Training in Christianity: The Obstacle
Belief vs. knowing
In the first section of Training in Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard invites us to pause and consider what holds us back from responding to Christ’s invitation. One of key challenges for many people is the desire to “prove” Jesus’ godhood using the tools of reason and historical investigation.
Kierkegaard is inherently skeptical of such an endeavor. For him, Christ is something entirely “other.” Attempting to confine Jesus to the categories comprehensible to the human mind is actually blasphemy. Instead, he says that Christ must be “believed” rather than “known.”
When I first read this dichotomy it felt like he was asking Christians to simply accept the irrational and ignore all the evidence they see in the world around them. However, ultimately, he used the example of a Christendom that has chosen to know many facts “about” Jesus while choosing to live in a way that looked nothing like what Christ actually taught.
What I heard in his statement that he was trying to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom was that purely academic knowledge of Jesus is insufficient, and may even get in the way, by making us complacent. Instead, he calls us to “believe.”
This is where it is easy to misunderstand what Kierkegaard is saying.
Risk with direction
For Kierkegaard, the word “believe” is a much deeper concept than the way that word is often used today. It is not a question of choosing to accept the unbelievable. For him it is a question of loyalty to the fundamental assumptions and values that shape a person’s life.
Dr. Aaron Simmons, philosopher and former president of the American Kierkegaard Society, teaches that Kierkegaard defines “faith” as “risk with direction.” In the context of Training in Christianity, I hear Kierkegaard as saying that Christendom’s unwillingness to risk living our lives in a Christlike direction shows that we have placed our faith in something other than Jesus. Our “belief” in the culture of Christendom is itself the obstacle that prevents us from truly experiencing the rest that Christ invites us into.
It does not have to be this way. In the next session he will remind us the qualities of the one who has offered that invitation and suggest that we place renewed trust in “the Inviter.”
