This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received. Mic 60-6349

BROWNING, Robert Lynn. SOREN KIERKE­ GAARD AND CONTEMPORARY PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1960 Education,

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan SOREN KIERKEGAARD AND CONTEMPORARY PROTESTANT

CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

ROBERT LYNN BROWNING, A.B., B.D ******

The Ohio State University I960

Approved by

Adviser Department of Philosophy of Education ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to acknowledge the inspiration and cooperation that I have received from my major adviser,

Dr. Everett Kircher, and from my minor advisers, Dr. Bernard

Mehl, Dr. Herman Peters, and Dr. W. C. Batchelor. To have had the satisfaction of knowing them and the other members of the faculty has been at least as rewarding and ­ ful as the academic experience itself.

Certainly the members and staff of North Broadway

Methodist Church should be recognized as having made pos­ sible my doctoral study. It was they who encouraged me to continue my academic pursuits. Their long- and genuine interest have sustained me beyond measure. A special word of appreciation should go to Dr. Lance Webb,

Senior Minister of North Broadway Church, Dr. Arch 0. Heck,

Professor Evere X Shimp, and many others who helped to arrange a program of study and work which was feasible. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the education staff of the church, The Rev. William Butterfield, Miss D 'cthy Jones, and Miss Margaret Redman, for their willingness to adjust their schedules and their lives to coincide with my special needs. Of course, the support and encouragement of my new associates, Dr.- John Dickhaut, President, and Dr. Van Bogard

ii Dunn,Dean, of the Methodist Theological School in Ohio have been crucially significant during the final phases of the program.

The patience, help, and love which my wife, Jean, and our three sons, Gregory, David, and Peter gave to me was far beyond that which any husband and father should

expect.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Specific Rationale for Relating Kierkegaard's Thought to the Field of Christian Education The Dissertation Design

PART I. THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF SOREN K I E R K E G A A R D ...... 26

I. HIS EXISTENTIAL SITUATION...... 27

II. THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF KIERKEGAARD'S RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND HIS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REACTIONS ...... 37

His Father Regina His Relationship to the Public (The Corsair) His Relationship to the Church

III. KIERKEGAARD'S ATTEMPTS TO EDUCATE HIMSELF RELIGIOUSLY...... 58

IV. KIERKEGAARD'S DESIRE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF OTHERS ...... 64

The Stages

PART II. THE MEANING OF KIERKEGAARD'S CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT FOR THE PHIL­ OSOPHY OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION ...... 79

V. RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION . . 82

Religions A and B

VI. THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS EXISTENTIAL SITUATION . . 102

VII. THE INDIVIDUAL AS A S E L F ...... 119

VIII. THE INDIVIDUAL AS A S I N N E R ...... 138

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS (CONTD.)

Chapter” Page

IX. THE INDIVIDUAL AND HIS RELATIONSHIP IN C H R I S T ...... 148

PART III. THE MEANING AND INFLUENCE OF KIERKEGAARD'S THOUGHT IN REGARD TO THE METHODS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION...... 170

X. THE ROLE OF THE T E A C H E R ...... 174

XI. TEACHING: METHODS OF COMMUNICATION ...... 188

XII. THE LEARNER AS A FIRST HAND DISCIPLE...... 223

The Learner as a Child The Learner as a Youth The Learner as an Adult

CONCLUSIONS ...... 258 s BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 272

AUTOBIOGRAPHY ...... 281

v INTRODUCTION

The unusual life and the provocative thought of

Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian, psychologist and born in 1813» have received exhaustive analysis at the hands of many of our most able thinkers.

He is commonly recognized as the founder of modern

Existentialist philosophy and as a catalyst for such crea­ tive and daring molders of theological thought as Karl

Barth, , , H. Richard Niebuhr,

Paul Tillich, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Jacques

Maritain. His psychological insight has helped to foster a school of existential psychotherapy in Europe, and his influence is acknowledged among the interpersonal psycho­ therapists, such as Karen Horney, in America.

Kierkegaard, the apostle of the authentic life of before God and man, the advocate of inwardness and freedom of the self, the brilliant and subtle writer of ironical and dialectical discourses, books, and journals, is otill a controversial figure over one hundred years after his death in 1855.

H. Richard Niebuhr has commented appropriately that

Kierkegaard strangely resists our attempts to classify him as a thinker in one field or another, as a genius or a sick mind, as a reactor to the closed system of Hegel In the last century or an original thinker whose thought will continue to stimulate new applications and Interpretations. Niebuhr

says: "For one thing he belongs less to the history of nine­ teenth century thought than to that of the twentieth. . . .

He makes himself contemporaneous with us. And he does not so much lead us to think about the systems of his and of the necessity of protests against them as about our sys­ tems and about our need to protest now. He will not keep his place in history. . . . His ideas are resurrected again and again!It is this quality in his thought which has stimulated me to undertake the present study in relation to Christian education, a field not usually associated with his name, but a field which finds its foundations (namely, the theological, psychological and philosophical) signifi­ cantly in debt to his thought, as I shall document through­ out this study.

Kierkegaard's influence was late coming into its own.

Writing in 1938 Hugh Ross Mackintosh said, "The history of systematic thought has rarely, if ever, seen so astonishing an example of a writer coming late into his kingdom. From an early point, it is true, his -'ame had been well known in

Denmark. But thirty years ago *ew outside that country had

•^Christianity and the Existentialists, edited by Carl Michalson, p. 25, 3 O heard of him." This fact was due, of course, to the in which he wrote. His works were first translated into German and his influence was powerful upon various

German and continental theologians and during the early part of the twentieth century. The significance of his thought did not have its full impact upon English speaking scholars until the 1930's- to 1950‘s during which period most of his books, a considerable portion of his illuminating personal Journal and his papers were translated into English. A great debt is owed to such translators as

David Swenson, Walter Lowrie, Alexander Dru, Douglas Speere, and others.

It is generally known that Kierkegaard was a person who suffered Intensely during most of his life. It is higher probable that his suffering was both physical and emotional. His physical suffering was the aftermath of a congenitally weak back which was worsened by a fall from a tree as a boy. His emotional suffering was the result of a

Vtery abnormal childhood with a melancholy father old enough to be his grandfather and a mother who was not in a position to relate to him deeply, as we shall discuss later. His unfortunate emotional development and his unusually keen and witty mind combined to make him exceedingly sensitive

O Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern . P. 230. and often very melancholy and in despair. Some have asked

whether so abnormal a person can really have a message for

ordinary people concerning the deeper issues of life.

T, H. Croxall, an able student of the lonely Dane, says, "I

answer unhesitantingly— Yes. What he felt so deeply we all

feel in our due measure. Kierkegaard should not be dismissed

as 'mad': he saw through and surmounted his abnormality—

this is his everlasting praise. It was, in fact, those very

abnormalities that gave him the extraordinary psychological

insight which enriches his writings, and makes him one of

the best psychologists in the world."3 Most scholars agree

with Walter Lowrie who has translated the major portion of

his writings when he says, "I revere the author . . . as a

witness for the truth who triumphed over great weaknesses.

. . . Lowrie further concludes in his major study of

Kierkegaard, "I believe that he has rightly understood and

expounded what Christianity is. He himself says that the

question whether It is true or not is quite another matter.

3t . H. Croxall, Kierkegaard Commentary, p. JCVTII.

^Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself, translated by Waiter Lowrie, quote taken from the Preface, p. VII. (Subsequently, all the works of Soren Kierkegaard will be listed without a full citation.)

^Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard. p. 322. Specific Rationale for Relating Kierkegaard's Thought to the Field of Christian Education

In the field of Protestant religious education during

the past 20 years there has been a definite shift away from

the liberal theological foundation for Christian education;

a trend toward the critical analysis of the underlying pre­

suppositions of the pragmatic philosophical base for much of

Christian education flowing out of the thought of and his followers; a trend away from the identification in

liberal Christian circles of the Kingdom of God with the

Democratic life which Dewey and various religious educators,

such as George Albert Coe, made the goal of their educa­ tional endeavors.^

To develop the significance of these trends more fully, it becomes quite clear that the early and pioneer work of the liberal Christian educational philosophers was in full swing from about 1915 to the 1930's. This is designated by D. Campbell wyckoff as the Educational phase in the recent history of Christian education, wyckoff then that the next phase started with the theological

Renaissance which, having begun in Europe with the work of

Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, reached American Christian

°A trend evident in the work of George A. Coe, "The Social Theory of Religious Education" (1917), in the early writings of Harrison S. Elliott with his emphasis upon "problem solving" and democratic method, and in the work of Ernest Chave, William Bower, and others. educators during the 1930's. This he calls the Theological p h a s e . ^ The evidences of this theological emphasis can be

seen in the early 1930's in a book by Wilfred Evans Powell^

and especially in the bold challenge to liberal theology given by H. Shelton Smith in his 19^1 volume, Faith and

Nurture. Subsequently, the theological emphasis was reflected in the Curriculum Committee of the International

Council of Religious Education via the work of Paul Vleth,9 and later in writings of James Smart, Lewis Sherrill,

Randolph Crump Miller and others.

The theological phase which was stimulated by Karl

Barth and Qnil Brunner in Europe was quickly furthered in

America by such thinkers as Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard

Niebuhr, Walter M. Horton, David Roberts, Edwin Lewis and especially in the of . All of these theologians were significantly influenced by the call of Soren Kierkegaard for the renewal of an authentic

Christianity which would be able to meet the deep problems of personal existence. Since it was the work of these and other theologians which caused the shift to take place in contemporary Christian Education, it seems clear that a

?D. Campbell wyckoff, The Gospel and Christian Education.

^Wilfred Evans Powell, Education for Life with God. Abingdon Press, 193^. ~ " "

^Paul vieth, The Church and Christian Education. Bethany Press, 19^7. study of the categories of thought of Soren Kierkegaard in

relation to Christian education is timely and needed.

H. Shelton Smith's major thrust maintained that con­

temporary Christian education was weak and ineffective

because it was "rooted in a sub-Christian gospel."10 Its

roots were in and pragmatism and yet it was

trying to bring persons to a sense of relationship with God

as known in Jesus Christ, Smith understood this goal to be

an impossible and contradictory task, given the underlying

theology then extant in the work of most Christian educa­

tional philosophers and curriculum writers.

