apostle.
It's someone who is let me getit right, Wait, this is
something you have memorized.
Yes, I've memorized it.
It explained all of Kierkegaardin one sentence.
(27:13):
That was my take on itAbsolutely, paradoxically,
teleologically placed.
Another way of putting it is aChristian, unlike a pagan
philosopher or a Descartesrationalist, is someone who is
(27:35):
absolutely, absolutely,paradoxically, teleologically
placed.
And to unpack that a little bitmeans that this is not
something he does as a hobby.
This is a reflection of hischaracter and belief, right, the
(27:56):
fullness of his individualrelationship to the absolute.
Okay, so he's absolutely.
Now, paradoxically and wehaven't really got into why
paradox is so important toKierkegaard but maybe we should
do that next, and then I thinkwe'll have the big picture.
(28:17):
I think we'll have the bigpicture, but paradoxically meant
, not dogmatically in the senseof you have a set of beliefs and
you believe them and you knowthe truth.
No, an authentic person.
Life unfolds into the truth,which means that sometimes he
(28:41):
contradicts himself in order toget into a new phase of
existential commitment.
He becomes the most famoushermit like Merton.
How can you become a famoushermit?
Isn't that a contradiction interms?
No, it's a Christian paradox ofliving beyond the mere
(29:04):
rationality of a system whoseinternal consistency is more
important than your authenticcapacity to live in the truth.
Yeah, so it's absolutelyparadoxically and then
teleologically placed.
It's focused on the ultimateends of things.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
For the audience.
Teleologically has to do withtrajectory of human history,
that there's a story, thatthere's an ending.
That's the concept ofteleological, I believe.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, that there's an ultimate end to things.
Human beings can't instantlyknow the ultimate ends of things
unless you want to say you knowwhat God thinks because you
went to church and they told you.
They told you, and so you havethis rational, objective
(30:03):
understanding of the ultimateends of your life, or God's
vision of the universe.
That's maybe more than youreally know, and, if you're
honest, you don't even know whoyou're going to be in a year and
a half or how your beliefs aregoing to change in the light of
a human crisis.
Ain't that the truth?
So let's just be real about it.
(30:31):
And the Christian apostle is onewho believes there's a purpose
to it, but I don't know it yet.
Maybe and faith is living withthat knowledge that there is
meaning, but you haven't yet,maybe, got it all together To a
Christian apostle, or aChristian apostle is more like
somebody who is aware of theirincapacities, their limitations,
(30:57):
their sin, and stands nakedbefore God in fear and trembling
, and says, unlike Descartes, Idon't know the meaning of life,
nor am I willing to pretend,like I do so, that I can pursue
it in my library on Fridays.
(31:17):
I have to pursue it in my lifeas it's unfolding before me and
right now I don't know and I'min crisis and I'm just living on
faith and a prayer, and it saysAmen.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
It sounds like what I would call cosmic humility.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Cosmic humility.
That's what it is, but it isn'tthat you lose yourself.
It's like my relationship withmyself needs God, because I am
not all that.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
And humility in that I am not God and I don't know
everything and I'm not going topretend like I really know as
many things as I pretend I know.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And even though I have a PhD in physics, or even
if I'm the greatest scientist inthe world, that when I'm facing
death or looking at theabsolute, or if someone says,
how can you live the truth ofthe cosmos?
I think it was Richard Dawkins,the famous selfish gene guy,
(32:24):
who said that evolutionarybiology doesn't really give him
rules to live by.
But if you were to ask him hisethics, he would say I just try
to live like an averageChristian, which is funny.
It's like a proving point.
Abstract knowledge is a kind ofknowledge, but it isn't the
(32:46):
only kind of knowledge.
There's one's relationship withoneself, existential experience
that is more directly addressedby the Christian apostle than
it is by Descartes or acontemporary enlightenment
scientist.
Not that those things aren'tgreat, but they don't help you
(33:09):
with these questions of self andvalues and meaning.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Yeah, and, as scientists even today would tell
you, science never was tryingto answer those questions deeper
meaning and so there was afalse conflict for a long time,
probably through the 1900s,where people thought science was
at odds with faith, and it'slike just that they're talking
about two different things thatthey both weren't talking about,
(33:35):
like the bible.
The genesis wasn't writing ascience textbook or one thing,
and the scientists weren'ttrying to write about the deeper
meaning of life.
That's right.
So it's like why was there sucha conflict there?
I think all the assumptionswere off on both sides.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, it got twisted around because science didn't
address those problems, thoseproblems didn't matter.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Or you shouldn't waste your time on those
problems because they'reunanswerable.
There's still questions we askourselves, whether the
scientists do or not what's myrelationship to myself and am I
an authentic person?
And those kinds of questionscome up, and that's what the
(34:18):
subversive orthodoxy is about,is there's a lot of people that
thought those were still goodquestions and so they pursued
them and the scientistsdismissed them.
But now we look back at themand we say, gee, at least they
addressed the issue.
What do I do with science?
What do I do with all thispower and this technological
(34:38):
advancement?
Speaker 3 (34:43):
power and this technological advancement, yeah,
so this is a good segue intowhat I told you is that in
college I did some course thatwas like worldview, yeah, uh-huh
, and it was somewhat of afundamentalist brainwashing
before you go to college, so youdon't get brainwashed the other
way become a atheist, whichactually turns out.
I was thankful for it because itdid expose me to things like
this.
One book was called seven menwho rule the world from the
(35:04):
grave, by a guy named breeze,and his take on kierkegaard was
kind of like on the defensive,here's a guy who is basically
causing post-modernism, oh, andit turns out the things that he
didn't like about Kierkegaardare the things I like about
Kierkegaard now.
But yet what's so cool aboutKierkegaard is that he is the
(35:26):
father of deconstruction andpostmodernism, but he didn't
step away from Christ.
He actually went deeper atChrist, which is just crazy
paradox.
Yeah, yeah, which is accused ofliberal theology, accused him
of faith detached from doctrineand truth, which I don't think
that was a fair critique, mostlikely.
(35:46):
And then another critique hehad was just subjectivity over
objectivity, and that'santi-enlightenment and that's
where theology had gotten to.
We have to have our seminarytell us exactly what this
passage means and exactly how topray in the scientific way
according to the text.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yes, because we want the scientists to respect our
faith.
So we want to show how Noah'sArk was really 5,000 miles long
and we can prove itscientifically or something.
It just seemed, fromKierkegaard's point of view, the
completely wrong question.
It's like you're buying allthese false premises about the
(36:28):
nature of truth as beingobjective, when there is such a
thing as subjective truth, yourrelationship with yourself,
whether you're lying to yourself, whether you're being honest
with yourself, whether you'relying to yourself, whether
you're being honest withyourself, those are elements of
human experience, and Goetheaddresses that, and Blake
addresses that, and all thenovelists of the 19th century
(36:52):
address that, and they weren'tjust people that didn't have
anything to say.
So let's go to the three ways,three stages.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Before we go there.
I have an interjection thatthat idea of what you're just
saying and we have been talkingabout it is that idea of not
lying to yourself and truly,truly knowing yourself.
I don't think that was reallyemphasized in Christian faith
that much.
It was more about knowing God.
There was a famous AW Tozerquote which was like what you
(37:24):
think about God is the mostimportant thing about yourself,
and I really hate that quote nowbecause it really had only to
do with knowledge and theology.
Do you have the right thinkingabout God?
Which is all that statement wassaying was the most important
thing about you having the righttheology.
And ultimately, I have to sharethis story for you and for our
(37:46):
audience.
A person in my life that had theright theology and was very
certain, one of the most certainpeople I've ever known and was
very critical of anyone who hadwrong theology or wasn't a
Christian.
Somebody that was veryjudgmental, was my youth pastor
and he pushed a lot of peopleaway.
(38:07):
His certainty and his harshguarding of the church, the
youth ministry and theology andsuch a rigid person turned out
well.
Did he truly know himself?
Did he really know God?
Because ultimately, in 2018, wefound out he had slept with
(38:27):
underage girls at a previouschurch.
It came out 20 years later.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, not an uncommon story, is it?
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, and just the certainty that goes along with
these types of characters isalways at a very high level, and
judgmentalism is at a very highlevel of those who are hiding
something.
