"What must I do to be saved?" The impassioned plea of the Philippian jailer to Paul and Silas (Acts 16:30) is the foundational question of Christian conversion; and Paul’s reply, "Believe in the Lord Jesus" is its proper answer. But to utter these words and leave it at that is insufficient; we must inquire further what it means to believe. The long theological and spiritual history of Christianity has established that to believe is much more than merely to assent. Faith is not only an intellectual agreement but a surrender of one’s entire being to the reality of Jesus Christ. It is a deeply personal appropriation of the good news of salvation. The New Testament describes the Christian way of faith as a complete transformation, in which one is transferred from the realm of darkness to the realm of light (Col 1: 12-13); dies and rises (Rom 6); is found after being lost (Luke 15.) Unless one must be prepared to undergo this transformation, implicit in the decision to believe, one cannot be saved.

The early church labored hard to explain a puzzling phenomenon: why, if Christ’s offer of salvation an offer of life over death, far more people rejected it than accepted it. The Gospel of John records that, immediately following the miraculous division of the loaves and fishes (a messianic reenactment of the manna in the wilderness), most of Jesus’ followers deserted him (John 6:66.) If Jesus truly does have "the words of life," why would so many refuse the gift?

The answer seems to be that, in order to receive the gift, one must be prepared to undergo, a total life-change, complete metanoia ; and that people naturally resist such disruptions to their routines.

So we find that Christians have always been adept at avoiding the full implications of their faith. Clever and inventive moral, theological and institutional strategies have been devised that ensure the Gospel will not succeed in its life-changing work. One writer who described this phenomenon with brilliant perception was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In this paper, I want to look at one aspect of Kierkegaard’s vision of Christianity: his description of the evasive maneuvers Christians use to keep Christ at a safe distance. Furthermore, I want to suggest that Kierkegaard’s insights are still relevant to the church today.

Kierkegaard’s context was European "Christendom" – the pervasive institutionalized, publicly-regulated religious culture of nineteenth century Lutheran Denmark, which, he argued, neutralized the radical message of Christ. The emerging modern state had co-opted the church as a tool of social control to safeguard the state’s interests. 1 Kierkegaard saw the Christendom church as a tool of bourgeois culture, a criticism shared by other nineteenth century critics like Marx and Nietzsche. It achieved this end by defining a "Christian" as a law-abiding, compliant and respectable citizen. Christians are those who participate in accepted forms of public piety, such as baptism and confirmation, without questioning whether these rites should lead to a life change. Because Christendom valued conformity over conversion, it served to dissipate the true passion of authentic faith. Christendom actually undermined the biblically stated goal of God’s work in Jesus Christ which is to transform the individual. Kierkegaard decried a situation in which people claimed to be Christians "solely by virtue of a baptismal certificate" 2 and noted that where everyone is a Christian, no one is really a Christian.3 "Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it. The consequence is, that if anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom."4

Even though Kierkegaard’s Christendom has been replaced by a post-Christian amalgam of civil religion, neo-pagan spirituality and an attitude of cynicism towards religious institutions,5 the habits of heart and will that he described persist wherever people come to church, not to be changed, but to remain as they are. True, many congregations are communities of grace that lead their members to deep and authentic faith; but every pastor is acquainted with those who experience the disorientation of change in every other area of their lives and take solace in knowing that, at least in church, everything is as it should be.

The Concreteness of Christianity

According to Kierkegaard, Christianity announces to the world the ultimate and most baffling of paradoxes: God has appeared in time.7 The paradox of the incarnation cannot be argued speculatively, but only appropriated personally. It cannot be analyzed but only obeyed. God’s incursion into time affects human beings at the level of their concrete existence, not in the abstract. For Kierkegaard, existence is the most trustworthy category of being; but because of human limitation, existence always seems to involve the collision of contradictory realities. But human beings must have the courage to live amidst the tensions of the world as it actually is, if they are going to live authentically. This means they must face often tortuous choices between opposing alternatives. There is no evading the travail of decision because the true self is the ethical self who decides for what it is true and good not theoretically, but in the concrete actuality of daily existence.8 In this sense, Kierkegaard rejected the side of the Enlightenment tradition that tried to negotiate around the complex and the paradoxical in a misguided search for a rationally transparent account of reality. Such a quest is a false hope because only God is able to transcend the tension and incompleteness of existence. We must face the anxiety of paradox with courage and faith. Only by doing so, according to Kierkegaard, can the individual move from inauthenticity to authenticity. The person of faith must be involved passionately in the business of existence and not try to take refuge in a realm of pure thought which gives the illusion of being able to mediate easily between contradictory alternatives. True faith always entails a "leap" from one side to the other, not a smooth and painless transition. Not shying away from paradox takes courage but infuses existence with passion, energy and "spiritedness." 9