Smith's criticism that the roots of Christian educa­

tion were in a sub-Christian gospel is essentially the same

criticism that Soren Kierkegaard made concerning the teach­

ing of the churches in his day in the of the 1830's

to 1830's. Kierkegaard called, at first indirectly through

his pseudonymous writings and later directly, for the Church

to realize that her teachings were not based in the distinc­

tively Christian presuppositions of the scriptures but had

been watered down by various human speculations, in particu­

lar, Hegelianism. Smith and others have asserted that the

church should not base its teachings in the naturalism of

Dewey but rather should rediscover the distinctive nature of

the Christian message for a culture that has really seldom

10H. Shelton Smith, Faith and Nurture, p. 105. been taught it.' Just as Kierkegaard had a sincere knowledge and appreciation for much In Hegelian thought and had a sincere knowledge of the uses of scientific thinking, so

Smith and the others who have followed his criticism have a sincere appreciation for much in Dewey's thought and feel that the work of Christian education has gained considerably as a result of his influence. The basic presuppositions, however, and the dedication to dialectical thought and problem solving in Hegel and in Dewey respectively must be recognized to be inadequate for a Christian education which takes seriously the of a unique in history in the person of Jesus Christ. The same is true concerning the concept of the continuing enoounter with God through Christ— which is the life blood of the Christian message to persons in need of a relationship through faith with a and with other persons in a community of love and trust.

It is interesting to note that both Dewey and Kierke­ gaard were at one time in their lives followers of Hegel and that each of them reacted against Hegelian thought.11 Dewey reacted against the abstract rational system of Hegel which easily became idealistic and impersonal, often leaving out important conflicting evidence in favor of the harmony of the whole. Since Dewey was primarily interested in the

■^Mar.lorie Grene. Introduction to , p. H. ------9 thinking process he moved toward an analysis of "the com­ plete act of thought" and developed his "problem solving" approach. In order to keep the steps in the thinking process uncluttered, he elected to eliminate all possibil­ ity of metaphysical considerations which would allow for any divine-human encounter or any revelatory experience except that of insight.12 Kierkegaard reacted, likewise, in terms of his pervading interest, which was the category of

"the individual." Hegel built beautiful castles of thought for the men of his day, said Kierkegaard, and then both he and they lived their lives out in miserable hovels beside the castleJ Hegel's system must never be above the honest and Individual needs of existing persons i The self of the individual was too dynamic to be put into any objective system. Kierkegaard reacted to Hegel's deification of human reason and sought with all the inwardness of his to show why and how man, the spiritual being, had to live by faith rather than knowledge in terms of his ultimate com­ mitments and loyalties.

The key to the revolt of Kierkegaard, curiously enough in view of the one hundred years that separate him from our day, was the understanding of the nature of the self —ra concept which we identify as being very recent in

*2See , A History of Western Phil­ osophy. p. 823 ff. for a very helpful analysis of the influ­ ence of Hegelianism on Dewey. its development. When the supreme characteristic of the human being is deemed to be the mind (in the idealistic and ultimate frame of reference given it by Hegel) or the release and development of intelligence (in the Devreyan functional approach to mind), it is logical that the major thrust of these two systems of thought would be in the direc­ tion of the objective and scientific dimensions of life. It was delineated by Kierkegaard and it is being confirmed and further amplified and corrected today in the various disci­ plines ancillary to education that the human self is not, cannot and, in many respects, should not be given to this same kind of objectivity. The self is both and object to itself. This is due to the mysterious power of self-transcendence which Kierkegaard so brilliantly clari­ fied for modern man and which has been studied with great vigor during the past few decades in the fields of psychol­ ogy, education, theology and especially existential approaches to philosophy and anthropology, It is rather well established and accepted by most scholars that the human self can be educated to think scientifically and objec­ tively concerning the world of objects or things (the physical world) but that the self becomes dehumanized and participates in the process of dehumanization of other selves when it is given over to the quest for objective approaches In the dimension of personal existence. The way of inwardness, of subjectivity, of sensitivity to the intangible qualities of interpersonal relationships is the way toward which Kierkegaard pointed and is the way which increasingly is being explored in contemporary life. It is not possible for the person as a self to be objective about his love, about his own death, about the crises of living such as the decisions regarding the commitment of his time and investments, about his Judgments and ultimate loyalties.

This attitude is to be found in present-day Christian education which makes no pretension of objectivity. This is reflected in many quarters and is not a retreat to irrationality nor to obscurantism. It is not a return to dogmatism. It is an honest endeavor to face the genuine need of human selves for subjective truth which they cannot prove scientifically but truth nevertheless for their lives, a truth which they hold in faith and in honesty, a truth which deals squarely with the problems of their subjective and personal existence, a non-dogmatic truth.

It is the major contention of this study that the work of Soren Kierkegaard is to be found in the background of this movement within society and, in particular, within the theological and educational approaches of contemporary

Protestant Christianity. As H. Shelton Smith stated in his manifesto against a mis-directed objectivity, "To think 12 that the child can be religiously nourished by a series of interrogations is fatuous. Any such wily dodging of one question by asking the pupil another finally betrays itself into a form of vacillation, cowardice, or superficiality."

There is "nc pretension of the objectivity of the Gospel."^3

It is a confession of faith which cannot be proved or dis­ proved except as it has meaning for the individual in his personal life. It is a confession of faith that in Christ

God has spoken an eternally meaningful word to man.

Christian education cannot take place unless this message is shared]

Such an approach to Christian education reflects a major shift from using the scriptures and resources of the

Church for hypothetical problem solving to a genuine sharing of the fears and Joys of human, existing selves within a community of faith in which both teacher and student receive and witness to the meaning which the revelation of Christ has for their lives and society. It will be a central con­ cern in this study to reveal how Kierkegaardian thought has played an important role in this change in the basic philosc phy of Christian education in the Protestant churches. This will be done with due respect for, and in relation to, the insights gained from the influence of the dominant pragmatic philosophy coming from general education. It will also be

•^smith, op. clt.. pp. 113, 114. 13

an objective of this study further to clarify the exact

nature of the present shift in Christian education. This

clarification will be a by-product of the study of the life

and categories of thought of Soren Kierkegaard.

The attempt will be made to establish the fact that

Kierkegaard's thought has been directly influential in

regard to the primary theological positions undergirding

the philosophy of Christian educators, and that Kierkegaard's

thought, thereby, is indirectly to be found present in many

of the themes of contemporary philosophers of Christian

education.

A word about the current theological positions and

their importance for the philosophy and methods of Christian

education seems essential at this point. In his recent dis­

cussion of the major theological positions and their rela­

tionship to Christian education Daniel Day Williams has maintained that there are three major trends which reflect

three basic concerns. The three concerns "are, first, the

concern for the uniqueness and integrity of the Christian

faith as it is rooted in the biblical witness to God's revelation in Jesus Christ; second, the concern to establish

the Christian view of the uniqueness and value of persons

and their relationships; and, third, the concern for the

relevance of the Christian message to the radical questions, 14 , and struggles of contemporary man."*** While these three concerns can be seen to some degree In all of the major theological movements, each concern Is to be seen as a central emphasis In one of the three which Dr.

Williams outlines.

The three movements are (1) the influence of the theological positions of and his call to the church to be true to the biblical witness to God's revela­ tion in Jesus Christ; (2) the understanding of revelation as a personal encounter of faith between God and man and between man and man which has been promulgated by Bnil

Brunner in Europe and by N. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold

Niebuhr in America, with the fundamental work of Martin

Buber admittedly giving these Christian theologians signifi­ assistance; (3 ) the concern for the existential prob­ lems of man and the relevance of the Christian "givens" of faith has been reflected in the theology of Paul Tillich with his effort to correlate theological answers to the basic existential questions of persons, and in the work of

Reinhold Niebuhr with his profound analysis of human nature and the symbolic significance of the answers from Christian revelation, and further in the Biblical studies of Rudolph

Bultmann and his attempt to demythologize the scriptures and

^Daniel Day Williams, "Current Theological Develop­ ments and Religious Education" in Religious Education— A Comprehensive Survey, edited by Marvin Taylor, I960, p. 45. make the Biblical message revelatory for man in his existen­

tial estrangement and need.^

It is highly significant for this study that the

theological and psychological insights of Soren Kierkegaard

can be seen in the background of each of these theological movements which are so important to the foundations of con­

temporary Christian education. Kierkegaard's strong empha­

sis upon the integrity of the New Testament witness to the

revelation of God in Chri3t, his emphasis upon the paradox­

ical nature of truth and the impossibility of human

synthesizing all of the theses and antitheses of thought (as

Hegel proposed to do) into the sure knowledge of God,

etcetera, can clearly be seen in the theology of Karl Barth.

Kierkegaard's thought was most significant for Barth in his

earlier writings when he followed Kierkegaard's paradoxical

approaches so much that his thought was often called

"dialectical theology." Barth's position ended not in syn­ thesis but in the position that only God can resolve man's paradoxes through His Grace. The latter is appropriated via the personal response of faith to the witness in the Bible which "becomes" the word of God, existentially, to the believer. This emphasis upon the uniqueness of the Biblical revelation has returned to contemporary Christian educational philosophy as I shall seek to document in this study, it is

^ Ibld.. pp. 45-50. not a rejection of the scientific study of the scriptures

and the critical examination of the historical and mythical

elements in the scriptures. Rather, it is the acceptance

of the continuing necessity to move away from literalism;

to move toward a more positive and existential view of the

uniqueness of the basic message of revelation which shines

through the whole Bible; and toward affirmations of the

meaning of God's love to man within the context of his

inability to find an ultimate commitment through knowledge

alone.

The second theological movement centers around the

nature of the human self and how the self views itself and

comes to decisions regarding personal loyalties and commit- ments. Since the self is hard pressed to be objective

about itself or its relationships with others it must find

other than scientific ways of finding truth upon which to ground its decisions and in reference to which interpersonal

relationships of trust and love can be created. Reinhold

Niebuhr's analysis of the human predicament which results

from the self which is tied to the ground as a natural biological organism and yet, unlike all other organisms, can

transcend the natural realm and view the self from above and beyond the self as a spiritual being, is fundamental in this

position. Likewise the understanding of the "revelation"

n g * “" This movement is sometimes called a new personalism. Melville Chanlng-Pearce describes the significance of Kierkegaard in this respect in Soren Kierkegaard-. A Study. P. 36. 17 that takes place when existing selves open their lives to each other in I-Thou relationships of trust can be seen in the work of Emil Brunner in his Divine-Human Encounter and

Man in Revolt and in the writing of H. Richard Niebuhr, particularly in his The Meaning of Revelation. The impor­ tance of Soren Kierkegaard to this movement is again identi­

fied by each of these authors, as I shall document during this study. While Martin Buber's work is the more recent

influence upon this theological movement, it is generally conceded that, "Kierkegaard himself prepared the way. The basic themes of the I-Thou philosophy were formulated by him, though he never gave them the systematic developed by Buber.nl7

The approaches inherent in this theological movement have been exceedingly pertinent for Christian educators such

as Ross Snyder of the Federated Faculty of the University

of , for Dr. Reuel Howe, in his 'language of rela­ tionships' thought, and to many other Christian educators,

including Lewis Sherrill, Randolph Crump Miller, and others.