So it's kind of like for me evenat times when I was a pastor or
a church planter and I wasstruggling with my own self was
ripping apart my marriage, myparenting.
(38:55):
Ultimately, I believed what Ithought were correct things.
What did that have to do withthe fact that I was being torn
apart right now?
Did I know God in that and didI even know myself?
I really did not know myselfvery well at the time.
So I think what Kierkegaard issaying is super relevant just to
living, but also to living infaith.
(39:17):
And, as he's saying on histerms, he's talking about faith,
but I think it's true foreveryone just to truly know
yourself, to have cosmichumility, to understand like you
could just be believing thingsbecause a bunch of people
believe it around you and thenyou think you know something,
but you're really just walkingin a form that somebody else
(39:38):
formed for you.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And if you're struggling with faith, or if
you're being honest withyourself, maybe you know God
loves you.
You don't believe.
If the existence of a God issomething you don't understand,
maybe you haven't perceived orthought the right thought about
God yet.
Don't blame yourself.
(40:01):
Stay true to your authenticityuntil it's made clear to you.
Otherwise, then you have thebig breakdown where doubt and
faith come together.
That's the paradox you can'tdoubt unless you have faith and
you can't have faith unless youhave doubt.
It's the person who can't havefaith unless you have doubt,
(40:24):
it's the person who opts forobjective certainty who doesn't
understand that faith is arelationship between the finite
human being and the absolute,transcendent God.
That is unknowable by myfaculties, and if I could prove
him mathematically orscientifically, he wouldn't be
absolutely.
(40:44):
He would be within my bailiwick, I could have him in my garage
or pictures of him or whateverthey sell you.
As to the search for historicalJesus, I'm going to find his
fingerprints somewhere and it'sgoing to give me the faith that
I'm struggling to possess thatlife isn't unfolding in stages,
(41:04):
and that's why we should go tothe Stages in Life's Way that he
wrote, which is another key tounderstanding existential
Christianity.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Okay, so you were going to tell us about the
Stages on Life's Way.
Okay, Stages on Life's Way.
Which book did this come from?
Do you know?
Speaker 1 (41:24):
from the.
I think the book is calledstages on life's way.
Oh, it's one of the books, yeah, but this concept comes up in
other books as well and theyrepresent the three different
modes of human existence the,the aesthetic, the ethical and
the religious.
And these are not likepsychological categories,
(41:46):
they're existential stages, andby that he means they're ways
that people experience theirlives that most, if not
everybody, goes through, becausethey are basically a changing
relationship of yourself toyourself.
They each have a differentrelation.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
I don't think people even use the word worldviews
anymore because, yeah, it seemslike they're like psychological
or spiritual stages, slashmaturity levels.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yes, they're more like that.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
And in your book.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
I did see that Faust only made it to stage two, right
?
Yeah, I think he did, and wedidn't talk about that when we
were dealing with Goethe,because Goethe was a hard one to
talk about.
Goethe was like his own animal.
Yeah, it started withKierkegaard.
We could have labeled himbetter.
But anyway, let's just gothrough the aesthetic phase
first, because I think a lot ofyoung people I know I was this
way in my 20s and the aestheticstage is where life is about
(42:53):
enjoyment and the avoidance ofcommitment and suffering
avoidance of commitment andsuffering.
So if you're living in theaesthetic stage of life, you're
essentially looking for the goodlife, the pleasant life.
What's the crazy?
Speaker 3 (43:11):
life.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
La Vida Loca La.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Vida Loca.
Yes, this is a lot of Americanculture.
Just have fun, enjoy your life.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yes, have fun For Kierkegaard.
He had a character in Either oras the seducer who was the
hedonist it's sort of like aHugh Hefner character and he
wrote what this person'sphilosophy of life would be if
he could speak.
And so he had a pseudonym forthe guy I think his name was A
(43:41):
or something and he explainedthat the aesthetic stage, your
purpose in life, is to avoidboredom and despair through
novelty, art and wittyreflection.
And so you're living.
Sounds like my children, yes,trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
And then you living Sounds like my children yes,
trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
And then you and most Americans Develop a persona in
your relationship with yourselfis you're somebody who has the
best of everything, or you'resomebody who knows how to have a
good time.
Or you live for the parties, oryou live for your aesthetic
work, which is not seen as anethical obligation but rather
(44:25):
just a beautiful way of livingyour life, with pleasure and
happiness, a minimum of pain andsuffering that come from having
a commitment.
But this only lasts for so longbecause ultimately the state
amuses themselves to a pointwhere they begin to find these
(44:49):
things meaningless.
P Diddy party that you've goneto, or the 5,000th wine high or
whatever, living for yourselfand your pleasures, you begin to
(45:13):
despair that it's allmeaningless.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
So when you hit that point now you're which you could
have solved already, becausethe book of Ecclesiastes was
written like 2,000 years ago.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, and it's also Faust right, he lived for
pleasure and power.
Yeah.
And so he came to the end of hisrope and it was like is this it
?
I'm beginning to think I wantto have some significance in my
life.
And so you undergo a crisis, ora crisis undergoes you, and you
(45:43):
are forced to look at yourselfin the mirror and you see a
pleasure seeker or someoneavoiding commitment and you say
I'm ready for the ethical stage.
And so then you move into theethical stage, and the ethical
stage is a life ofresponsibility and commitment,
(46:05):
and so it has aspects to it likeduty, selfhood, marriage, a
profession, a job, relationshipwith yourself as your
relationship, with a series ofresponsibilities and tasks and
things you can be proud of goodwork, professionalism.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
Does even service or charity fit in here?
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Service charity.
A good example for regard wouldbe the tragic heroes in Greek
tragedy.
Guard would be the tragicheroes in Greek tragedy.
They all live for, either likeAntigone to protect her brother,
or all the tragic heroes ofclassical literature, the hero
with a thousand faces.
He's an ethical figure to winHelen back for the Greeks.
(46:56):
They have a cause and theirlife has meaning, and so what's
the trajectory on?
This one, the first one'spredictable.
Yeah.
The second one is you become aself with maybe a professional
life, maybe an ethical ambition.
Maybe you're like at a servicejob let's say you're a
(47:18):
missionary or something but overtime you realize that Maybe
you're like a service job let'ssay you're a missionary or
something but over time yourealize that.
But for Kierkegaard, yourealize that you can't do it.
You can't really do what youset out to do.
I wanted to educate all thechildren in America and I can
(47:40):
barely educate five of thesekindergartners and, if I'm
honest with myself, my usefulidealism has dried up.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
And so there's got to be something more than just me
and my virtue.
So this stage is you had goodintentions, but it's just not
enough and you're running out ofout of gas, or you're just not
good enough.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
You're not living up to your own ideal, even.
Yeah, and why even do it now?
Because the bad guys win.
You can't save the world andyou're powerless to be any, so
this is unlike the person who'stired of the party.
This is the person who's tiredof the party.
This is the person who's tiredof the job.
This is the kind of the burnoutperiod.
(48:26):
It's hard of duty, yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
And so this is where everyone who's listening to our
podcast is at.
They're all probably in theirmid forties, and this is the
leap of faith.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, this is the absolute, paradoxical,
teleological leap.
I don't know why it's this way,but there's got to be some
reason that I don't get.
That's motivating me tocontinue to believe in a larger
(49:04):
order, and it must be in God'shands or I'm going to give up.
Yeah, so you.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Wow, that's it, just as you're saying.
That brought three of myfriends testimonies to mind of
how they found God.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
And that's the paradox.
It's like when I realized Icouldn't do it on my own, I just
turned it all over to God andsaid you're going to have to
carry me because I can't do itNow.
That's the Kierkegaardian leapof faith, and for a Kierkegaard,
that's really the only way youget to the religious faith.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
How does he defend that from Nietzsche saying oh,
you're so weak-minded.
What does Kierkegaard say tothat?
Speaker 1 (49:48):
It is weak-minded because I'm a finite creature.
I'm not a superman like you,Nietzsche, who is going to kid
himself about Back to honesty ofcosmic humility.
Yes, the honesty of the cosmichumility.
Now, maybe if you are a Naziand you are Adolf Hitler, you
(50:12):
think you can take over theworld and usurp gods, but the
track record so far you'refinite.