Kierkegaard saw Christendom as an organized drive to avoid this risk. It could not abide the instabilities and uncertainties of existence and devised ways to resolve and neutralize them. In the opening chapters of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard identified two characteristic tendencies that accounted for the evasive dimension of Christianity in his time: "the historical point of view" and "the speculative point of view." By reviewing what Kierkegaard meant by these terms we can gain insight into the evasive maneuvers of not only his time but our own.

History in the modern era is not just a chronicle of the past but a comprehensive world view. The Enlightenment rejected revelation as a source of truth in favor of the methods of science which, during the nineteenth century, expanded beyond the natural to the so-called human and social sciences, including history. Kierkegaard saw great peril in the historical point of view, however, which he regarded as a prime example of abstract thinking. Abstraction results when the subject ceases to be personally related to the object in question and takes up the position of a detached spectator. "Abstract thought is disinterested," Kiekegaard wrote, "but for an existing individual, existence is the highest interest;"10 and historical method actually tries to circumvent existence by "propos[ing] to make everyone an observer"11 in the interests of "objectivity." Indeed, one of the great spiritual quests of the nineteenth century was to give an account of Christianity in "objective" historical terms which were valid apart from personal commitment or faith.

From a religious perspective, this strategy is doomed to fail, according to Kierkegaard. The modern study of history is based on an "approximation process" by which one attempts to reconstruct the past on the basis of the best available evidence. 12 But, when it comes to matters of truth, this is completely inadequate precisely because any such claim to knowledge is only ever approximate and provisional while Christian faith necessarily concerns matters of "infinite personal interest."13 When one tries to establish faith on things that can only ever be known approximately, one ends up withholding genuine commitment pending more complete knowledge. When this stance is adopted, constantly changing historical judgments and hypotheses replace the appearance of eternity into time and Jesus Christ is displaced as the ultimate criterion of truth. Faith is then relativized and the believer is given license to avoid the full crisis of decision by reserving judgment concerning the historical truth of the Gospel. The historical point of view allows the individual "to shirk something of the pain and crisis of decision," which, for Kierkegaard, is the essence of faith.14

The second problem with the historical point of view hast to do with the meaning of the term "history" in Kierkegaard’s time. Historical study was dominated by speculative idealism which saw truth as embedded in the unfolding development of human culture. History is the process by which Absolute Spirit comes to realization and "God" is in no way separate from this process but fully immanent. 15 One could go so far as to say that for Hegelians, history is the divine, advancing towards full realization according to its own inexorable dialectic. Like Kierkegaard, Hegel was concerned to counteract the "spiritlessness" of the Enlightenment;16 but, Kierkegaard argued, what Hegelian idealism does is to render the individual inconsequential. In the great world system, only grand movements and big events are historically significant. What is a single individual against the whole sweep of human history?17 And yet, in Kierkegaard’s view, the individual remains the irreducible "center of value"18 and the "world historical" perspective "a demoralizing aesthetic diversion" from the business of choosing the actual rather than contemplating the general.

The historical point of view also separates the believer from the source of faith by relegating the events on which the Gospel is founded to a past supposedly remote from the living concerns of the present. It encourages the view that Christianity has progressed beyond its origins. Kierkegaard often referred to the "the eighteen hundred years" that stood between the time of Jesus and the present; and to the common belief that knowledge of God had improved over this time. This is an illusion, Kierkegaard argued, because faith does not advance cumulatively through research and reflection, but appears whenever an individual responds to an encounter with the paradox of Christ. Nineteenth century Christians were in no better position to grasp the reality of Christ than the first believers. The so-called "proof of the centuries," essential to the doctrine of progress, was of little value in evoking authentic faith.19 "Eighteen centuries," he wrote, "have no greater demonstrative force than a single day, in relation to an eternal truth." 20 "The fact that the eternal once came into existence in time is not a something which has to be tested in time, not a something which men are to test; but is a paradox by which men are to be tested."21

So, the task is not to make Christ a starting point from which one can move forward but to become "contemporaneous" with him as the first believers were; to find ourselves in the same life-giving relation to the Savior as those who walked and talked with him on earth.22 Neither historical proximity nor historical distance is of decisive importance, only the individual’s confrontation with the living truth of the Gospel. For these reasons, Kierkegaard was hostile to historicism which, he believed, devalued the importance of the individual’s transformation.