It will be'an objective of this study to relate the thought

of Soren Kierkegaard more directly to this movement and to establish the specific ways in which his concept of the self and his understanding of revelation have meaning.

The third movement in theology certainly is related

to Kierkegaard's thought because it is so basically rdated

^ Ibid.. p. 47. to the existentialist analyses of the human situation of

, of lostness, of sin, of standing in deep need of

forgiveness and reconciliation. This movement, as we have

established, is identified with the theological positions

of Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolph Bultmann.

While it must be noted that other existentialist and non­

existentialist thinkers such as Pascal,Schelling, Heidegger,

Jaspers, Marcel, Luther, Calvin, Augustine, and many others have been influential in the thought of the leaders of this movement, Kierkegaard as the modern father of existentialism must receive credit for his contributions to this thought.

The ramifications of existential analysis, of the symbolic approach to the scriptures, and especially the method of correlation of the answers of faith to the existential prob­ lems of man (Tillich) will be traced from Kierkegaard through these theologians on to the thought of contemporary

Christian educators.

The existential emphasis has appeared directly in the literature of Christian education within the past ten years, and roughly parallels the writings of Paul Tillich, especially his two volume Systematic Theology which was published in 1951 and in 1957. One denomination has written new curriculum materials, which have been classified by

Dr. C. Ellis Nelson as ''Existential Christian Education."^®

•^Union Seminary Quarterly Review, May 1$58, p. 21, 19 Nelson states that the new Episcopal material seeks to get

the real, Individual, and existential questions of students

out in the open "to which the faith has an answer." A very

flexible and dynamic approach is essential in order for the

students to come to first hand encounters with the love of

God and with relationships of trust with each other within the community of believers, the Church.

Albert E. Bailey, writing on "Philosophers of Educa­ tion and Religious Education" says that existentialism, along with logical analysis, are two very recent trends in the philosophy of education. He refers to a chapter on existentialism in the Fifty-fourth Yearbook of the N.S.S.E. and to a recent book, Existentialism and Education, by George

Kneller; Bailey also confirms our position as stated above that, "The influence of existentialism and studies of the learning process have been leading toward what may be called a philosophy of encounter. This seeks to resolve the seeming contradiction between the otherness and the immanence of the divine, and establish a basis for religious learning, in understanding the media through which the divine enters the 'life ' of the individual in contin­ uing encounter. The initiative and freedom of both God and man are held in perspective."^9

^Albert E. Bailey, Religious Education: A Comprehen­ sive Survey, p. 3 1 . As has been maintained, the early emphasis upon God's immanence in the reason of man (Hegel) or the identifica­ tion of the purposes of God with the fulfillment of the scientific and democratic aims of culture (the religious followers of Dewey) has been shifted toward a recognition of man's finitude; his inability to deal with himself and his interpersonal relationships objectively; the inability of man to penetrate into the ultimate mystery of reality and

Being; and the transcendence of God. Yet, to leave man in this condition is to leave him in despair. Kierkegaard, as we shall discover, called attention to many of these existential conditions of finite man but he also laid the foundations for a new understanding of the way that man finds the path to truth and personal meaning through the revela­ tion of the transcendent God of love in Christ. Effort will be made in this study to reveal how Kierkegaard's original positions have been utilized or corrected by various theo­ logians and other thinkers and how, in turn, these patterns of thought manifest themselves in Christian education today.

No attempt will be made to deal comprehensively with the thought of the theologians or Christian educators in whose writings Kierkegaardian categories can be found. The trac­ ing of such categories of thought will be made on the basis of (1) the presence of the basic ideas with which Kierkegaard dealt even though no direct reference to Kierkegaard is made, 21

(2 ) the presence of actual quotations of or references to

the thought of Soren Kierkegaard.

The Dissertation Design

As I have sought to Indicate, the fundamental thesis

of this study Is that the life and thought of Soren Kierke­

gaard has been directly influential upon the three major

theological movements undergirding Protestant Christian

Education, and that his thought, therefore, has been

indirectly influential in the thought of the major philoso­

phers of Christian Education in American . It

is the aim of this study, moreover, to—

1. Discern Kierkegaard's own understanding of the

task of educating the existing individual to become a

Christian at the operational level of life. This was his

announced passion: to discover, "how a Christian becomes a

Christian," or how a person born into a family with the

label "Christian" on it can ever discover in all reality

what Christianity really is all about. In seeking to solve

this basic problem for himself, in relation to the pseudo-

Christian culture of his day, and in his own inwardness and honesty,he discovered and developed the several categories

of thought which have been so very distinctive and meaningful.

2. Analyze the life and categories of thought of

Soren Kierkegaard, as viewed through his voluminous writings, 22

in relation to current manifestations of his thought in

theological and Christian educational literature.

3. Draw certain conclusions concerning (a) further

undellneated ramifications of his thought for Christian

education, (b) how his thought, which was admittedly exag­

gerated in order to be a corrective in his day, has been

brought into balance and focus and has been adopted and

further corrected in our day and in our cultural situation.

These research objectives have made mandatory a

thorough study of Kierkegaard's own writings, as well as the

many interpretations of Kierkegaard's significance for

philosophy, psychology and theology. In order to trace his

influence the major writings of the most prominent theologians

and Christian educators have been analyzed. Mention has

already been made of the names of the theologians. The

Christian educators to be studied include the significant

leaders from Horace Bushnell, the early prophet of modern

Protestant Christian education and contemporary of Kierke­ gaard (1802 to 1876), until now, with emphasis upon the

philosophers of Christian Education who parallel Dewey's

Influence (from about 1900 on), such as George Albert Coe,

Ernest Chave, William Bower, Harrison S. Elliott, H. Shelton

Smith, James Stert, Paul Vieth, Randolph Crump Miller, Lewis

Sherrill, C. Campbell Wyckoff, and Iris Cully, Charles H.

Johnson, Howard Grimes and others who are wilting in the present situation. Deliberately I have not included an analysis of the philosophers of Christian education who

represent fundamentalist or evangelical points of view.

The scholars included are those who have been identified with the major Protestant denominations and especially with the Division of Christian Education of the National Council

of Churches. While progressive religious educators have been and still are very much associated with this inter­ denominational agency such leaders are not as influential today as they were prior to the theological Renaissance in this country. A very stimulating and healthy dialogue is afforded these educational leaders, however, through the

Council and also via the Religious Education Association, a professional society representing all and positions.

The impression must not be left that the shift away from the progressive philosophy of religious education has been a universal phenomenon. It has been sufficiently widespread and significant to warrant being called a genuine trend, however. The exclusion of the thought of certain philosophers of religious education does not imply their unimportance; it was done in order to delimit this study.

A representative religious educator who has not followed the trend toward a theological orientation is

Dr. Ernest Ligon of Union College. Ligon has been a strong advocate of the use of the scientific method in religious education. It is his fundamental assumption that God*s will may be discovered via the scientific study of character development. His Character Research Project at Union Col­

lege has been quite Influential. Basically he and his

followers are following a philosophy of immanence^ His

work has been reported regularly in the Journal of the

Religious Education Association and in various books includ­

ing, The Psychology of Christian Personality. Their Future

Is Now and A Greater Generation. It should be clear at the

outset that the author of this study understands the work of

Dr. Ligon and other progressive religious educators to be very important. To include their findings in this study, however, would not contribute to the objectives of this particular dissertation.

In accomplishing these objectives this study will be organized in three parts. Part I will be a consideration of the religious education of Soren Kierkegaard. An effort will be made to reveal the existential situation out of which his writing came and his understanding of the various stages of the religious pilgrimage. Part II will be an analysis of the meaning of Kierkegaardian categories of thought for the philosophy of Protestant Christian educa­ tion. This will commence with Kierkegaard's understanding of the between Religious education and Christian education. Categories to be studied will include individual existence, truth as Inwardness (subjectivity), the struggle of the spiritual self "to be and to become," the nature of reason and revelation In the history of the self, the 25 necessity of living by some faith and the paradoxical nature of the Christian faith, the condition of sin and the need for salvation, the relationship of the authentic self to society and to the church manifest, and the nature of true freedom. The ramifications of Kierkegaard’s thought will be drawn for contemporary Christian education within the framework of the study of each category. Part III will study the meaning of Kierkegaard’s thought for the methods of Christian Education. This will consider the role of the teacher; direct and indirect methods of communication; group and individualistic approaches to learning; education as preparation for I-Thou encounters; and specific suggestions for the Christian education of children, youth, and adults within the educating community, the church, and in refer­ ence to general education in American society. PART I

THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OP SOREN KIERKEGAARD

As we seek to understand Kierkegaard1s contribution

to contemporary Christian Education, our perspective will

be enhanced as we look closely at his own personal religious

growth— his religious education. We shall attempt such an

analysis in terms of the following classifications:

1. Hie existential life-situation in which he came

to self-awareness and out of which his own religious identi­

fications and commitments came.

2. The nature and character of the religious educa­

tion which he experienced in his Danish culture, the

Lutheran Church, and in particular, in his home— and the

positive and negative reactions which he had to this educa­

tion.

3. The struggle which Kierkegaard made to discover himself before God and to educate himself religiously.

4. His developing passion to participate in the religious education of others in a society which was sup­ posedly Christian, but which he criticized as being without authenticity.

26 CHAPTER I

HIS EXISTENTIAL SITUATION

Kierkegaard's life is interpreted by some to be the result of both the and inadequate aspects of his own religious education in a family situation which was most unusual.1 Kierkegaard reveals in his personal Journals that he had a deep insight into the importance of early childhood experiences and identifications. He clearly saw that his agonizing struggles to discover his destiny and to get a firm hold on himself in young adulthood had their genesis In childhood.

The thoughtlessness, carelessness, and cock­ sureness with which children are brought up is frightful to see: and yet everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old; and yet one would find that almost everyone bears with them a defect from their childhood, which they do not overcome even in their seventieth year; together with the fact that all unhappy individuals are related to a false impression received in childhood. Oh, pitious satire upon mankind: that provi­ dence should have endowed almost every child so richly because it knew in advance what was to befall it: to be brought up by "parents," i*e., to be made a mess of in every possible way.2

^Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard. p. 26.

^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 31^.