You can't be Superman.
Superman is an imaginaryprojection of the ego that has
to die.
And so the religious stage isnot about doctrine or dogma, but
(50:35):
about passion and commitmentfor something that on the face
of it, seems absurd, forsomething that on the face of it
seems absurd.
So you believe because you havefaith and commitment and
devotion.
You don't believe becausesomebody proved it to you and
(50:57):
gave you a guarantee that if youbelieve, everything's going to
go great for you.
In fact, if you believe, itmight not go great for you and
that might be okay.
And it's like where MartinLuther King said the arc of the
moral universe is steep, but itbends toward justice.
(51:18):
That's a statement of afaithful person.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
That's a teleological statement.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
Yeah, that's a teleological statement.
Yeah, it's a teleologicalstatement.
It bends toward justice.
He's not saying I know exactlywhere it goes and I'm going to
take you there.
It's no, I'm on this journey andI might not make it with you
but I know that we'll make itthere eventually and I have
faith that it bends towardjustice.
(51:47):
So this is the one part Iwanted to read to you.
You have tragic heroes inclassical literature who stand
for something and die, usuallyfor their commitment, but their
values live on because theystood for them.
So you have Achilles orOdysseus or Antigone, and these
(52:11):
are essentially humanist heroeswith a thousand faces right.
They go through a trial, theydevelop these skills, they come
back and give the good fight andthen they pass on the boon to
the community and they'recelebrated as great heroes.
Well, he had his Christiancounterpoints to the tragic hero
(52:35):
, and one was the knight offaith.
And the knight of faith issomebody who carries on, not
because they're going to get aboon that's going to renew the
community.
They don't know if they'regoing to get a boon or not, but
they're carried by faith.
Night of faith, the other nightwas the night of infinite
(52:59):
resignation.
And the night of infiniteresignation is and the night of
infinite resignation is someone,like a nihilistic
existentialist, doesn't know ifthey're doing the right thing,
if there's any reason really toserve the poor, but they can't
think of anything else thatmakes sense to them that's any
(53:22):
more important.
So they do it anyway, with thekind of infinite resignation
that my thought is worth it,even though it doesn't give me
any pleasure or meaning beyondthe fact that I choose to do it.
That's the atheisticexistentialist, whereas the
(53:43):
night of faith holds out, theparadox that maybe there's
something out there that I don'tunderstand that will, like the
resurrection or like theturnaround in people's lives,
(54:07):
give meaning where right now Idon't see it, and so that's the
night of faith.
Like Martin Luther King man thatwhole his life is, and these
Christian heroes are running onfaith.
There are no guarantees in thatworld other than the guarantee
they have with theirrelationship to their God in
(54:28):
fear and trembling.
And that's why Kierkegaardwrote Fear and Trembling and
said a Christian lives in fearand trembling as to the
consequences of their faith.
And not drinking a latte at themegachurch rally put on by the
dancing pastor or whatever thathe was in tune with the fact
(54:50):
that they're suffering.
Yes, and then not everybodyknows or can know.
And if you're really honestwith yourself, your faith comes
in stages.
And maybe you were a hedonistin your 20s and maybe you're a
burnt out idealist in your 30sand now in your 40s.
And maybe you're a burnt-outidealist in your 30s and now in
your 40s, you're willing to turnit over to God or, like the
12-step program, to whateverhigher power you believe may be
(55:14):
in control of things, and putyour trust in something larger.
And that trust is, forKierkegaard, the leap of faith.
That's what that's about.
Speaker 3 (55:27):
Yeah, I did.
Actually I noticed thatrealizing the powerlessness was
in that chapter, Like that waspart of his leap of faith
verbiage, and you almost wonderif the AA got that from there.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
Yeah, they did, maybe unconsciously, Because
Kierkegaard was the leap offaith is a great term, but the
fact that for Kierkegaard thatit's almost an inevitable stage
you and psycho-spiritualdevelopment it's like you got to
(56:01):
go through I don't know for him.
You go through all phases atsome point in your life and I
think they also.
You go back and forth sometimes.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
That's a little too gracious, because I think some
people stay stunted in differentmentalities and cultural norms.
Unfortunately, people don'teven develop.
Sometimes Somebody is the sameat 25 as they are at 65, which
is sad when you see it.
But it's cool to hear just howthose three stages work together
(56:34):
, because I didn't read thatbook and I didn't know how one
led to the next and how thatsecond to third.
I could relate to a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
And then we're dealing with these Christian
writers and philosophers andcritics and meta-historians and
people like that.
Kierkegaard gives us someinteresting conceptual
frameworks.
Understand them.
The Goethe is second stage.
Faust, if we're lucky, he'sgoing to make it to the second
(57:03):
stage.
He's going to move out of anaesthetic life of pleasure and
power into an ethical point ofview.
He'll be like Oppenheimer.
He'll have realized that hisscience has an ethical dimension
to it.
But now you're going to turnthat over to God.
And if you're going to turn itover to God, how would that look
(57:25):
?
And that's why the Christianwriter said we're going to ask
Stavsky he writes a whole400-page novels on that question
what would it look if thishedonist turned himself over to
God?
Is that even possible?
(57:46):
I'm going to be a realistwriter.
I'm going to tell what'spossible for people in my
generation.
What would it look like forthem to do that and try to tell
the truth about their internalrelationships with themselves,
not just how it looks from theoutside?
That's why literature is soimportant, because literature
(58:09):
and writing is really the onlyplace you can get inside the
character.
Movies, they can talk, you canhave a voiceover, but it's
pretty much we're looking at himfrom the outside and seeing
behavior and maybe someself-talk.
But novels and poetry get rightinside the psyche and the
(58:30):
scripture does that too.
Get right inside the soul, theself's relationship with itself.
Speaker 3 (58:38):
We're out of time, but I want to thank you so much
for helping us with Kierkegaard.
He's an exciting one for me.
I see so much parallel tomodern culture, the modern
church, so it may be worthrevisiting him as well later.
And I want to update you I did.
I finished One Day of the Lifeof Ivan Denisovich.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Oh, yes, okay.
Speaker 3 (58:58):
I finished my first orthodoxy book since we started
the podcast and it's not even abig book, but it still took me a
little while.
But yeah, I want to read someKierkegaard.
I want to read guys along as wego.
It's really fun.
Speaker 1 (59:09):
Walker Percy was a big Kierkegaard fan, so when we
get to Walker Percy we'llrecapitulate the themes.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
Yeah, he's coming up on a few in the future, but,
yeah, thank you all so much forlistening and thank you all for
being here.
Okay, thanks, adios, and thatconcludes this episode.
I think there may be somethingin here for all of you, each of
you whether you're a skeptic, abeliever or somewhere in between
, on your own deconstructionjourney.
We're going to be exploringwhat it means to live a life of
(59:40):
deep meaning in a world thatoften feels fragmented and
nihilistic, and this revelatoryfaith doesn't seem to come to us
from the expected places.
The prophetic voice doesn'tseem to come from the pulpits or
the seminaries.
It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the
unexpected corners of culture.
(01:00:00):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
If you found this meaningful,please leave a five-star review,
subscribe and share with anyonewho might resonate with this
conversation.
Adios.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast
with Travis Mullen and ProfessorInchosti Outro Music.
When he said subjectivity is truth, what he
meant is your relationship toyourself is fundamental, and if
it's real you're not putting on.
You can't do that really unlessyou want to be totally
(00:20):
alienated from yourself and besomebody who doesn't have any
identity other than the personathat you play in society.
He was very big onindividuality, but only that.
Individuals had to have anauthentic relationship with
themselves, whether or notanybody else picked up on it or
(00:42):
whether anybody else thoughtthat was Christian in their
church.
It had to be an authenticrelationship to themselves and
their faith, and so you can'trely on other people, even your
therapist, to tell you who youare, because you could be
telling your therapist what youthink your therapist wants to
(01:03):
hear without authenticallyconfronting your own fear and
trembling and confusion anddoubts about faith.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So that confrontation , that inwardness, is what
Christianity introduced to theworld.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast.
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
(01:51):
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, denmark, in
1813, into a wealthy but deeplymelancholic family.