None of this is to say that history is not important. We are deeply indebted to the nineteenth century’s development of historical consciousness and its methods. Our faith has been aided by the rich understanding of Christian origins and the context of Jesus that research has given us. Furthermore, we have come a long way since the 1840s in our selfawareness and sensitivity to presuppositions which can distort historical judgment. Good historiographers are much better able today to take account of their own perspective and prior assumptions and to minimize the effects they have on their work.

And yet, Christians still use the historical point of view to escape the claims of the Gospel. It is a measure of historical criticism’s astonishing success that people instinctively equate what is "true" with what can be established factually about the past. Historians may have methodological doubts about the great Ranke’s confident dictum that history describes the past "as it really was" but it is a deeply entrenched popular view. Historical critical judgments have become a trusted standard of truth. Kierkegaard pointed out, though, how easily they can relativize and ultimately neutralize the claim of the Christian message. The historical point of view persuades the believer that the Gospel can truly be understood apart from personal commitment. The two-hundred year quest for the historical Jesus illustrates this. Although it is always risky to generalize, it is safe to say that the historical- critical approach tends to assume that the New Testament has concealed the "real" Jesus behind the self-interest of the early church which must be stripped away in order to get at the truth. Historical consciousness is a basic component of the critical mindset and one of the chief characteristics of the Enlightenment tradition. 23 Now, we are all products of the Enlightenment and we cannot escape its influence, nor would we want to entirely. But we are most faithful to our Enlightenment roots when we are self-critical and that means being aware of the hidden presuppositions that affect our viewpoint. When Christian believers think that the most important task is to achieve historical "objectivity" and that this will lead to the "truth," they are actually alienating themselves from the truth which can never be known disinterestedly but only passionately.

For several generations of mainline Protestant clergy, historical criticism has been mother’s milk. They have thoroughly imbibed this mindset which they have then taken into their pastoral ministries. There is a view that research into Christian origins and a demythologizing criticism of the New Testament will lead modern church folks to authentic understanding and, therefore, to faith which rests on rationalistic foundations. To believe with integrity means to believe rationally. Van Harvey stated this position in an extreme form some forty years ago, defining fearless commitment to historical inquiry in terms of the "morality of knowledge." 24 Harvey argued that Christians who do not follow the historical-critical viewpoint suffer from a failure of nerve and violate the integrity of thought. He lamented, back in the 1960s, that so few Christians saw things this way. I am amazed, though, at how deeply-rooted his basic presuppositions have become in mainline Protestantism. Scholars, pastors and laity alike see the main impediment to understanding as a lack of historical knowledge. They assume that if the right tools could be put into the hands of the people, and the "real" historical Jesus found behind the smoke and mirrors of the Gospel accounts, they would be liberated from an infantile view of Christianity. To Kierkegaard, this quest for "objectivity" only served to attenuate the vital claim of Jesus on the life of the believer. Criticism, he argued, thinks it is dealing with essentials but really its concerns are merely "parenthetical." 25 "Exegesis," the cornerstone of modern criticism, is "the first parenthesis." Exegesis, Kierkegaard mocked, is the business of "learned twaddlers" who can only look backwards. 26 And so today, critical analysis, while an indispensable tool of modern Christian knowledge, can quickly become master rather than servant. It can degenerate into an escape into "the parenthetical," the details behind which the whole becomes lost. Ironically, when critical objectivity becomes the overriding concern, the end result may be radically and idiosyncratically subjective. Recent reconstructions of the historical Jesus have bordered on the bizarre. Thomas Cahill, summarizing on the fruits of contemporary Jesus research, remarks somewhat cheekily, but not inaccurately:

Criticism has, at times, veered so far into the tangential that Jesus is no longer a coherent figure but is reduced to a fragmented and quirky anti-hero who may be an object of some historical curiosity but scarcely one to whom one would want to surrender one’s life. Not only that, surrender to Jesus is not even a live option because his context is so remote from ours that he has no truly credible claim on twenty-first century people, except as a kind of general anti-establishment archetype. What ends up shaping our lives is not a decisive and tension-filled encounter with Christ but the prevailing prejudices of modernity. Kierkegaard sensed the spiritual barrenness of modernity and his prophetic insights are descriptive of our situation today. One is struck by how ethically, religiously and existentially trivial so much of the study of Christian origins is, despite a veneer of sophistication.