27 Here we see Kierkegaard at his psychological best!

At a time In history considerably in advance of the insights of modern psychology he discovers, in his own experiences of existence, the destiny-determining nature of parent-child relationships during the first ten years of life. As the events, crises, and achievements of his life are unfolded we shall see with increasing clarity how each dimension has its genesis in these early years. In Kierkegaard's inter­ pretations of his own experiences he was not unlike the early Hebrews in that he always sought to understand his experiences in terms of his relationship to God. Almost all of his writing reflects a pervading God reference. In this sense he tended to view his life, in its various facets, as his religious education.

The primary factor in determining this interpreta­ tion on the part of Kierkegaard was the powerful influence of his father. Michael Pederson Kierkegaard was a man of rugged and yet quiet strength. He had been a very poor child in the rough terrain of Jutland where he herded sheep.

Later he came to Copenhagen to be an apprentice in his uncle's wool business. Quickly he took advantage of an expanding economy and became a very successful hosier and wholesaler of food stuffs. In fact, he was so well estab­ lished that he was able to retire in his early forties, a wealthy man. Always he had had a desire to study and 29 meditate. Being a man of great native intelligence he read widely, primarily in his favorite subjects of religion and philosophy, and developed solid dialectical skill. Soren

Aabye was born on May 5, 1813, as the seventh and last child when his father was 57 and his mother was ^5.^ Michael

Kierkegaard's first wife had died childless in 1796. The tragedy of his life, which he held as a deep secret, took place the next year when he became involved sexually with a servant in his house, a distant relative, Anne Sorensdatter

Lund. Being forced to marry her because of her pregnancy,

Michael never really accepted her as a full partner in the family. It is for this reason that Soren appears not to have been influenced very significantly by his mother, except perhaps In terms of his humor and Instant wit, quali­ ties which his mother apparently possessed.

It is rather well established, moreover, that Soren was born a hunchback and with uneven legs.2* These deformi­ ties apparently were not extreme but were narked enough that

Soren was given special considerations and was probably over­ protected. A fall from a tree in childhood further compli­ cated his physical handicaps and, it is believed, brought on

3por a good description of the cultural conditions of the time of Kierkegaardte birth see Peter P. Rohde, Soren Kierkegaard. The Danish Philosopher.

li . See Theodore Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). 30 a condition which plagued him all during his life and was the cause of his physical collapse in the streets of Copen­ hagen which resulted in his premature death at the age of forty-two. Kierkegaard's emotional life was gradually warped. This inner condition was due in large measure to the way his older parents treated him. They apparently did not allow him to have a genuine childhood. His father especially wished him to advance intellectually hut was not sensitive to his need for natural social relationships with his peers.

This Insensitivity manifested itself in the way that Soren was dressed when he was- sent to school, for Instance. His formal, " boy," attire made him the laughing stock of his . Kierkegaard's father, having the leisure to spend with his youngest son, was very strict and often quite melancholy. Kierkegaard later interpreted his close super­ vision by his morose but clever father as one of his great­ est assets and also as a curse on his life. As we shall see the curse had religious dimensions just as did his father's love and care for him. Before analyzing this and other fundamental relationships at more depth, a quick over-view of Kierkegaard's life seems to be essential.

Because of his physical limitations young Kierkegaard sharpened his intellectual powers in order to compensate.

He was not only very able in his studies but he was also exceedingly gay and clever in his conversation. His gay outer appearance, he admitted, was a cover for his inner melancholy. He was known In his family as "the fork"

because of his sharpness; and, he was often misunderstood by his teachers as being very Intelligent but not serious

enoughJ In 1830 Soren enrolled for theology at the Univer­

sity of Copenhagen. This course of action pleased his

father, but Soren Increasingly sought Independence and became defiant regarding his father's Influence. While he was a brilliant student he was also thoroughly in revolt.

In this Inner state of mind he spent money lavishly on food

and parties, incurring sizable debts; he apparently sowed his crop of wild oats including a possible sexual fall about which he was always extremely guilt-ridden; and he refused to prepare himself for his theological examinations.

During these days of revolt which included moving C-- from his father's house to his own apartment, Kierkegaard grieved his father to the point where he sought a rapprochement with his favorite son. It was during this attempt at the restoration of a relationship that his father told him certain things which made him experience in 1835 the Great Earthquake, Kierkegaard used this expression to describe the sudden shock which he experienced when he realized that his father's melancholy was not just centered in his religious piety but that it was really due to some great moral defection. It struck Kierkegaard with the force of an earthquake that his father's early denunciation of God as a child on a hill in Jutland because of his hunger and 32 suffering (a fact which was apparently shared by his father during the days of reconciliation), and his father*s moral defection had brought a curse on the family. Kierkegaard had the secret fear that his father would outlive all of his children and have to suffer this punishment as a result of commiting the unforgiveable Sin against the Holy Spiriti

His fears were confirmed as one after another of his brothers and sisters died within a very short time, leaving only his brother Peter Christian who later became a Bishop, and himself. During these days of crisis Kierkegaard and his father reached deeper understandings as his father con­ fessed his secret regarding his moral failure. This rapprochement prepared the way for his religious experience of 1838 about which we shall say more later.

During his years of study Kierkegaard passed his liberal arts examinations and then in his freedom as a candidate in theology, concentrated mostly upon history, literature and philosophy. He became a strong follower of

Hegel for some time, but increasingly became influenced by philosophers who laid the ground work for his revolt against

Hegelianism. Such thinkers as Van Baader, an associate of

Schelling who revolted against Hegel too, Schelling himself who revolted in his more mature years, and under whom

Kierkegaard studied later in , Lessing (1729-1782)

^James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, p. 7. 33 and his subjectivity, and especially Jahan G. Haraann (1730-

1788), along with the beloved , influenced Kierke­ gaard deeply. These studies, coupled with his profound

struggle to escape his own despair and melancholy and to

find something for which he could give his all (for which he could "live and die"), prepared the way for Kierkegaard1s creative years of writing.

But before he was motivated to achieve as he did,

several other experiences took place which must be mentioned.

The most central was his love affair with Regina Olsen which

ended in a broken engagement and a vow to renounce normal

life in favor of the higher life before God. Torn by inner conflicts, afraid to share with Regina whom he loved very much the secrets of his family as well as his own secrets and melancholy, Kierkegaard felt that he could not marry.

Rather, he would throw himself either into the wildest kind of life or else become abs&utely dedicated to religious writing. As a direct result of this decision to save her from the pain of knowing the truth about him, and as an aftermath of his father's death, Kierkegaard finished his

Masters in Theology and threw himself into a life of writing.

This tremendous period of productivity— during which he wrote Either/Or. . Repetition. Stages on Lif^s Way. . The Concept of Dread.

Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, all under pseudonyms, nine Edifying Discourses and Thoughts on Crucial Situations In Human Life, under his own name— resulted in his literary

prominence which provoked the controversy which was to break

forth in the Copenhagen scandal sheet, the Corsair. Having planned to end his writing career with the Postscripts and

become a country parson, Kierkegaard was so badly crushed

and ridiculed by the Corsair that he became convinced that he could not follow his original plan but must enter into defense of his interpretations of the sickness of his day.

He entered, therefore, a period of polemical writing concerning the true nature of Christian existence. He con­ tinued to use up the inheritance from his father's estate to spend his full time writing. This financial independence allowed him the privilege of writing and publishing on his own, . Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits.

The Gospel of Suffering. Purity of Heart, and The Lilies of the Field, all in 1847, and the next year, Christian Dis­ courses. These years of increasing commitment came to a climax during Holy Week of 1848 when he had a deep sense of joy and inner conversion. Having heretofore written mostly under pseudonyms he declares that he must "speak out" directly for his that "Christianity does not exist," that the Christian faith had been so influenced by secular values and speculative philosophy that it was not in exis­ tence in the life of any, not in the lives of even the

^All of this writing took place from 1843 to 1846. . 35 priests, the teachers of Christianity. Kierkegaard's posi­

tion was that Christianity, in the new Testament sense, was

not preached or taught in the Denmark of his day.

Further he felt that it was his role to be "an alarm,"

"a corrective," to convict men that they were not Christians

as he admitted he was not. It was his calling to educate

those who were born Christians how "to become Christians."

Kierkegaard spent the remainder of his life and almost all

-of his financial resources in this cause. During this final

phase of his life he wrote some of his most profound and yet most extreme books and articles including Sickness Unto figftth, Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises (1849), Training

in Christianity. For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself

(1850-52), and The Attack on Christendom a compilation of

pamphlets and discourses regarding his running battle

against the sickness of the Established Church. His auto­ biographical essay, The Point of View for my Work as an

Author. written in 1848 but published posthumously, indi­ cates Kierkegaard's own amazement at the consistency and purpose in all of his writings, whether they were his early aesthetical works, his ethical or his solidly religious works. From the beginning he conceived of himself as a religious writer.

He had a passion to discover how he himself as a

Christian could become a Christian, and to reveal that others did not know what it was to be a Christian. This passion made his works existential because he related each category

of his thought to the existing individual. Christianity

only exists within the individual person as he lives it

out in his life. Christianity is not correct doctrine or the established church or the sophisticated syntheses of

Hegelianism, or the state. It is an inner condition of faith in the existing individual before God, not before manj

Therefore, all attempts to understand the existential dimen­ sions of Kierkegaard without recognizing the centrality of his passion to educate himself and others in what it means to become a Christian are not true to Kierkegaard. CHAPTER II

THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF KIERKEGAARD‘S

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND HIS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REACTIONS

Kierkegaard is often characterised by present day religious and philosophical thinkers, such as Martin Buber, as being too concerned with the Single One, too impervious to the interpersonal nature of all learning, all formation of the self,-*- There is little doubt that Kierkegaard's extreme accent on the integrity of the self alone before God can be so interpreted. It will be the emphasis of this study to establish that such an interpretation is an exag­ geration of Kierkegaard's position. He is exceedingly sensitive to interpersonal relationships, which is usually recognized in terms of his psychological observations which are brilliantly reflected in his aesthetical works, for instance. However, in terms of religious education it Is more often thought that Kierkegaard's identification of God as "wholly other," transcendent and not Immanent, precludes the possibility of the appropriation of the God relationship within the family and social setting.

■^Martin Buber, Between Man and Man. p; 57.

37 It is the,thesis of this study that when we analyze

Kierkegaard's reflections concerning his own religious

education we find that he discerned the extreme importance

of education in the home and society and the central

importance of the sincere religious devotion of parents.