His father, michael Kierkegaard, was a stern and religious man
who had once cursed God as achild and spent much of his life
fearing divine punishment.
That deep sense of guilt waspassed on to Soren, shaping his
psychological landscape from thestart.
(02:58):
Kierkegaard was academicallygifted.
He studied philosophy andtheology at the University of
Copenhagen and became well knownfor his brilliance, wit and
sarcasm.
But even as he climbed theranks of intellectual society,
he wrestled with a profoundinner conflict between reason
and faith, structure and passion, tradition and authentic belief
(03:20):
.
At 27, kierkegaard was engagedto a young woman named Regine
Olson, but fearing he couldnever offer her a normal life,
plagued as he was by inneranguish and a sense of calling,
he broke off the engagement, adecision that tormented him for
the rest of his life andappeared often thinly veiled in
his writings.
He remained single and lived arelatively isolated life.
He remained single and lived arelatively isolated life,
(03:43):
pouring his energy into his work.
Between 1843 and 1855,kierkegaard wrote a remarkable
series of books under both hisname and pseudonyms, exploring
themes of despair, anxiety,faith, love and the absurd.
His method was unique he didn'tjust teach doctrine.
He created characters, voicesand scenarios that forced
(04:06):
readers to confront themselves.
Works like Fear and Trembling,the Sickness Unto Death,
either-or, and PhilosophicalFragments challenged
conventional theology andoffered a new way of thinking
about what it means to believe.
At the heart of Kierkegaard'swork is the idea that truth is
personal, not merelypropositional.
He argued that faith isn'tabout intellectual certainty but
(04:29):
about passionate commitment,what he famously called the leap
of faith.
For Kierkegaard to be a trueChristian wasn't to go to church
and follow rules.
It was to stand tremblingbefore God with nothing to lean
on but trust.
That made him deeply unpopularwith the religious establishment
of his day, especially theDanish Lutheran Church, which he
accused of dead orthodoxy, andcultural Christianity In the
(04:53):
last years of his life turnedmore openly polemical, launching
scathing attacks on the churchand calling Christians to
embrace the suffering, scandaland paradox of the cross.
He died young, at age 42 in1855, after collapsing in the
street and spending his finalweeks in a hospital where he
refused the last rites of thechurch he had so fiercely
(05:15):
criticized.
And yet, despite his obscurityin his own lifetime,
kierkegaard's influence has onlygrown.
His work laid the groundworkfor existential philosophers
like Jean-Paul Sartre and MartinHeidegger, theologians like
Karl Barth and Paul Tillich,psychologists like Rollo May,
and writers and artists fromDostoevsky to Camus to Flannery
(05:37):
O'Connor.
He is, in many ways, aparadoxical bridge between
classical Christianity andpostmodern thought, both
orthodox and radical, faithfulyet disruptive, often called the
father of existentialism,kierkegaard wasn't just a
philosopher.
He was a theologicalprovocateur, a poetic genius and
a deeply haunted soul trying towake the church, and maybe the
(05:59):
world, from a spiritual sleep.
In this episode, we'll explorehow thought speaks so powerfully
into today's culture, wheretruth feels fragmented, the
church is under critique andfaith often feels more like
struggle than certainty.
But far from pushing peopleaway from Christ, kierkegaard
invites us in deeper to a faiththat's not shallow or
(06:21):
performative, but raw, costlyand real.
And with no further ado, I'dlike to bring on Professor Larry
Inchosti.
Hello there, travis, good tosee you.
Larry, welcome back.
And for those of you who areeither newer to the podcast or
(06:42):
haven't listened to the firstepisode, I did realize maybe
some people do that they jumparound.
This whole podcast is based ona book that Professor N Chostey
wrote.
We call him Professor Larry,and so we've had him on every
episode and we're planning tohave him on every episode going
forth through all the charactersfrom the book, and we have a
bunch of ideas beyond that.
So welcome back.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
So just to give our audience a little more scope on
Kierkegaard's most notable works, just so they have an idea of
what he wrote.
A couple of them were justmentioned, but he wrote most of
these between 1843 and 1850.
In these seven years he wroteEither-Or Fear and Trembling
Repetition, philosophicalFragments, the Concept of
Anxiety, stages on Life's Way,concluding Unscientific
(07:33):
Postscript to PhilosophicalFragments, works of Love,
christian Discourses, theSickness Unto Death and Practice
in Christianity.
Very prolific guy, yeah.
Very prolific years there.
Just the last seven years ofhis life, it looks like yeah.
(07:53):
So some of the interesting factsabout him, before we dig in, is
that he walked the streets ofCopenhagen a lot.
He would take long solitarywalks, and I've actually been
hearing this about a lot of verysmart people through history.
They would have their bestideas on walks.
Nietzsche said the same thing.
So Kierkegaard and Nietzschemust have been two peas from the
(08:13):
same pod coming from completelydifferent angles on faith.
Locals called him themelancholy Dane because they'd
always see him walking and itwould help him think and write.
The next one is that we alreadymentioned.
He broke off his engagement,but he never got over the girl.
So he thought about it the restof his life and I guess appears
a lot in his writings.
(08:34):
Under a veil of not being superobvious, he had multiple
pseudonyms and he wrote wholebooks in these pseudonyms to
debate with himself.
So he would present differentarguments from different
characters.
But it was all him writing andsome of those pseudonyms were
Johannes de Silentio, vigilis,hoffnines and Anticomachus.
(09:00):
So these are some of hispseudonyms.
Komakis so these are some ofhis pseudonyms.
But it wasn't deception, it wasart.
It was almost like a form of anauthor's performance, art, and
it allowed him to attack weakfaith of feeling like he was
preaching doctrine or theology.
His biggest masterpiece of fearand trembling he wrote in two
(09:21):
weeks.
That's a fun fact.
He waged a one-man war on thechurch.
He was calling the church out.
Actually sounds stuff thatwould be relevant today.
To call the church out forThings like being too cozy with
power and afraid of suffering.
So political power and comforthe was calling them out for us.
(09:42):
How relevant is that?
And he said they haveChristianity without the cross
was a part of his critique.
And he once tried to publish abook without his name at all and
even with all of the pseudonymspeople knew it was him.
So it was similar to Banksy.
If Banksy tried to do somethingand not let anyone know it was
(10:03):
him, people would probably stillfigure it out.
So that's the clout he had.
And the last fun fact is henever traveled outside of
Denmark.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Those are fun facts this morning as well.
How would you frame bird's eyeview not zooming in yet how
(10:32):
would you frame Kierkegaard,what he meant to you and to your
book, subversive Orthodoxy?
Kierkegaard is the patron saintof subversive orthodoxy.
Did you mean original, or didyou mean orange juice?
(11:06):
He was the original gangster ofthe subversive orthodoxy, in
that he wasgaard's perspectivewouldn't really be a fiercely
intellectual defender ofChristianity, but more of a
humanist cultural critic thatfound interesting things in the
(11:30):
Christian mythology but didn'thave an existential commitment
to the faith per se in the sameway that Kierkegaard thought was
necessary.
If you wanted to live theChristian life.
You couldn't just rely onhumanist standards and see
(11:52):
Christ as a humanist, but youhad to make an existential
commitment and he was the firstperson, because his writing
seems so original, he was thefirst person, because his
writing seems so original, toexplain what an existential
commitment is or what it meansto want to live the truth and
(12:13):
not just simply know the truth,how that would play out
psychologically and spiritually.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Yeah, so there's so much we get from Kierkegaard and
I think also from Nietzsche,and we get so much of it in our
modern American worldview thatwe don't even know came from
them, and I think when I'mreading about Kierkegaard and
reading some of his quotes andstuff, it's like he actually
created a bunch of mindsets thatwe do have.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Like it's just me and my personal relationship with
God.
That came from Kierkegaard,pretty much, yeah, and you could
see how having a radical faithcame from Kierkegaard, because
everybody around him seemed,from his perspective, very
lukewarm and like the church hadbecome very cultural.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yes, conventional, everybody believed the same
thing.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, kind of like when you're in Texas now and
it's like everyone's a Christianin Texas, like that's the joke.
It's not really a joke, butit's like sure, like everyone
goes to church.