This is no mere academic debate because so many pastors and church leaders have been enculturated into it. The religious marketplace frequented by mainline clergy and laity has been dominated recently by the Jesus Seminar, for example, or more popular writers like John Shelby Spong. Many of my colleagues without hesitation cite writers like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and the aforementioned Spong as the formative influences on their understanding of Christian faith, an understanding which, in turn, shapes preaching, teaching and pastoral care. While no one, to my knowledge, has studied the pastoral consequences of these developments, I strongly suspect that the one main result is that they give further permission to an educated laity to distance themselves morally and spiritually from the demands of the Gospel.

The Speculative Point of View

The second evasive strategy that Kierkegaard describes in the Postscript is the tendency towards abstract speculation. Kierkegaard saw speculation as the substitution of thought for action which undermines true faith. "Thought," he wrote, "takes existence away from the real."28 Kierkegaard, of course, was not against thinking. But the nineteenth century had become "the speculative century" which "made existence tantamount to thinking about everything"29 in such a way that the real tension of ethical decision— the essence of faith—is bypassed. Speculation is dangerous because presumes that the individual can be a neutral observer, contemplating reality from a safe distance. One is able, speculatively, to retreat into a world of thought in which one can get "more and more away from [one]self."30

Furthermore, speculation dissolves the paradox that is at the very root of authentic existence. In the end, speculation tries to deal with the "Absolute Paradox" of Jesus, the God-man, by simply mediating it out of existence. "The Absolute Paradox forces an ‘absolute decision’—either believe or be offended."31 The speculative frame of mind naturally seeks to avoid this "either-or" and rebels against the seemingly contradictory elements of the incarnation.

Speculatively, the Christian Gospel seems like nonsense because it puts together that which, rationally, is incommensurable. How can God be confined to an individual human being bound by space and time? In response, speculation tries to turn everything into a neatly integrated and complete system.32 Hegel did this by means of his dialectical method which embraced contradictions as temporary stopping places on the road to a higher and all-embracing unity. However, Kierkegaard argued, the paradox of the Gospel cannot be speculated away because it is the very source of passionate life and faith. Speculation may produce a beguiling aesthetic harmony but it does so only by positing a false unity of thought and being and by evading real existence.

The speculative point of view turns the incarnation into a mythical expression of the convergence of the human and the divine. Hegel himself viewed every particular as a manifestation of Geist, the world spirit, and he argued that universal concepts are what give particular embodiments their reality. This was an exact inversion of the truth, according to Kierkegaard, and an avoidance mechanism designed to sidestep the full force of Christian revelation. The incarnation is not just "the clothing in human form of religious ideas"33 but God’s shattering of the boundaries between time and eternity, body and spirit, heaven and earth in Jesus of Nazareth. This event cannot be explained in terms other than itself but only appropriated in faith. It inspires not thought but wonder.

The speculative mindset tries to assert control over a reality that is simply too unruly and perplexing to be accepted without cost. "The philosopher contemplates Christianity," he wrote, "for the sake of interpenetrating it with his speculative thought."34 A heavy price is paid for the spurious satisfaction of reining in reality, however; that price is nothing less than the loss of true inwardness. "While the speculative and worshipful Herr Professor is engaged in explaining the whole of existence, he has forgotten his own name; namely, that he is a human being, not a fantastic three-eighths of a paragraph."35 The speculative frame of mind leads to an aesthetically pleasing but ethically and spiritually dissipated form of existence which is ultimately impoverished.

This same drive towards control can be observed today whenever Christianity is regarded merely as a theoretical religious perspective in a universe of religious perspectives. When it is so regarded, the Gospel message is reduced to a topic of interest, a subject of curiosity which one may inquire into or know "about" but not submit one’s life to. As a consequence, its hazardous existential claims are rendered docile and harmless. One area that is especially vulnerable to these tendencies is socalled interfaith dialogue. In a sense, our awareness of other religious worldviews is a rejection of Hegelian universalism because it demands that we take other traditions seriously in their own terms and not force them into mould. And it is a good thing that Christians are hungry to learn about other religious traditions and to overcome Christian triumphalism. The Kierkegaardian issue, though, is not what is pursued but the way in which it is pursued. The besetting speculative temptation today is to subordinate all religious claims to a supposedly higher general theory of religion as a cultural construct. When Christians engage in conversation about "other faiths" they need to beware lest, under the guise of sympathy, they do not end up bracketing the question of ultimate truth which is at the root of all religions and thereby dissipate their power of transcendence. Many mainline Christians are deeply troubled by Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of John, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me" because it seems to claim that Christianity is the only path to God. Such a response expresses concern for people of "other faiths." But often this text is dealt with in such a way that all religious truth claims are relativized. "How many have not asked ‘What is truth?’ and at bottom hoped that vast spaces would intervene before truth comes close to him?" Kierkegaard asked.37 We need Kierkegaardian discernment so that we do not give the appearance of fostering tolerance when we are in fact sheltering ourselves from the uncomfortable demands of our own faith.