Yet, he was profound in his understanding of the false

images and the distortion that every child distills from his

experiences with his own parents and others regarding the

Christian life, the nature of reality, and his own religious

destiny, Kierkegaard saw the absolute necessity of each

child growing up to the place of awareness, of reaching the

point of crisis where the child realizes that God as

revealed by Christ and God as revealed by his parents are

not synonymous] Kierkegaard also discerned in his own

agonizing struggle that the Christianity which pervaded the

church and the total culture was far from being authentic.

He also saw that Christianity could not be proved to be

true via rational explanations. It was true only for the

existing persons— in faith. Kierkegaard called for a first

hand faith. He asked for utter honesty in the process of becoming a Christian. He sought not a pure rejection of

the education of parents, the church and the community but

an honest and vigorous use of dialectic regarding religious

truth. This use of dialectic, of rigorous question and

answer, searching and refining, would end not in a beautiful 39 system (a synthesis of all opposites) but would end in para­ dox and mystery. Human thought could not be equated ever with God's thought. Human manifestations of the Christian life could not be equated with the true life of faith re­ vealed in the absolute paradox, Jesus Christ who was, in faith, mysteriously God in human life, a revelation which should offend any man of reason!

Christian education should center on building rela­ tionships of trust and love within the life of the child within the family. These relationships should reflect the life of love which Christ died to reveal. But because man is a self who is anxious to find inner security and meaning he sins inevitably. He grasps at less than God and he wor­ ships other false of his own making. Therefore,

Christian education should include dialectic which will shatter the images of the false Gods. This process will bring the youth to a place where he can see the paradoxical nature of human reasoning (which to Kierkegaard is important and essential in any educational process, but not final) and yet he is able in his own inner self to take "the ," to affirm the truth as revealed in the Christ who speaks through the scriptures if not always through parents or avowed Christians.

Kierkegaard saw the possibilities for good religious education within the family, the church, and the community but he also saw, painfully and in an exaggerated form in his own experience, the possibilities for very poor religious

education through these same channels. This thesis will be developed in terms of the major relationships in his life; his relationship with his father, Regina, the public (the

Corsair). and the established church (the personalities representing the church being primarily Bishop Mynster and

Professor Martensen who succeeded Mynster near the end of

Kierkegaard's life and against whose words "the attack on

Christendom" was aimed).

His Father

Kierkegaard saw religious education for children in terms of relationships of love and trust which would establish firmly in the child's inner being a belief that the love of God was not unlike the love of his father.

After his father's death Kierkegaard wrote in his Journals,

"I learnt from him the meaning of fatherly love and so was given some idea of divine fatherly love, the one unshakable thing in life, the true archimedean point."2 Strangely,

Kierkegaard's father was the source of his faith and the genesis of his despair and revolt.

As we recall Michael Pederson Kierkegaard retired to plunge deeply into the religious pilgrimage and to have time to train his children. Since Soren was the youngest

p Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 86. and so handicapped and yet. so sensitive and clever, his father took special interest in his training and in his supervision. Instead of playing with other children Soren would find himself detained by his father who would take him on "long walks" right in the house where the father and son would imagine meeting all kinds of interesting people and situations. They would discuss all of the drama of the outside world but only as detached observers and not as participants. The same would be true of the religious life, it would be discussed brilliantly, and devotions would be practiced regularly, but not in terms of actual living.

Apparently there was always a feeling on young Kierkegaard's part that there was ; something horribly sad and unreal about

Christianity. Kierkegaard later observed that he had never been allowed to be a child and to "play with holy things.

Kierkegaard felt that his father's deep melancholy, which he projected to all things religious, put a crushing burden upon him from which he could hardly recover. In his Journals

Kierkegaard describes his inner despair in many entries. He describes his belief in the glowing and warm love of his father concealed "under his frieze coat" but at the same time this pervading sense of melancholy, this sense of "pres­ sure from childhood up that not even the elasticity of the #. nor all the energy of freedom" could rid him of it.^

^Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. P. 532.. ^Kierkegaard, Journals. pp. 108, 112. 42

Michael Kierkegaard loved philosophical discussions and he often invited learned professors and his favorite cleric, the future Bishop Mynster, into his spacious home for this purpose. Soren often would listen in. He was taught to respect the power of dialectical thinking and he learned to respect his father's great intellectual power and brilliance. He was educated religiously far in advance of his years or his experience. In his Postscript Kierkegaard in the words of his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, longs for a religious education appropriate for his childhood, a warm and pleasant sharing of the myths of the faith, "the gentle, the lovable, the heavenly traits"— the Christ child, the wise men, the angels, the star— "one surprise after another

. . . the sweet-meats and all the other splendid things that come in this connexion."5 instead of these Kierkegaard was taught in words and by mood that Christ was crucified to save all men from their sin. Kierkegaard later realized just how fundamentally true this experience of sin is and how Christ in fact became his path to inner health and salvation; but in childhood he was only oppressed by this teaching.

For this reason Kierkegaard sees childhood as a time for the development of this central belief that God is and

^Lowrie, op. clt.. p. 86— an interesting paraphras­ ing of the Postscript. 43 that God is love, like unto but infinitely beyond the love of parents; that it is a time to develop the foundations upon which the full blown Christian message may be built.

Kierkegaard maintains that:

The Age of Childhood is therefore not the true time to become a Christian; but on the contrary the older age, the age of maturity, is the right time when it must be decided whether a man will or will not. . . .6

Lowrie, who seems to be the most sensitive student of

Kierkegaard's religious education, says that Kierkegaard's childhood lacked wholeness. His strict education was not geared to the capacities and needs of childhood and this caused him to despair. Yet, his father's love for him led him to believe that God was indeed a God of love. This lack of integration resulted in a divided personality in childhood. And the "reintegration, the unity of mind which

'wills one* thing,' after which he ardently struggled, he did not attain until the end."^

The attainment of wholeness was conceived by Kierke­ gaard later in his struggle to be the gift of God. Yet, he recognized the relationship of his human identifications to his ability to respond to God's love in faith. In his thought we find the concept of providence, or as he said,

?------°Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 532.

^Lowrie, op. cit. . p. 61. 44

Oovernance, God was moving In human events. It becomes apparent In a study of his Journals and of his literary works that his "struggle of the soul" was Inexorably related to his father's deep seated fear that he was not the recipi­ ent of God's love but of God's cursej In his Journals

Kierkegaard reveals the nature of this inner struggle when he says:

The most dangerous case is not when the father is a free-thinker, and not even when he is a hyprocrite. No, the danger is when he is a pious and godfearing man, when the child is inwardly and deeply convinced of it, and yet in spite of all this observes that a deep unrest is deeply hidden in his soul, so that not even _ piety and the fear of God can bestow peace. The danger lies Just here, that the child in this relationship is almost compelled to draw a con­ clusion about God, that after all God is not infinite love.“

It is important to note that it was after Kierkegaard had revolted from the "pressure" of his father's desires and then had been reunited to him (after his father's confes­ sions) that he experienced In 1838 his first religious experience. The "indescribable Joy" which came over him at

10:30 A.M. on May 19, 1838 was the first indication of the fact that Kierkegaard was re-establishing and confirming both his father's love for him and God's infinite love for him. The experience was far from final, but it was the first step toward a serious life of faith.

^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 374. 4 5

Kierkegaard had to go through the adolescent period of discovering himself. Revolt and doubt are ingredients in the development of most persons. In Kierkegaard's case his revolt needed to be more exaggerated because his early life had been most unnatural. Also his revolt took the form of intellectual doubt as well as emotional irresponsibility.

He adroitly assessed the situation in this way:

In Christianity itself contradictions are so great, to say the least, they prevent a clear view. As you know, I grew up, so to speak, in orthodoxy; but as soon as I began to think for myself the tremendous colossus began to totter. I call it a colossus with purpose, for taken as a whole it is very consistent and in the course of centuries the different parts have been fused so tightly together that it is difficult to quar­ rel with it. I could of course agree with it on certain points, but these would have to be treated like shoots, found in the cracks of a rock. On the other hand, I could also see what was wrong with it at many different points, but I had to leave the fundamentals in dublo for a time.9

It was during this period of doubt that Kierkegaard studied seriously Rationalism and Romanticism. Still his early training never left him and he became a severe critic of these systems of thought. In its early phases his crit­ icism was possibly the natural out-flowering of his love for dialectical thinking. Later, and especially after a trip to Gillileje in 1835 ?or a summer holiday, he decided that he would get nowhere unless he faced up to himself and to his need for an Archimedean point which Christianity

%bid.. p. 8. could be. He wanted to return to the faith but like

Augustine, he wanted to put it off as long as possible.

During the next three years of agonizing struggle he was unable to follow through on his father's desire for him to take his theological examination. It was not until the rapprochement with his father and actually until after his father's death (which freed Kierkegaard of the deep fear that he would die before his father because of a curse on the family) that Kierkegaard was able to work through his doubts and affirm his faith, on his own terms. He was seeking something that was truth for him, something he could live and die for, not tiluth that was generally, abstractly proven. We must recognize, however, that the struggle continued for another ten years until his next deep religious re-integration during Holy Week in 18^8 about which he comments in The Point of View. "I radically altered my attitude toward existence."

During these ten years Kierkegaard was working through, existentially, his own problem of whether or not

God had called him from the very beginning to be his special servant, to be a corrective, to be willing to be "a fool" for God, or whether there was any chance that he could have a normal life of marriage and pastoral service. It was his passion during these years to let God be his teacher, on the one hand, and to educate himself or find himself through his authorship, on the other hand. The central experience 47 which motivated especially the early years of this period was his engagement to and final rejection of Regina Olsen.

This everlbis so crucial in his-religious experience that it deserves additional interpretation.

Regina

Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regina Olsen reveals his extreme ambivalence and his divided personality. He felt that his love for her was so great that he could not possibly marry her and introduce her to his melancholy.

Yet, twice in his Journals he says that if he had had enough faith he could have remained with her. Nevertheless, he persisted in viewing his rejection of her as God's judgment upon him, and as his call to a higher telos. He saw his suspension of the ethical and desirable course of action

(to marry her as he had committed himself to do) in terms of the call of God for him to dedicate himself to His higher purposes. It was the resolution of such ambivalence and inner conflict that motivated Kierkegaard to leave Copen­ hagen for Berlin and to start writing Either/Or and the other books of this period.

There are many explanations for his course of action.

His tremendous desire for a normal existence, a wholeness to his being, prompted him to pursue and win this attractive girl of seventeen. But, his inner division made him pull 48 back, the very day after the engagement.-1'0 Another mani­ festation of his early conditioning was his turn toward the world of ideas rather than the world of real people. This bent in his life style made him much more in love with the idea of Regina and marriage than with Regina in flesh and blood. He was passionate in his descriptions of his love for her but he was ill at ease and afraid of opening his life to her when they were together. She loved him deeply and sensed his inability to consummate his desires. This made his situation all the more painful when he realized he would have to break off the engagement. Again and again throughout his writing career Kierkegaard analyzed the religious life in terms of his love relationship— sometimes in a most balanced and healthy way and sometimes in a way which drew a clear line between human and divine love.