It's more normal there, but ifyou're in Boston, very few.
So there's a cultural norm thathe was speaking at, obviously
in Denmark.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
The thing with Kierkegaard, and I think you're
right to point out how a lot ofhis ideas have made it into our
culture, like authenticity andbeing real and having a personal
relationship to Jesus and allof those things, but they've
also been bastardized and notreally understood in the deep
(13:43):
way that he intended as aphilosophical critique, and so
it's good to go back to him andlook at what he actually said
and the context of what she said.
These things yeah.
So that's what.
Maybe we can do a little bit ofthat today.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah, and that's what you're here for.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
She helped take me back to the source.
One thing off the bat I see inhim is a double edged sword.
So there's one of his critiqueswas against the dogmatism and
theological certainty of thechurch and certainty in general,
not just the church but justcertainty in general, the
enlightenment.
And then I think challengingthat is good.
(14:22):
And then I think where it has anegative it can be too far of a
negative swing is where youlead into a relativism of just
total subjectivity.
I think the truth is somewherein a balance of the two.
But yeah, I think is thatsomething in him is like a
double edged sword in that way.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
No, I think the consequences of his popularity
and fame after he died andeverything, and him being taken
up by the French existentialistsand the German, like Heidegger
and those folks and Jaspers,took him out of his Christian
context and turned a lot of hisbest ideas into slogans.
Turned a lot of his best ideasinto slogans.
(15:09):
And so if we could put some ofthese ideas, like truth is
subjectivity, put that into itscontext of what he was trying to
talk about when he said that,and also the crowd is untruth,
that famous quote.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Yeah, that has a huge implication here in your book
yeah where he talks about that.
It sounds like it sounds likesuch a critique on social media
culture yeah like house ofmirrors.
I saw this line.
This is how the world it'stalking about the crowd.
They look at, people look at.
I'm sorry, let me back up.
Modern christendom had become acivil order, given over to
(15:46):
various hypocrisies and biblicalpieties, but lacking any
authentic relationship to theabsolute.
In other words, a sense ofcentered and coherent
self-consciousness is preciselywhat individuals lack.
Therefore, they look around atothers, the crowd now.
Think of social media here.
They look around at others, thecrowd, so that media.
Here.
They look around at others, thecrowd, so that they might
pattern themselves after thecollective reality, but all they
(16:09):
learn is what the others are.
This is how the world seducesindividuals from being
themselves.
The others, in turn, don't knowwho they themselves are, but
only who the others are, and soeveryone lives in a house of
mirrors, seeking essential lifein a world of appearances and
never finding it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
That's Kierkegaard in spades, but Kierkegaard himself
like in the actual text.
The concluding post-scientificpostscript.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Concluding unscientific postscript to
philosophical fragments.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Concluding unscientific postscript to
philosophical fragments, thatone is his mighty tome, in which
(17:06):
he philosophically tries toexplain what it means to be a
Christian from a psychological,spiritual, anthropological point
of view, that really you can'tcopy your Christian faith from
anybody else, because it'sreally a dialogue with yourself
in terms of the absolutes inyour life.
Your relationship with yourselfis defined by it, and so that's
the point that he's trying tomake is that the self is a
(17:26):
relation in which the self haswith itself, and so he meant by
that is that subjectivity.
When he said subjectivity istruth, what he meant is your
relationship to yourself isfundamental, is your
relationship to yourself isfundamental, and if it's real,
(17:49):
you're not putting on.
You can't do that really unlessyou want to be totally
alienated from yourself and besomebody who doesn't have any
identity other than the personathat you play in society.
And so he was very big onindividuality, but only that
(18:13):
individuals had to have anauthentic relationship with
themselves, whether or notanybody else picked up on it or
whether anybody else thoughtthat was Christian in their
church.
It had to be an authenticrelationship to themselves and
their faith in order for it tomatter at all.
(18:35):
To them.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
I think I hear what you're saying.
That he's saying is thatbecause he's looking at a world
that has been very conformistand he's getting really critical
of it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yes, and one way of thinking of it.
One of his famous quotes wasthat you can understand your
life looking backwards, but theproblem is you have to live it
going forward.
Understanding conceptually isapplying categories to past
experience, but unfortunately,life unfolds in new contexts and
(19:14):
in ever new relationships withyourself, and this can't be
formulated before the fact forindividuals or for people living
in time, and so faith comes inpieces.
(19:36):
Sometimes.
It doesn't come in terms of acomplete theology and dynamic.
It's dynamic and as you piecetogether your identity, you're
piecing together yourrelationship to God and your
faith.
So it's a process that only Godand your soul really have a
(19:59):
front seat to, and so you can'trely on other people, even your
therapist, to tell you who youare, because you could be
telling your therapist what youthink your therapist wants to
hear without authenticallyconfronting your own fear and
trembling and confusion anddoubts about faith.
(20:20):
Fear and trembling andconfusion and doubts about faith
.
So that confrontation, thatinwardness, is what Christianity
introduced to the world.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah, it relates to one of his quotes you have in
the book about knowing oneself.
Yeah, it's Sykegaard and you'resaying it's from the Christian
discourses.
It says there is only one whoknows what he himself is, and
that is God.
And he also knows what everyman in himself is.
For it is precisely by beingbefore God that every man has
(21:00):
his being.
The man who is not before Godis not himself.
A man can be himself only bybeing before him.
Who is in and for himself.
If one is oneself by being inhim, who is in and for himself.
One can be in others or beforeothers, but one cannot be
(21:22):
oneself being merely beforeothers.
It's almost like Dr Seuss,right there.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's similar to that mirrors passage you read a
little earlier.
Yeah, it was right after that,except it's a little bit more
philosophical, because the twophilosophers that were big in
his youth, that he read andadopted language from One was
Hegel the Mythology of theSpirit, and for him Hegel got it
(21:54):
exactly where philosophy wasaiming at the ultimate
abstraction that would explainthe dialectic of human history.
No, it was that each individualwas searching for their
relationship to the absolute,and that was a person-by-person
(22:19):
activity.
It wasn't a historical abstractactivity and it was concrete in
the present tense, unfolding,not something that you could
look back and understand allhuman history from this abstract
point of view.
Absolutely ass backwards.
(22:41):
You know the beginning ofDescartes' philosophical
meditations.
He talks about how he's goingto live a conventional life and
believe what everybody elsebelieves as a practical
expedient, and then that'llallow him to be a true thinker
(23:03):
in his professional work as aphilosopher.
And Kierkegaard, whosephilosophical ideal is Socrates
no, you either live the truth oryou're not a lover of wisdom.
You want to live your wisdom.
You don't want to just play theconventional game of the
(23:25):
culture you're in and then onyour days, in your writing, den
be a philosopher and write aboutthese abstract truths that are
impossible to embody.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Did he think of himself as a philosopher?
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, I think he did.
I think he thought of himselfas a Christian apostle who wrote
philosophy.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I think there's a bunch of reasons why I love this
guy yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
But there's one other quote, and this is another
abstract quote, but I think itmight help again to connect the
concrete to the abstract herefor us a little bit.
Kierkegaard wrote an essay inwhich he made a distinction
between the Christian apostleand the cultural genius.
(24:15):
A genius was somebody whoactualized the full potential of
any great science or art form.
So the genius was somebody likeBach, who took German music and
ran it through its paces toessentially complete all the
(24:39):
possible counterpoint that wasimaginable, right?
Or Einstein, who took physicsto its ultimate conclusion and
then one step further, and sothey were great embodiments of
human potential, but it wasalways at a human level, whereas
(25:02):
the apostle, he said and thenthis is his definition, which is
another one of these headspinners he said the genius is
only whose ends are only eminent.
They're ends that are onlywhat's possible now for a human
(25:27):
being in history, where anapostle is absolutely
paradoxically teleologicallyplaced.
Paradoxically teleologicallyplaced.
Now, when I read that, Ithought that was a perfect
description.
I was writing my book on ThomasMerton at the time, and Thomas
(25:52):
Merton is a creature of paradox.
He was like a world-famoushermit, right.
He was a writer who believedthat silence was the ultimate
eloquence.
Yeah, he was famous for being apoet, but he wasn't a very good
poet, so he had all thesecontradictions, a lot of
paradoxical facets of him, likeKierkegaard, and so why was he
(26:18):
so influential?
