Kierkegaard on the poor…

I am not sure why, but I have enjoyed two of Pastor Cole’s recent blog posts. This is a real good one. He references Kierkegaard.

If I had to name the greatest theological influences on my Christian education they would be Soren Kierkegaard, E.Y. Mullins, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dale Moody. I love to read their works.

But Kierkegaard is the most influential. He is such if anything for the fact that Brunner, Niebuhr and Moody are all theologically indebted to him. Let’s include with them Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Frank Stagg, etc. Kierkegaard was the theological father of neo-orthodoxy and, I would argue, the man who saved conservative Christian theology from intellectual extinction.

So I am so thrilled that Pastor Cole mentions him and a particular book.

Ah, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard. What a wonderful compendium! One of my favourite books. Theology, devotion, philosophy, criticism, kerygma and doctrine joined in a harmonious, counter-point concert. I strongly recommend this book, particularly as an introduction to his theology. I think this books presents a fairly accurate summary of Kierkegaard’s primary points of view about the Christian Faith and his significant contributions to the Church.

Provocations was one of the books I read on the Oxford Study Program in 2004. I think I actually bought it at the Barnes & Noble in Oxford. Interestingly, that year’s program was led by Dr. Yarnell who has left comments on the passage.


This, from the book Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard.

Disclaimer: Reading a single syllable of Kierkegaard is certain to set your little boat adrift, either to the right side of the river in ecumenism, or down the middle in neo-orthodoxy, or to the left toward liberalism. As with Liberation Theology, thar be dragons aplenty. Enter ye, who must surely meet their fate:

Christ was not making a historical observation when he declared: The gospel is preached to the poor. The accent is on the gospel, that the gospel is for the poor. Here the word “poor” does not simply mean poverty but all who suffer, are unfortunate, wretched, wronged, oppressed, crippled, lame, leprous, demonic. The gospel is preached to them, that is, the gospel is for them. The gospel is good news for them. What good news? Not: money, health, status, and so on — no, this is not Christianity.

No, for the poor the gospel is the good news because to be unfortunate in this world (in such a way that one is abandoned by human sympathy, and the worldly zest for life even cruelly tries to make one’s misfortune into guilt) is a sign of God’s nearness. So it was originally; this is the gospel in the New Testament. It is preached for the poor, and it is preached by the poor who, if they in other respects were not suffering, would eventually suffer by proclaiming the gospel; since suffering is inseparable from following Christ, from telling the truth.

But soon there came a change. When preaching the gospel became a livelihood, even a lush livelihood, then the gospel became good news for the rich and for the mighty. For how else was the preacher to acquire and secure rank and dignity unless Christianity secured the best for all? Christianity thus ceased to be glad tidings for those who suffer, a message of hope that transfigures suffering into joy, but a guarantee for the enjoyment of life intensified and secured by by the hope of eternity.

The gospel no longer benefits the poor essentially. In fact, Christianity has now even become a downright injustice to those who suffer (although we are not always conscious of this, and certainly unwilling to admit to it). Today the gospel is preached to the rich, the powerful, who have discovered it to be advantageous. We are right back again to the very state original Christianity wanted to oppose. The rich and powerful not only get to keep everything, but their success becomes the mark of their piety, the sign of their relationship to God. And this prompts the old atrocity again — namely, the idea that the unfortunate, the poor are to blame for their condition; that it is because they are not pious enough, are not true Christians, that they are poor, whereas the rich have not only pleasure but piety as well. This is supposed to be Christianity. Compare it with the New Testament, and you will see that this is as far from that as possible.

Allow me to make a few concluding un-scientific commments, he says with a self-satisfied chuckle.

Kierkegaard was from an infant-baptism church and, to my knowledge, never spoke against it.

With regards to his scathingly attacks on those churches that consider everybody possible to be a Christian, his criticism applies to both infant-baptism churches and believers-baptism churches. Indeed, a proper reading of Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom will show that it stems from his studies on the subjective aspect of faith in God (see Philosophic Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Kierkegaard’s problem was with a Christianity that taught that mere assent to the objectives truths of the Faith made one a Christian. He saw that such an objective approach to Christianity had no transforming affect upon the individual believer. Instead, Kierkegaard argued for a subjective approach to the Faith which involved a personal commitment on the part of the believer; an approach beyond mere assent to that of a transforming, personal commitment. The reduction of Christianity to mere assent to objective facts and elementary truths aside from any real personal relationship with God is a problem that plagues all church traditions regardless of mode and meaning of Baptism.

Thus, Kierkegaard would have liked the Emergent Church. He would have approved of its focus on the personal, relational and subjective aspects of that part of the Church.

In fact, I could make a case that Kierkegaard would have been thrilled with the works of E.Y. Mullins.