At the end of his life during the attack on the priesthood of the Established Church he refers back to his experience with Regina. In a moment of pride he says that the marriage service of the Established Church is half

Christian and half erotic. The Christianity of the New

Testament would make room for a man who loved the girl of his life as the only one, but loved God so much more that he let her go in order not to pervert his love for God.11

1Qlbld.. p. 93.

■^Kierkegaard, The Attack on Christendom, p.163. He concludes that men of such quality and caliber are not born any more! It Is this interpretation of his experience with Regina that has led his followers to believe that he felt that God could not be met in interpersonal encounters, as Martin Buber has so beautifully developed in his concept of the eternal Thou as present by faith in the human encounters of I and Thou. Kierkegaard always remains doubt­ ful of his ability to find a relationship with God within human community, but he seems to realize that this is a product of his own warped situation, on the one hand, and also that interpersonal relationships always are less than divine because of the reality of human anxiety which results in human pride and lack of faithfulness. These two themes can be seen repeatedly in his writings as we shall discuss in Part II, and they are present in his private assessments of his situation in his Journals.

He says to himself, "Had I had faith I should have remained with Regina. Thanks and praise be to God, I now see that. I was near to losing my mind in those days."I2

This was written in Berlin during a second trip in 1843 after Regina had given up and had married another. By that time Kierkegaard had worked out a better perspective. He realized that his rejection was based on fear rather than faith:

. . . if I had had to explain myself then I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my

^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 121. 50

relation to my father, his melancholy, the eternal darkness that broods deep within, my going astray, pleasures and excesses which in the eyes of God are not perhaps so terrible, for it was dread that drove me to excess, and where was I to look for something to hold on to when I knew or suspected that the one man I revered for his power and strength had wavered.13

Kierkegaard's concept of faith was profoundly influ­ enced by his experience with Regina. His understanding of the nature of the self and of the freedom of the self from anxiety and sin was often directly related to his own existential struggle to find not an intellectual faith but a faith encompassing the whole self, that would give a man a center and a grounding upon which he could act freely.

Having rejected real encounter with Regina, however,

Kierkegaard used his familiar world of ideas as the avenue of his expression of his belief that the only essential relationship for man is his relationship with God. The marriage relationship and other human relationships are important and potentially very rewarding but they are not essential.1^ He says, however, in his philosophical way that marriage is the highest telos of the individual human existence.

. . . it is so much the highest that the man who goest without it cancels with one stroke the whole of earthly life and retains only eternity and

13Ibld.. p. 122.

^Kierkegaard, Stages on Lifes Wav, p. 2*4. 5 1

spiritual interests— what at first glance seems no slight thing but in the long run is very exhausting and also in one way or another is the expression of an unhappy life.3^

Kierkegaard eventually found a sense of balance in his feel­ ings concerning Regina and sought to re-establish the rela­ tionship on a friendship basis--not only with her but with her husband who had a real appreciation for Kierkegaard's thought but did not feel that close interpersonal contact would be advisable.

Whatever interpretation should be placed upon Kierke­ gaard's relationships with his father and with Regina, it is clear to present interpreters as it was to Kierkegaard that they were the two most pivotal relationships of his life.

As Kierkegaard observed, "

15Ibid.. p. 107.

Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 137. 52

destiny, was precisely the correct interpretation for him.

It was truth for him. He readily recognizes in his works

that it very well might not he the truth for someone e l s e . 1 ^

It may be accurately stated that Kierkegaard inter­

preted the crises of his life and of others' lives as the

when, through faith, man is ready to give up his false

securities and his idolatries and allow “God to be the

teacher." In this way Kierkegaard saw the Christian faith

existentially, not intellectually, or even in any primary

sense, morally.

His Relationship to the Public (The Corsair)

It is fair to say that once again Kierkegaard was

ambivalent in regard to his relationship to persons in his

social setting. It is true that he had a love for the com­

mon people of Copenhagen and was often seen talking to

humble people along the streets or in the cafes. He loved

children and old people and was very sensitive to their

inner needs. He loved to entertain his friends and rela­

tives with good food and drink. He loved conversation and

was very stimulating and entertaining upon such occasions.

He needed people and he needed to be understood by them.

Nevertheless, he was aware of the near impossibility of his

relationship with other persons at a very deep level. He was not inclined to open his life to them because his

^ Ibld.. p. 375. 53 motivations were so difficult to communicate, so beyond the norms of the average person. His relatives, especially his nephews and nieces, liked to visit him, and he loved to have them come. They thought of him as perhaps eccentric but very witty and brilliant— and really very thoughtful and kind.

It was almost more than he could bear when, as a result of the caricatures, parodies, and ridicule that the

Corsair gave him, he was cut off from communication with the common people and the children of Copenhagen. The contro­ versy with P. L. Miller, who was an anonymous writer for the

Corsaltf. eventually made Kierkegaard a laughing stock of the city.

The Corsair battle Is a symbol of Kierkegaard's identification of himself with the Christian faith as taught him by his father. Kierkegaard was taught to accept the sacrifice of Christ for him, a Christ who stood alone against the misunderstanding of the multitudes and the forces of religious and political power. It was this identi­ fication with Christ that gave him the strength to endure the ridicule and to turn the episode into another occasion to be taught by God. It is not necessary to give the details of the controversy here. They may be read in any good biography of Kierkegaard.^8 The Important aspect of

loOne of the best accounts is in Johannes Hohlenberg's Soren Kierkegaard. translated by T. H. Croxall, p. 159 ff. the episode for this study is the fact that Kierkegaard interpreted it as an another indication of the soundness and necessity of his calling. As Alexander Dru says, the result was "to transform his talent into his vocation. His work was no longer 'an intellectual enthusiasm for the question: What is Christianity?' but 'suffering for the doctrine, in such a way that in bearing it I have the direct support of Christianity.'"^ The Corsair controversy made

Kierkegaard change his course of direction from his original design to stop writing and take a country parish to. continu­ ing in an increasingly more direct manner his attempts to

'make the people aware' that Christianity did not exist en masse. It could only exist in the individual who allowed the contemporaneous Christ to confront him in all of his authentic truth and power— a confrontation which demanded a decision: either for or against I The goal of Christian education, of preaching, was to cut through 1800 years of the cultural clouding of the faith and to bear the original revelation in Jesus who becomes the Christ for any person only through a response of his whole being in affirmative faith.

^Alexander Dru, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard. Introduction, p. xlvil. 55

rft His Relationship to the Church

After Kierkegaard's decision to pursue his calling to

proclaim authentic Christianity and his second major

religious experience during Holy Week in 1848 at which time

he felt that he "must speak out," his writing increasingly

centered upon the shallowness of the Church in Denmark. Not

until his last year of life, however, did he call people to

stay away from the Established Church because it was not wit­

nessing to the truth. He himself during all of his life

until this final prophetic moment, was loyal to the Church,

attended regularly and occasionally preached masterful

sermons, many of which are classics today.

In his Training for Christianity he summons the

Church to bring integrity to the teaching of the faith, and

shows a great hope for the accomplishment of a sincere and

profound ministry to persons of all ages and situations by

a priesthood who, in the first place, had met Christ in

faith themselves I He sought men who were not afraid to

introduce persons to the paradox and offense of the faith rather than to rationalize it and "sugar-coat" it away to an

Insipid state, demanding nothing and getting nothing from the individual in terms of decisive and responsible action.

In preparation for "speaking out" Kierkegaard went

through a period of deep self-examination in light of the

Christian faith. This personal pilgrimage was recorded in brilliant psychological works which diagnosed the sickness of the self without real faith, and the necessity of the indLividual to face himself and in so doing, to find God.

When Kierkegaard felt that he had found a center for his life in his God relationship through Christ he was then able to attack directly the sham in the Church. Waiting to speak openly until after Bishop Mynster's death, out of respect for his father’s favorite pastor and with some sensitivity to the complexity of the Bishop's situation, Kierkegaard then challenged Professor Hans Martensen's funeral oration for the Bishop which lauded him for being a great "witness for the truth." Kierkegaard's goal was to prove that the

Bishop and the Established Church leaders, including the new

Bishop (Martensen himself), had diluted and compromised the

Christian faith to the place that it was completely unrecog­ nizable from the New Testament point of view! This attack on the Church became very severe. It may very well be true that Kierkegaard's earlier pent-up hostilities were finding an avenue of expression along with his sincere desire to be

"a corrective" for his time. His writing fluctuates between brilliant and balanced polemic and a bitterness which is difficult to rationalize. Suffice it to say that this final period in his life, nevertheless, proved his

Intense desire to reform the church and to establish a new yet old foundation for the religious education of individ­ uals within God's family. The final thrust of this passion 57 was so great that Kierkegaard brought himself to say,

"Denmark has need of a dead man. My life will cry out after my death.'" There was never a more accurate prognosti­ cation in all history. Kierkegaard's sudden death brought his life and work to the point of continual resurrection.

As Richard Niebuhr has so adroitly observed, "his day is yet to come." CHAPTER III

KIERKEGAARD'S ATTEMPTS TO EDUCATE

HIMSELF RELIGIOUSLY

Kierkegaard's religious pilgrimage illustrates a cardinal in all forms of effective education: per­ sonal effort must be poured into the solving of some real need which is felt by the learner. Kierkegaard, particularly after he was sufficiently "weaned" from his father, and had rejected marriage, threw himself into a process of self- education. This is the more accurate meaning of his aesthetical writings. As he said, "I see Christianity from the inside and my writings are my own education."

While it is valid to maintain that he was seeking to educate others by his subtle pseudonymous approach, it is equally true that he was seeking to discover truth for him­ self .

Sometimes the cloudiness of thought and crabbedness of expression are due more to his own hesitant searching for fact than to any attempt at mystification or concealment. Although he Insisted that his own final stand­ point was always higher than that represented in the esthetic books, still they faithfully mirror his own previous attempts to,wrestle with the problems under discussion.

1James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard. p. 7.

58 59

Kierkegaard's immersion into a sea of reflection through his writing had its genesis in his early sense of lostness. At age twenty-one he writes in his Journal.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know. except in so far as a cerlzin understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me. to find the idea for which I can live and die. What would be the use of discovering so-called objec­ tive truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system; . . . what good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christian­ ity if it had no deeper significance for me and for mv life. . . . I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of understanding and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.2

It is almost phenomenal that at such an early age

Kierkegaard was able to phrase so eloquently his majo,r pre­ supposition for his writings which were not to follow for several years. Here we see his central concept that the fundamental thing about truth is not the objective descrip­ tion of it but the individual's subjective relationship to it, whether or not he is grasped by it in terms of the^eep problems of his existence.