Why was he a bestseller in the50s and why does he continue to
influence people in his books onspirituality?
Because he really he wroteabout spirituality more than
theology and he really wasn't avery good theologian.
He's probably a good theologian, but he wasn't a very original
(26:38):
one.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Now are you connecting Merton to the concept
?
You just read that Kierkegaardwas saying about apostle yeah,
about apostle.
So can you say it again,Because it was pretty heady and
I want to try to capture themeaning.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
And I think it's why maybe Goethe wouldn't fit the
Kierkegaardian, except incertain phases of his life he
would.
Okay, this is the Kierkegaarddefinition of an apostle.
It's someone who is let me getit right, Wait, this is
something you have memorized.
Yes, I've memorized it.
It explained all of Kierkegaardin one sentence.
(27:13):
That was my take on itAbsolutely, paradoxically,
teleologically placed.
Another way of putting it is aChristian, unlike a pagan
philosopher or a Descartesrationalist, is someone who is
(27:35):
absolutely, absolutely,paradoxically, teleologically
placed.
And to unpack that a little bitmeans that this is not
something he does as a hobby.
This is a reflection of hischaracter and belief, right, the
(27:56):
fullness of his individualrelationship to the absolute.
Okay, so he's absolutely.
Now, paradoxically and wehaven't really got into why
paradox is so important toKierkegaard but maybe we should
do that next, and then I thinkwe'll have the big picture.
(28:17):
I think we'll have the bigpicture, but paradoxically meant
, not dogmatically in the senseof you have a set of beliefs and
you believe them and you knowthe truth.
No, an authentic person.
Life unfolds into the truth,which means that sometimes he
(28:41):
contradicts himself in order toget into a new phase of
existential commitment.
He becomes the most famoushermit like Merton.
How can you become a famoushermit?
Isn't that a contradiction interms?
No, it's a Christian paradox ofliving beyond the mere
(29:04):
rationality of a system whoseinternal consistency is more
important than your authenticcapacity to live in the truth.
Yeah, so it's absolutelyparadoxically and then
teleologically placed.
It's focused on the ultimateends of things.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
For the audience.
Teleologically has to do withtrajectory of human history,
that there's a story, thatthere's an ending.
That's the concept ofteleological, I believe.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yes, that there's an ultimate end to things.
Human beings can't instantlyknow the ultimate ends of things
unless you want to say you knowwhat God thinks because you
went to church and they told you.
They told you, and so you havethis rational, objective
(30:03):
understanding of the ultimateends of your life, or God's
vision of the universe.
That's maybe more than youreally know, and, if you're
honest, you don't even know whoyou're going to be in a year and
a half or how your beliefs aregoing to change in the light of
a human crisis.
Ain't that the truth?
So let's just be real about it.
(30:31):
And the Christian apostle is onewho believes there's a purpose
to it, but I don't know it yet.
Maybe and faith is living withthat knowledge that there is
meaning, but you haven't yet,maybe, got it all together To a
Christian apostle, or aChristian apostle is more like
somebody who is aware of theirincapacities, their limitations,
(30:57):
their sin, and stands nakedbefore God in fear and trembling
, and says, unlike Descartes, Idon't know the meaning of life,
nor am I willing to pretend,like I do so, that I can pursue
it in my library on Fridays.
(31:17):
I have to pursue it in my lifeas it's unfolding before me and
right now I don't know and I'min crisis and I'm just living on
faith and a prayer, and it saysAmen.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
It sounds like what I would call cosmic humility.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Cosmic humility.
That's what it is, but it isn'tthat you lose yourself.
It's like my relationship withmyself needs God, because I am
not all that.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
And humility in that I am not God and I don't know
everything and I'm not going topretend like I really know as
many things as I pretend I know.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
And even though I have a PhD in physics, or even
if I'm the greatest scientist inthe world, that when I'm facing
death or looking at theabsolute, or if someone says,
how can you live the truth ofthe cosmos?
I think it was Richard Dawkins,the famous selfish gene guy,
(32:24):
who said that evolutionarybiology doesn't really give him
rules to live by.
But if you were to ask him hisethics, he would say I just try
to live like an averageChristian, which is funny.
It's like a proving point.
Abstract knowledge is a kind ofknowledge, but it isn't the
(32:46):
only kind of knowledge.
There's one's relationship withoneself, existential experience
that is more directly addressedby the Christian apostle than
it is by Descartes or acontemporary enlightenment
scientist.
Not that those things aren'tgreat, but they don't help you
(33:09):
with these questions of self andvalues and meaning.
Speaker 3 (33:14):
Yeah, and, as scientists even today would tell
you, science never was tryingto answer those questions deeper
meaning and so there was afalse conflict for a long time,
probably through the 1900s,where people thought science was
at odds with faith, and it'slike just that they're talking
about two different things thatthey both weren't talking about,
(33:35):
like the bible.
The genesis wasn't writing ascience textbook or one thing,
and the scientists weren'ttrying to write about the deeper
meaning of life.
That's right.
So it's like why was there sucha conflict there?
I think all the assumptionswere off on both sides.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah, it got twisted around because science didn't
address those problems, thoseproblems didn't matter.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Or you shouldn't waste your time on those
problems because they'reunanswerable.
There's still questions we askourselves, whether the
scientists do or not what's myrelationship to myself and am I
an authentic person?
And those kinds of questionscome up, and that's what the
(34:18):
subversive orthodoxy is about,is there's a lot of people that
thought those were still goodquestions and so they pursued
them and the scientistsdismissed them.
But now we look back at themand we say, gee, at least they
addressed the issue.
What do I do with science?
What do I do with all thispower and this technological
(34:38):
advancement?
Speaker 3 (34:43):
power and this technological advancement, yeah,
so this is a good segue intowhat I told you is that in
college I did some course thatwas like worldview, yeah, uh-huh
, and it was somewhat of afundamentalist brainwashing
before you go to college, so youdon't get brainwashed the other
way become a atheist, whichactually turns out.
I was thankful for it because itdid expose me to things like
this.
One book was called seven menwho rule the world from the
(35:04):
grave, by a guy named breeze,and his take on kierkegaard was
kind of like on the defensive,here's a guy who is basically
causing post-modernism, oh, andit turns out the things that he
didn't like about Kierkegaardare the things I like about
Kierkegaard now.
But yet what's so cool aboutKierkegaard is that he is the
(35:26):
father of deconstruction andpostmodernism, but he didn't
step away from Christ.
He actually went deeper atChrist, which is just crazy
paradox.
Yeah, yeah, which is accused ofliberal theology, accused him
of faith detached from doctrineand truth, which I don't think
that was a fair critique, mostlikely.
(35:46):
And then another critique hehad was just subjectivity over
objectivity, and that'santi-enlightenment and that's
where theology had gotten to.
We have to have our seminarytell us exactly what this
passage means and exactly how topray in the scientific way
according to the text.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Yes, because we want the scientists to respect our
faith.
So we want to show how Noah'sArk was really 5,000 miles long
and we can prove itscientifically or something.
It just seemed, fromKierkegaard's point of view, the
completely wrong question.
It's like you're buying allthese false premises about the
(36:28):
nature of truth as beingobjective, when there is such a
thing as subjective truth, yourrelationship with yourself,
whether you're lying to yourself, whether you're being honest
with yourself, whether you'relying to yourself, whether
you're being honest withyourself, those are elements of
human experience, and Goetheaddresses that, and Blake
addresses that, and all thenovelists of the 19th century
(36:52):
address that, and they weren'tjust people that didn't have
anything to say.
So let's go to the three ways,three stages.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Before we go there.
I have an interjection thatthat idea of what you're just
saying and we have been talkingabout it is that idea of not
lying to yourself and truly,truly knowing yourself.
I don't think that was reallyemphasized in Christian faith
that much.
It was more about knowing God.
There was a famous AW Tozerquote which was like what you
(37:24):
think about God is the mostimportant thing about yourself,
and I really hate that quote nowbecause it really had only to
do with knowledge and theology.
Do you have the right thinkingabout God?
Which is all that statement wassaying was the most important
thing about you having the righttheology.