Bogus Subjectivity

Subjectivity is the proper orientation of the authentic self, according to Kierkegaard.38 However, subjectivity itself can become an evasive maneuver if the "infinite qualitative difference" between God and the self is collapsed. On the one hand, Kierkegaard attacked the objectivity that "seeks to shirk something of the pain and crisis of the decision;"39 but on the other he rejected the subjectivity that claims an easy and painless unity with the divine.

This phenomenon takes various forms, for example, the tendency to view the truth as something one possesses naturally. In the opening chapters of Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard discusses two ways of learning the truth. One is the Socratic way in which "all learning and inquiry is interpreted as a kind of remembering."40 Socrates argued that "one cannot seek for what he knows" because it is already known and does not need to be sought; but "it seems equally impossible for him to seek for what he does not know" because one would not even know what to look for except on the basis of some antecedent knowledge. 41 Therefore, Socrates argued that we must already be in possession of the truth and need only to awakened to what is already there. A teacher, then, is really a midwife who does not so much impart knowledge but bring it to birth; and moments in time are inconsequential because if enlightenment does not come today it may come tomorrow. "From the standpoint of Socratic thought every point of departure in time is eo ipso accidental, an occasion, a vanishing moment." 42

The Christian perspective is profoundly different, according to Kierkegaard. Truth is not a possession of the subject but a revelation from beyond. Consequently, "the moment must have decisive significance … because the Eternal, which hitherto did not exist, came into existence at this moment."43 The only way one can come to know this truth is through an incursion of the divine, not through intuition. Furthermore, a teacher is absolutely necessary, and apart from a personal and life-changing encounter with such a teacher, we remain lost in a state of error. This state of error is known by the name "sin"44 ; and, "let us call [the Teacher] Saviour, for he saves the learner from bondage and from himself; let us call him Redeemer, for he redeems the learner from the captivity into which he has plunged himself." 45 The moment when we encounter the Teacher is "the Fullness of Time" and the result is a conversion from an old way of life to a new, a "change from non-being to being," nothing less than a "New Birth." 46

Under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard articulated in philosophical language the Christian account of prevenient grace, conviction of sin, repentance, conversion and salvation. The choice is between Socratic recollection in which one assumes to possess the truth already, and Christian revelation according to which truth is a gracious and saving gift. Despite his great reverence for Socrates, Kierkegaard viewed his doctrine of recollection as a persistent form of paganism:

All paganism consists in this, that God is related to man directly, as the obviously extraordinary to the astonished observer. But the spiritual relationship to God in the truth, i.e., in inwardness, is conditioned by a prior irruption of inwardness, which corresponds to the divine elusiveness that God has absolutely nothing obvious about Him, that God is so far from being obvious that He is invisible. 47

There is nothing about human existence that leads naturally and immediately to a knowledge of God. If God did not seek us, God would remain unknown.

This discussion has sharp relevance to our own time. It describes what is probably the primary evasive strategy of contemporary spiritualities that define themselves in terms of a quest for "the God within." Certain forms of feminist spirituality, for example, do this by equating women’s experience with the divine. Other spiritualities promote selfawareness as the path to true redemption. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby has employed survey data to create a composite template of such spiritualities. He found people who defined religion as:

… a matter relating to our inner-self or soul …a feeling of oneness with the earth and all that is within me … the existence of an immortal soul that has to be cared for … positive thinking and excitement … can be religious or the beauty of nature or the love of family and friends … a feeling that a force controls the universe … the human spirit and goodness of all humanity … recognition and nurturing of the needs of the soul .. a feeling of being whole and at peace with my experiences in life … inner awareness … my presence and communication with the world around me ….48