As we shall see Kierkegaard delineated certain levels of awareness of the truth through which each man must pass and in which men live their lives. He referred to these as

2Klerkegaard, Journals. p. 16. 60 stages or existence-spheres. He saw the religious stage as the highest, but he seems to be admitting in 1845 through his pseudonymous writer of the book, The Stages of L i f e ^ Way. that he was still "not actually a religious individual. I am only a properly and completely formed possibility of such a thing.In order to realize that possibility Kierkegaard decided that he must enter into a period of deep reflection which went to a level which he termed "double reflection," an approach that we discuss in our section on methods. Looking back on his struggle Kierkegaard rightly described his own situation.

To become a Christian in Christendom is tanta­ mount either to becoming what one already is, and this requires reflection In the direction of inwardness and subjectivity, or else it means to be freed first from the grip of the illusion and this cannot be done without reflection. The problem is: being in a.certain sense a Christian, to become a Christian.^

To a real degree Kierkegaard realized that hehad become a Christian in his attitudes and commitments as a natural outgrowth of his education within his family and cultural setting. This observation clearly saves Kierke­ gaard from the one-sidedness for which he is sometimes criticized. He realized, however, that he could not even claim as his own his past conditioning without personal

3Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, p. 242.

^Kierkegaard, The Point of View, pp. 42, 43. effort, conscious inner reflection and appropriation! This

he attempted in his books, in his personal Journal. and in

his religious devotions. Also, Kierkegaard realized that

many of the influences of his past which carried the label

"Christian" were really based on illusion. He must be freed

from the grip of such illusion. Likewise the path to this

freedom was reflection. Kierkegaard struggled to separate

genuine faithfulness and psychological melancholy from each

other as he reflected upon the illusion under which he had

for so long been operating in regard to his father and, as

we have seen, in relation to his own self-picture.

Almost at the beginning of his conscious struggle

Kierkegaard, on December 23, 183^, set the direct ionfc,5f his

religious self-education. As in the lives of most promising

young men, he was concerned about his destiny— whether or

not he could achieve or handle greatness. As he reflected

upon his capacity he said, ", . . a great man is great

because he is a chosen instrument in the hand of Godj but the moment he imagines that it is he himself who is acting, that

he can look into the future and with that in mind let the end

enable the means— then he is small."5 During these early

student days of revolt and re-evaluation, we can see that

Kierkegaard never was able to escape completely his Christian

perspective. Even though often he found himself in a state

^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 3. 62

of unbelief and with feelings of depression which carried him to the brink of the abyss of suicide, he would return

again to the Archimedean point that God loved him and had a

distinct destiny of greatness for him.

Often we find him expressing his form less longing and

passion for an encounter with inner certainty. He often

said to him self, "in order to live a complete human life,

not merely a life of knowledge, I need something which I

still lack, something that shall be intim ately connected with the deepest roots of my existence, something that shall

unite me with the divine, something to which I could cling

if the whole world collapsed."^

This something was a ’’leap of faith" which carried him beyond the contradictions, the m ystery, and the synthetic

abstractions which were the result of the use of reason only.

Yet, Kierkegaard used an uncommon amount of sound reason to come to his conclusion! He knew, nevertheless, that man's finite condition was such that he could never reason his way to an over-arching truth in which the great source of all

life, God Himself, would be only a part of the system. He discovered, also, in his religious pilgrim age, which took him into the best thought of the philosophers and theologians of his tim e, that orderly and rational form ulations of truth did not bring order and meaning to his life in its wholeness.

^Ibid.. p. 1 6 . During his own deep struggle and reflection Kierke­ gaard saw that man and Qod were on quite different levels of existence. Man's thought was fragmentary. It was not unlike

the thought of the men in 's cave--men who saw only

dimly the light from the Sun outside the Cave. To Kierke­ gaard nothing was more audacious than for the Hegelians to

assume that m an's reason and God's truth were homogeneous]

Kierkegaard, observed that after he reasoned from thesis to antithesis to synthesis he still lived in anxiety, in fear, and in a state of immediacy. He was still without grounding unless he could believe that God had actually broken into man's experience with a clear revelation of him self. It is for this reason that he looked to the revelation In Christ.

Since this revelation was unprovable, it could be appropri­ ated only as the individual before God took the “leap of faith" ’which allowed him to be grounded in this life which was in Christ and could be In him. It was this conviction which gave Kierkegaard the m otivation to analyze so meaning­ fully the existential situation in which men find them selves, and It was this growing conviction which grasped Kierkegaard and called him to witness to this truth before other men, first indirectly in his aesthetlcal and ethico-rellglous pseudonymous w ritings and then directly in his religious w r i t i n g s . C H A P T E R I V

KIERKEGAARD'S DESIRE TO PARTICIPATE IN

THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF OTHERS

On the surface it appears that Kierkegaard's analysis of the religious needs of other persons was geared more to the solving of his own problems than to a genuine interest in the destiny of others. His life of isolated reflection and his statements upon occasion that he was not a Christian himself and, of course, had no right to try to reform others, confirm such a conclusion. And yet, a deeper study of his motivations will not sustain this point of view.

Repeatedly he refers to his purpose to communicate with others, to help them face themselves and the fact that in most cases they were not religious but were living their lives at sub-Christian levels. In 1848, after his second deep religious experience but prior to his direct attack upon the

Church, Kierkegaard explains his approach to the masses. He felt that they would never listen to abstractionsi They would respond only to personality. He believed that the mass mind was so conditioned that it would be unwise for him to speak directly as an "I" to a people "so pampered by never hearing "I." So, he created personalities in his 64 psuedonymous authors and “let him step Into the reality of my life in order to accustom people a little to hear this speech in the first person.At that time in his life he saw himself only as a forerunner until "he should come who, in the strongest meaning of the word, says *1.' But to swing people over from all this inhuman abstractness— that is my task]“

Kierkegaard saw himself as a second Socrates.. It was his task to convince people that they were not religious, first, and then, using the Socratic Maieutic method, act as a mid-wife to them. In this way the religious life might be born in them. God would be the real teacher, Kierkegaard the helper! Increasingly Kierkegaard gave up this more indirect method and spoke with a strong “l“ which brought on the battle prior to his death; and yet he maintained, except on rare occasions, his sense of humility. In his final attack, moreover, he conceived of teaching in very bold terms. He saw his goal to be, "in the direction of seeing what can be done by way of clarifying men's , teaching them, mov­ ing them by pathos into a state of suffering, stirring them up by the gadfly— sting of irony, derision, sarcasm, etc."2

His passion was to get other people to do what he had to do:

1 See T, H. Croxall, Kierkegaard Commentary,p. 7.

2Kierkegaard, T h e Attack on Christendom, p. 97. 66

to get rid of the "prodigious illusions" which they were carrying around in the name of C hristianity.

T h e S t a g e s

While the direct and rather severe approach of the prophet was finally embraced Kierkegaard used a develop­ mental approach to education during most of his life. Due prim arily to his own tremendous capacity for profound intro­

spection he evolved the theory that men lived their lives on

one of three levels of existence— the aesthetic, the ethical

or the religious. He referred to them as the stages on life's way, or stages of spiritual development. They are imagina­ tively and brilliantly hammered out on the anvil of Kierke­ gaard's own experience and observations as reflected in his earlier w ritings. These "existence-spheres" coexist often and in part overlap. Some interpreters of Kierkegaard believe that the concept of "stages" is unfortunate and not really what Kierkegaard meant. "Stages" imply a sequence rather than the possibility of coexistence.

The mass of men live prim arily in the aesthetic sphere.

They live for the pleasure and satisfactions of the moment.

They are possessed by immediacy. They need great men, great objects, great events to which to cling. They vacilate from one center to another, tasting every facet of life. The aesthetic man has no lasting center for his faith. He tends to be concerned with quantity of experience (eating, drinking 67 and bodily gratifications) rather than quality of experience.

In his despair to find any meaningful way to fill his anxiety he can move toward the blatantly sensual or he can move toward the higher forms of sophisticated enjoyment of the arts. He can poetize all of life and remain in a state

of detachment and indecisiveness. Kierkegaard was fully aware of this dimension of life because in his revolt he had tasted it, both in its sensual and its sophisticated forms. He was profound enough to know that all men are tempted to exist in this manner; and, that they instinc­ tively know this language and identify with these longings.

So, many of his writings in Either/Or or in The Stages on

Life's Way developed the dilemmas into which men got them­ selves when they lived as gluttons or seducers or as poetizers of life. He knew he would have readers!

The ethical "existence sphere" was conceived by

Kierkegaard to be a much higher or more fulfilling mode of living. He recognized, as we do today, that men may live ethically without wanting to live religiously. Kierkegaard felt that the ethical was always moving away from the out­ wardness of the aesthetic and moving toward the religious.3

The ethical is not the immediate. The ethical man is com­ mitted to values for which he will work over a long period of time. He Is the responsible man. Without the ethical

^Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, p. ^400. 68 man calls man to change and repentance. Therefore, It is a transitional sphere which prepares man for the religious.

The ethical is concerned with universal . It can become, therefore, quite abstract and impersonal— in fact, at tim es inhuman. The religious sphere moves man toward the fully personal. It often suspends the ethical in order to preserve some higher values of the personal and the divine.

The religious sphere, then, is concerned with the ultim ate truth upon which a person may center his life eternally. If all the considerations of the aesthetic, if all the world were to crumble, the religious man would still be grounded and faithful. Yet, this quality of existence is not anything which can be "firmed up" or fortified by reason. It is an existence based upon the same quality of faith that exists between two lovers who would ruin their love the very moment that they were to try to prove it] It is a quality of life where the believer finds himself strangely, absurdly, secure while lying upon seventy thousand fathoms of water and yet with a sense of great joy and ultim ate security and meaning.4

It was Kierkegaard's belief that he could start on the very naturalistic level of the aesthetic and "capture his reader" and seduce him to reflect upon the absolute inade­ quacy of his present mode of life. In this way he would

4Ibid.. p. 430. perform his Socratic function of convincing the person that

he was in great need; or, as Kierkegaard later m aintained

in Sickness Unto Death, that he was in a state of spiritual

illness, in a state of unbelief, in a state of sin. Then,

Kierkegaard led his readers to consider the glories of the

ethical life until they were brought to the point of

realizing just how unsatisfying and legalistic this kind of

existence could be. He would bring them to see that the

ethical life could be a cruel and sterile form of existence,

lacking true freedom and individuality, lacking again a true center for life. Kierkegaard sought to lift up the forms of idolatry into which men of law and reason coulc fall. He sought to lead them to embrace the religious life of true freedom.