And ultimately, I have to sharethis story for you and for our
(37:46):
audience.
A person in my life that had theright theology and was very
certain, one of the most certainpeople I've ever known and was
very critical of anyone who hadwrong theology or wasn't a
Christian.
Somebody that was veryjudgmental, was my youth pastor
and he pushed a lot of peopleaway.
(38:07):
His certainty and his harshguarding of the church, the
youth ministry and theology andsuch a rigid person turned out
well.
Did he truly know himself?
Did he really know God?
Because ultimately, in 2018, wefound out he had slept with
(38:27):
underage girls at a previouschurch.
It came out 20 years later.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, not an uncommon story, is it?
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Yeah, and just the certainty that goes along with
these types of characters isalways at a very high level, and
judgmentalism is at a very highlevel of those who are hiding
something.
So it's kind of like for me evenat times when I was a pastor or
a church planter and I wasstruggling with my own self was
ripping apart my marriage, myparenting.
(38:55):
Ultimately, I believed what Ithought were correct things.
What did that have to do withthe fact that I was being torn
apart right now?
Did I know God in that and didI even know myself?
I really did not know myselfvery well at the time.
So I think what Kierkegaard issaying is super relevant just to
living, but also to living infaith.
(39:17):
And, as he's saying on histerms, he's talking about faith,
but I think it's true foreveryone just to truly know
yourself, to have cosmichumility, to understand like you
could just be believing thingsbecause a bunch of people
believe it around you and thenyou think you know something,
but you're really just walkingin a form that somebody else
(39:38):
formed for you.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And if you're struggling with faith, or if
you're being honest withyourself, maybe you know God
loves you.
You don't believe.
If the existence of a God issomething you don't understand,
maybe you haven't perceived orthought the right thought about
God yet.
Don't blame yourself.
(40:01):
Stay true to your authenticityuntil it's made clear to you.
Otherwise, then you have thebig breakdown where doubt and
faith come together.
That's the paradox you can'tdoubt unless you have faith and
you can't have faith unless youhave doubt.
It's the person who can't havefaith unless you have doubt,
(40:24):
it's the person who opts forobjective certainty who doesn't
understand that faith is arelationship between the finite
human being and the absolute,transcendent God.
That is unknowable by myfaculties, and if I could prove
him mathematically orscientifically, he wouldn't be
absolutely.
(40:44):
He would be within my bailiwick, I could have him in my garage
or pictures of him or whateverthey sell you.
As to the search for historicalJesus, I'm going to find his
fingerprints somewhere and it'sgoing to give me the faith that
I'm struggling to possess thatlife isn't unfolding in stages,
(41:04):
and that's why we should go tothe Stages in Life's Way that he
wrote, which is another key tounderstanding existential
Christianity.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Okay, so you were going to tell us about the
Stages on Life's Way.
Okay, Stages on Life's Way.
Which book did this come from?
Do you know?
Speaker 1 (41:24):
from the.
I think the book is calledstages on life's way.
Oh, it's one of the books, yeah, but this concept comes up in
other books as well and theyrepresent the three different
modes of human existence the,the aesthetic, the ethical and
the religious.
And these are not likepsychological categories,
(41:46):
they're existential stages, andby that he means they're ways
that people experience theirlives that most, if not
everybody, goes through, becausethey are basically a changing
relationship of yourself toyourself.
They each have a differentrelation.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
I don't think people even use the word worldviews
anymore because, yeah, it seemslike they're like psychological
or spiritual stages, slashmaturity levels.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yes, they're more like that.
Speaker 3 (42:20):
And in your book.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
I did see that Faust only made it to stage two, right
?
Yeah, I think he did, and wedidn't talk about that when we
were dealing with Goethe,because Goethe was a hard one to
talk about.
Goethe was like his own animal.
Yeah, it started withKierkegaard.
We could have labeled himbetter.
But anyway, let's just gothrough the aesthetic phase
first, because I think a lot ofyoung people I know I was this
way in my 20s and the aestheticstage is where life is about
(42:53):
enjoyment and the avoidance ofcommitment and suffering
avoidance of commitment andsuffering.
So if you're living in theaesthetic stage of life, you're
essentially looking for the goodlife, the pleasant life.
What's the crazy?
Speaker 3 (43:11):
life.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
La Vida Loca La.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Vida Loca.
Yes, this is a lot of Americanculture.
Just have fun, enjoy your life.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yes, have fun For Kierkegaard.
He had a character in Either oras the seducer who was the
hedonist it's sort of like aHugh Hefner character and he
wrote what this person'sphilosophy of life would be if
he could speak.
And so he had a pseudonym forthe guy I think his name was A
(43:41):
or something and he explainedthat the aesthetic stage, your
purpose in life, is to avoidboredom and despair through
novelty, art and wittyreflection.
And so you're living.
Sounds like my children, yes,trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
And then you living Sounds like my children yes,
trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
And then you and most Americans Develop a persona in
your relationship with yourselfis you're somebody who has the
best of everything, or you'resomebody who knows how to have a
good time.
Or you live for the parties, oryou live for your aesthetic
work, which is not seen as anethical obligation but rather
(44:25):
just a beautiful way of livingyour life, with pleasure and
happiness, a minimum of pain andsuffering that come from having
a commitment.
But this only lasts for so longbecause ultimately the state
amuses themselves to a pointwhere they begin to find these
(44:49):
things meaningless.
P Diddy party that you've goneto, or the 5,000th wine high or
whatever, living for yourselfand your pleasures, you begin to
(45:13):
despair that it's allmeaningless.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
So when you hit that point now you're which you could
have solved already, becausethe book of Ecclesiastes was
written like 2,000 years ago.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, and it's also Faust right, he lived for
pleasure and power.
Yeah.
And so he came to the end of hisrope and it was like is this it
?
I'm beginning to think I wantto have some significance in my
life.
And so you undergo a crisis, ora crisis undergoes you, and you
(45:43):
are forced to look at yourselfin the mirror and you see a
pleasure seeker or someoneavoiding commitment and you say
I'm ready for the ethical stage.
And so then you move into theethical stage, and the ethical
stage is a life ofresponsibility and commitment,
(46:05):
and so it has aspects to it likeduty, selfhood, marriage, a
profession, a job, relationshipwith yourself as your
relationship, with a series ofresponsibilities and tasks and
things you can be proud of goodwork, professionalism.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
Does even service or charity fit in here?
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Service charity.
A good example for regard wouldbe the tragic heroes in Greek
tragedy.
Guard would be the tragicheroes in Greek tragedy.
They all live for, either likeAntigone to protect her brother,
or all the tragic heroes ofclassical literature, the hero
with a thousand faces.
He's an ethical figure to winHelen back for the Greeks.
(46:56):
They have a cause and theirlife has meaning, and so what's
the trajectory on?
This one, the first one'spredictable.
Yeah.
The second one is you become aself with maybe a professional
life, maybe an ethical ambition.
Maybe you're like at a servicejob let's say you're a
(47:18):
missionary or something but overtime you realize that Maybe
you're like a service job let'ssay you're a missionary or
something but over time yourealize that.
But for Kierkegaard, yourealize that you can't do it.
You can't really do what youset out to do.
I wanted to educate all thechildren in America and I can
(47:40):
barely educate five of thesekindergartners and, if I'm
honest with myself, my usefulidealism has dried up.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
And so there's got to be something more than just me
and my virtue.
So this stage is you had goodintentions, but it's just not
enough and you're running out ofout of gas, or you're just not
good enough.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
You're not living up to your own ideal, even.
Yeah, and why even do it now?
Because the bad guys win.
You can't save the world andyou're powerless to be any, so
this is unlike the person who'stired of the party.
This is the person who's tiredof the party.
This is the person who's tiredof the job.
This is the kind of the burnoutperiod.
(48:26):
It's hard of duty, yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:29):
And so this is where everyone who's listening to our
podcast is at.
They're all probably in theirmid forties, and this is the
leap of faith.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yeah, this is the absolute, paradoxical,
teleological leap.
I don't know why it's this way,but there's got to be some
reason that I don't get.
That's motivating me tocontinue to believe in a larger
(49:04):
order, and it must be in God'shands or I'm going to give up.