Now, on the one hand, we must beware of falsely dichotomizing transcendence and immanence. The biblical God is both transcendent and immanent. "The word is very near you," the Book of Deuteronomy says, "it is in your mouth and your heart for you to observe" (Dt 30:14.) In Christianity, God must be deeply experienced and one of the real problems with Christendom, Kierkegaard argued, was too little subjective awareness of God, not too much. The issue is not whether we will experience God but the origin and content of such experience. Modern day spiritualities, Christian or otherwise, that are heavily immanentist tend to be hostile to the very notions of sin, repentance, judgment and ethical decision that are critical to Kierkegaard’s Christian vision. If God has been inside of us all along, just waiting to be discovered, then there is no fundamental breach between the self and God that needs to be healed and conversion is unnecessary. It is easy to understand the attractiveness of such spiritualities; but, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, they exact a terrible and eternal toll because they alienate the self from the very God they seek to find.

Personal Transformation

Søren Kierkegaard addressed what he saw as the "spiritlessness" of an allpervasive Christendom in which people inherited church membership simply as an accident of birth. One might argue that our situation is so different from his that his critique is no longer really relevant. Furthermore, the theological weaknesses in Kierkegaard’s obsessive and ahistorical concern with the individual have been noted.49 Nor can one imagine his work standing alone as an adequate blueprint for the church or the Christian life. But Kierkegaard’s main concern was not the specifics of a particular configuration of religious and social institutions but an everpresent temptation within Christianity to flee from the authentic inwardness that is at the heart of the Gospel; in effect, to enjoy the benefits without counting the cost. To not count the cost, however, is, ironically, to lose the benefits. In that regard, Kierkegaard’s critique retains its bite for those of us who try to live a life of faith amidst the ruins of Christendom because he can make us aware of our own evasive maneuvers.

Kierkegaard reminds us of something often forgotten: that Christ came to change individuals. Faithful Churches will lead individuals on a pilgrimage of transformation, and their preaching, teaching and pastoral care will be oriented to such a task. While authentic Christian faith is not "private" ("Me and Jesus") it is deeply personal because it is concerned with persons in relation to God. One of liberal Protestantism’s foremost evasive maneuvers is to play off issues of individual and social salvation against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. There is a kind of Protestant piety that dismisses personal morality as inconsequential compared to the need to combat the systemic evils of society. Kierkegaard would regard this as a false dichotomy and pure avoidance. The individual is the basic category of spiritual value and rightly constituted communities consist of individuals rightly related to God. Part of the hypocrisy of present-day Christianity is that it denigrates personal conversion under the guise of social concern, while embracing the more narcissistic elements of the modern therapeutically constituted self. The church today, as in Kierkegaard’s time, ought to be guiding individuals into conformity with the life of Jesus Christ. In this way, Christian communities will be healed.

In no way is this sectarian, however. Whenever the church has emphasized spiritual maturity, it has always been vulnerable to the charge of elitism.50 True Christian conversion, however, changes the individual but gives no grounds for boasting because the source of change is God and not the self. It is an event of grace. Consequently, when individuals are related authentically to Christ, they will offer themselves in humble service rather than claiming a privileged status. "Only love of one’s neighbour truly leads to life," Kierkegaard reminds us. 51

We began with the question of salvation and we have proceeded on the assumption that it remains the basic question of faith today. We have explored how Søren Kierkegaard analyzed the failure of the established church of his own time to address this question adequately and how it devised a set of strategies to free it from the responsibility of doing so. Kierkegaard can assist the church today by helping us to be more aware of the tactics we use to evade that same question. Sometimes this evasiveness involves marginalizing the question altogether so that salvation itself becomes a peripheral concern. Sometimes it is by defining salvation in such a way that it can be achieved with effortless ease and no cost to the believer. Sometimes it is by way of viewing salvation as a kind of enclosure safely separating the "saved" from the "lost." Sometimes it is by equating salvation with the prevailing assumptions and values of one’s group. Evasive maneuvers take different forms in different contexts because they are the antithesis of faith which is always lived out contextually. So, while our situation may be quite different from Kierkegaard’s, our tendency to look for evasive strategies and our inventiveness in creating them remains constant. In this regard, Kierkegaard is a faithful friend who continues to call us to account.

Dr. Paul Miller is one of the ministers at First Grantham United Church, St. Catharines, Ontario, and Editor of Theological Digest and Outlook.

Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling is Senior Minister of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, Ontario.