Yeah, so you.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
Wow, that's it, just as you're saying.
That brought three of myfriends testimonies to mind of
how they found God.
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:20):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
And that's the paradox.
It's like when I realized Icouldn't do it on my own, I just
turned it all over to God andsaid you're going to have to
carry me because I can't do itNow.
That's the Kierkegaardian leapof faith, and for a Kierkegaard,
that's really the only way youget to the religious faith.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
How does he defend that from Nietzsche saying oh,
you're so weak-minded.
What does Kierkegaard say tothat?
Speaker 1 (49:48):
It is weak-minded because I'm a finite creature.
I'm not a superman like you,Nietzsche, who is going to kid
himself about Back to honesty ofcosmic humility.
Yes, the honesty of the cosmichumility.
Now, maybe if you are a Naziand you are Adolf Hitler, you
(50:12):
think you can take over theworld and usurp gods, but the
track record so far you'refinite.
You can't be Superman.
Superman is an imaginaryprojection of the ego that has
to die.
And so the religious stage isnot about doctrine or dogma, but
(50:35):
about passion and commitmentfor something that on the face
of it, seems absurd, forsomething that on the face of it
seems absurd.
So you believe because you havefaith and commitment and
devotion.
You don't believe becausesomebody proved it to you and
(50:57):
gave you a guarantee that if youbelieve, everything's going to
go great for you.
In fact, if you believe, itmight not go great for you and
that might be okay.
And it's like where MartinLuther King said the arc of the
moral universe is steep, but itbends toward justice.
(51:18):
That's a statement of afaithful person.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
That's a teleological statement.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
Yeah, that's a teleological statement.
Yeah, it's a teleologicalstatement.
It bends toward justice.
He's not saying I know exactlywhere it goes and I'm going to
take you there.
It's no, I'm on this journey andI might not make it with you
but I know that we'll make itthere eventually and I have
faith that it bends towardjustice.
(51:47):
So this is the one part Iwanted to read to you.
You have tragic heroes inclassical literature who stand
for something and die, usuallyfor their commitment, but their
values live on because theystood for them.
So you have Achilles orOdysseus or Antigone, and these
(52:11):
are essentially humanist heroeswith a thousand faces right.
They go through a trial, theydevelop these skills, they come
back and give the good fight andthen they pass on the boon to
the community and they'recelebrated as great heroes.
Well, he had his Christiancounterpoints to the tragic hero
(52:35):
, and one was the knight offaith.
And the knight of faith issomebody who carries on, not
because they're going to get aboon that's going to renew the
community.
They don't know if they'regoing to get a boon or not, but
they're carried by faith.
Night of faith, the other nightwas the night of infinite
(52:59):
resignation.
And the night of infiniteresignation is and the night of
infinite resignation is someone,like a nihilistic
existentialist, doesn't know ifthey're doing the right thing,
if there's any reason really toserve the poor, but they can't
think of anything else thatmakes sense to them that's any
(53:22):
more important.
So they do it anyway, with thekind of infinite resignation
that my thought is worth it,even though it doesn't give me
any pleasure or meaning beyondthe fact that I choose to do it.
That's the atheisticexistentialist, whereas the
(53:43):
night of faith holds out, theparadox that maybe there's
something out there that I don'tunderstand that will, like the
resurrection or like theturnaround in people's lives,
(54:07):
give meaning where right now Idon't see it, and so that's the
night of faith.
Like Martin Luther King man thatwhole his life is, and these
Christian heroes are running onfaith.
There are no guarantees in thatworld other than the guarantee
they have with theirrelationship to their God in
(54:28):
fear and trembling.
And that's why Kierkegaardwrote Fear and Trembling and
said a Christian lives in fearand trembling as to the
consequences of their faith.
And not drinking a latte at themegachurch rally put on by the
dancing pastor or whatever thathe was in tune with the fact
(54:50):
that they're suffering.
Yes, and then not everybodyknows or can know.
And if you're really honestwith yourself, your faith comes
in stages.
And maybe you were a hedonistin your 20s and maybe you're a
burnt out idealist in your 30sand now in your 40s.
And maybe you're a burnt-outidealist in your 30s and now in
your 40s, you're willing to turnit over to God or, like the
12-step program, to whateverhigher power you believe may be
(55:14):
in control of things, and putyour trust in something larger.
And that trust is, forKierkegaard, the leap of faith.
That's what that's about.
Speaker 3 (55:27):
Yeah, I did.
Actually I noticed thatrealizing the powerlessness was
in that chapter, Like that waspart of his leap of faith
verbiage, and you almost wonderif the AA got that from there.
Speaker 1 (55:38):
Yeah, they did, maybe unconsciously, Because
Kierkegaard was the leap offaith is a great term, but the
fact that for Kierkegaard thatit's almost an inevitable stage
you and psycho-spiritualdevelopment it's like you got to
(56:01):
go through I don't know for him.
You go through all phases atsome point in your life and I
think they also.
You go back and forth sometimes.
Speaker 3 (56:11):
That's a little too gracious, because I think some
people stay stunted in differentmentalities and cultural norms.
Unfortunately, people don'teven develop.
Sometimes Somebody is the sameat 25 as they are at 65, which
is sad when you see it.
But it's cool to hear just howthose three stages work together
(56:34):
, because I didn't read thatbook and I didn't know how one
led to the next and how thatsecond to third.
I could relate to a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
And then we're dealing with these Christian
writers and philosophers andcritics and meta-historians and
people like that.
Kierkegaard gives us someinteresting conceptual
frameworks.
Understand them.
The Goethe is second stage.
Faust, if we're lucky, he'sgoing to make it to the second
(57:03):
stage.
He's going to move out of anaesthetic life of pleasure and
power into an ethical point ofview.
He'll be like Oppenheimer.
He'll have realized that hisscience has an ethical dimension
to it.
But now you're going to turnthat over to God.
And if you're going to turn itover to God, how would that look
(57:25):
?
And that's why the Christianwriter said we're going to ask
Stavsky he writes a whole400-page novels on that question
what would it look if thishedonist turned himself over to
God?
Is that even possible?
(57:46):
I'm going to be a realistwriter.
I'm going to tell what'spossible for people in my
generation.
What would it look like forthem to do that and try to tell
the truth about their internalrelationships with themselves,
not just how it looks from theoutside?
That's why literature is soimportant, because literature
(58:09):
and writing is really the onlyplace you can get inside the
character.
Movies, they can talk, you canhave a voiceover, but it's
pretty much we're looking at himfrom the outside and seeing
behavior and maybe someself-talk.
But novels and poetry get rightinside the psyche and the
(58:30):
scripture does that too.
Get right inside the soul, theself's relationship with itself.
Speaker 3 (58:38):
We're out of time, but I want to thank you so much
for helping us with Kierkegaard.
He's an exciting one for me.
I see so much parallel tomodern culture, the modern
church, so it may be worthrevisiting him as well later.
And I want to update you I did.
I finished One Day of the Lifeof Ivan Denisovich.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Oh, yes, okay.
Speaker 3 (58:58):
I finished my first orthodoxy book since we started
the podcast and it's not even abig book, but it still took me a
little while.
But yeah, I want to read someKierkegaard.
I want to read guys along as wego.
It's really fun.
Speaker 1 (59:09):
Walker Percy was a big Kierkegaard fan, so when we
get to Walker Percy we'llrecapitulate the themes.
Speaker 3 (59:17):
Yeah, he's coming up on a few in the future, but,
yeah, thank you all so much forlistening and thank you all for
being here.
Okay, thanks, adios, and thatconcludes this episode.
I think there may be somethingin here for all of you, each of
you whether you're a skeptic, abeliever or somewhere in between
, on your own deconstructionjourney.
We're going to be exploringwhat it means to live a life of
(59:40):
deep meaning in a world thatoften feels fragmented and
nihilistic, and this revelatoryfaith doesn't seem to come to us
from the expected places.
The prophetic voice doesn'tseem to come from the pulpits or
the seminaries.
It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the
unexpected corners of culture.
(01:00:00):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
If you found this meaningful,please leave a five-star review,
subscribe and share with anyonewho might resonate with this
conversation.
Adios.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast
with Travis Mullen and ProfessorInchosti Outro Music.
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