Kierkegaard was inclined to reject all m etaphysical form ulations concerning man and his situation which the

Hegelian philosophers tended to posit. In this regard he was sim ilar to the Instrum entalists who were to follow.

Yet, he did not reject the m etaphysical dimension com­ pletely. It was the underlying reality, the prius upon which all life was grounded, whether aesthetic, ethical, or religious.^ He was prone not to build metaphysical struc­ tures upon the one basic presupposition, however. It is this same fundamental ontological grounding which Paul

5Ibid'.. pp. 428-430. 70

Tillich insists upon.** This onotological base for the

existence of man relates him to God as the source of his

life and makes possible a relationship between God and his

created children. While man in his freedom can live apart

from God, he has the infinite possibility of becoming

related to Him in faith. It is a faith which responds to

God's love Just as man and woman respond to each other in

love.

Kierkegaard saw his role as one who prepared the

inner life of men for the revelation in Christ that God

loves themi This great revelation of God's active love for

man cannot be proved. It can only be received in faith. It

can only be responded to and acted upon; and, thereby does

it become operative In human life.

Fundamentally, then, Kierkegaard's interest in the

religious education of others was at the level of convinc­

ing them, existentially, that they were not religious and

that they were looking at the religious life abstractly

rather than as individuals before the revelation of God's

love— the true archlmedean point upon which life could be based.

Dr. Perry LeFevre, author of The Prayers of Kierke­ gaard . in which he has written one of the best English

**Paul Tillich, The . p. 22. "Man is Immediately aware of something unconditional which is the prius of the separation and interaction of subject and object, theoretically as well as practically." interpretations of Kierkegaard's life (according to Walter

Lowrie) believes that Kierkegaard's developmental psychology is one of the most fruitful of his concepts for religious education.7 Yet he raises the issue of whether or not

Kierkegaard was genuinely developmental, whether or not he saw the necessity for various levels of development in children, youth and adults, whether or not he had any under­ standing of "developmental tasks," in the Havighurst sense o of the phrase. This question prompted me to re-think

Kierkegaard's understanding of the stages in terms of his own life story.

Kierkegaard attacks the problem of development of the inner self in terms of the necessity of choice. Human beings are not animals who act by instinct. They must choose

If they do not choose, their unconscious minds will choose for themj In Either/Or we find a very able discussion of this whole matter. To Kierkegaard the necessity for deci­ sion-making must be conscious and it must be a process in which the whole self participates at the correct time, developmentally. If this is not done, gaps will be dis­ covered in the inner self which will have to be re-worked, as he said, from the "back to the front" of life. This he knew because this is exactly what he had to suffer. This

^Stated in a personal interview at Chicago Univer­ sity, June, i9 6 0 .

^Robert Havighurst, Developmental Tasks and Education. 72 process is the very one which has been called "re-education" by certain of our psychotherapists. Kierkegaard said, "So when at last the choice is made one discovers . . . that there is something which must be done over again, some­ thing which must be revoked."9 This is when the choice is not conscious, but the result of unconscious forces which have to take over because the self is unprepared to make a true decision. "Therefore, it is important to choose and to choose in time."10 Kierkegaard seems to understand that his own life would have been a different story if he had known himself well enough to make the correct decisions at the right time along the path of development. Yet, one wonders whether or not we would have his great reflections today if he had]

Continuing with an analysis of the necessity of the choosing self, Kierkegaard saw aesthetic existence as essentially a life of drifting, of the inability of the self to choose] There is choice, of course, of a type, but it is a choice "for the moment." Genuine choice moves into the ethical sphere. Real choice Involves the consolidating of the energies of the total personality. It involves "earn­ estness" and "pathos." Kierkegaard sees this kind of choice as being "made with the whole inwardness of his personality."

^Kierkegaard, Either/Or. Vol. II, p. 139.

1QIbld. . p. 139. 73

Here, the ethical person's nature is "purified and he him­

self brought into immediate relation to the eternal power

whose omnipresence interpenetrates the whole of existence.

This transfiguration, this higher consecration is never

attained by that man who chooses merely aesthetically. "‘L1

Kierkegaard saw clearly that the self had to be

united in order to make a choice. The , therefore,

of choice was for a person to be able "to choose him self."

This could be done as an ethical choice which is enabling.

However, when a person chooses him self only— makes him self

the end of his quest he easily falls back into the aestheti-

cal state. He cannot be centered in himself. He is not

truly grounded. The final level, therefore, is to choose to believe in God and His special destiny for each person.

When the individual freely chooses God he, in turn, is free

to choose himself and not falter in his dally choices. His choices w ill be more than merely ethical or legal; they w ill be personal and faithful to higher spiritual purposes. The

"leap of faith" is therefore a free choice of a responsible person. In Kierkegaard's mind it tends to be the act of an

older youth, or adult.

C hristianity, in terms of choice, is not for chil­ dren. The latter, in Kierkegaard's thought, would not yet be conscious enough of the meaning of their previous

i:LIbid. . p. 141. experiences. They are living too much in the aesthetic sphere of immediacy. They are still making choices in terms of their reactions to their parent's religious loyal­ ties or lack of them. They cannot choose freely until they mature enough to confirm or reject the religious and ethi­ cal teachings of their parents, unti^ they can "stand alone before God" and take responsibility for their choices.

Kierkegaard saw philosophy as a m anifestation of either the aesthetic or ethical spheres. It was too con­ cerned with the past and not enough with the telo s. the future, which youth need. Philosophy tries to mediate all contradictions away, but fails. This cripples youth so that they cannot make a decision.

Hence, in our age as the order of the day we have the disgusting sight of young men who are able to mediate C hristianity and Paganism, are able to play with the titanic forces of history, and are unable to tell a plain man what he has to do in life, and who do not know any better what they them selves have to do.12

To Kierkegaard, the element of choice was the place in the human self where the eternal power is present.

Choice indicates man's real freedom before God. Choice confirms man's spiritual nature. His goal, in relationship to the education of his fellowmen, was to convict them of their spiritual natures, of their need to decide for or against the fact of God's love. He desired to lead them to

12Ibid.. p. 145. 75 make the decision to become Christians even though they perhaps had been Christians nominally.

Kierkegaard's message is amazingly optimistic for someone who is caricatured as declaring only man's state of separation and anxiety. He says, as he describes the fruits of the life of decisive faith:

And when the spirit finds itself, all the small troubles vanish, all the causes which according to some people produce melancholy, for example, that one cannot find oneself in the world, that one comes to the world both too late and too early, that one cannot find one's place in life; for he who owns his own self eternally can come neither too early nor too late, and he who pos­ sesses himself in his eternal validity surely finds his significance in this life.13

There is no doubt in this statement that the religious sphere of existence is the way of life which fulfills. It makes all the difference to the quality of life. Kierke­ gaard's conviction concerning this conclusion grew and grew until he was able to proclaim it directly and openly. His observations concerning the indirect method of communication, none the less, are indicative of his sensitivity to the inner lives of his fellowmen and to his desire to have a part in their religious education.

One of the major criticisms of Kierkegaard has to do with his understanding of the religious stage, and it may se well be faced 3quarely while we are discussing this quality of life. It is correctly maintained that Kierkegaard is

13Ibid.. p. 161. easily misleading if he is not actually consistently pro­

claim ing that God is "Wholly Other"; and therefore, man can

have no contact with God except those which God in itiates.

This is the interpretation which Karl Barth made. Further,

it is stated that for Kierkegaard, man gets in the way of

God’s revelation of Himself rather than, for instance, in

M artin Buber's thought where God is actually confronted

every time man treats his brother as a Thou, a sacred person

in whom the Eternal Thou dwells. It is my position that

such interpretations are lacking In balance and perspective.

Kierkegaard surely emphasized the transcendence of God and

differed strongly with the H egelian,attem pt to equate human

reason with Divine Wisdom. This emphasis was a needed cor­

rective, but that is precisely what it was— a corrective.

Kierkegaard still witnessed to the possibility for truth to be encountered in human relationships— a truth to be sure,

which had been a gift of faith to individuals of faith. It was his own experience that the religious truth which he

appropriated w ithin the interaction of his family and with

other important persons in his life was not valid until he had, in all honesty, allowed God to help him separate the

illusion from the truth. He was eternally grateful that he had finally found confirm ation through his own father's love for him that God loved him.

His corrective took extreme forms. The most shocking illustration is his description of the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling. Here, as an analogy to his own suspension of his love for Regina and his promise to marry her in favor of the higher purposes of serving God as a religious author, Kierkegaard describes

Abraham's struggle as he suspends his best ethical sense

(it is morally wrong to kill one you love) and offers his own son, Isaac, upon the altar as a of his complete trust in God's loving will and purposes. This analogy has been interpreted as evidence enough that Kierkegaard saw human relationships to be "in the way," standing between a relationship to God. Yet, paradoxically, we must remember that God did not so view Isaac. God forever taught man at that time that He does not see man as "in the way." God, in this biblical story, revealed that human sacrifice was unnecessary and wrong in His sight. Nevertheless, a faith that was that deep, a faith that would trust God that far was not wrong. So, we find Kierkegaard Interpreting his own experience of giving up Regina for God. He later said that if he had had enough faith in God he could have remained 14 with her. Yet, Kierkegaard seems to maintain to the end that either we believe in God's love or we do not. There is no middle ground. This calls for decision, and decision

For an interesting and balanced interpretation of this episode see Edmund Perry, "Was Kierkegaard a Biblical Existentialist?" The Journal of Religion. Vol. XXXVI, 1956, P. 17. 78

without proof.1 Kierkegaard is still calling men to decide

to trust God all the way.

He believes that education is a cultural process.

He understands ever so painfully how much the self is

determined by social interaction in the family and commun­

ity. He maintains that some truth is appropriated in this

process— subjective truth, that is—but that there is always

a gap, a sense of split-ness, an element of "I-It-ness," as

Buber says, which the community interaction (even w ithin the

Church) can never transcend. Furtherm ore, man should not

pretend that this is possible. If so, man would actually

lose his freedom of decision and turn out to be, only what

he had interanlized from his interactions. Kierkegaard

realizes that man teaches in community and he is forever

seeking to redeem this community, but he holds that true

personal freedom is present. Man is truly man, when he

stands before God to decide his destiny. This is true edu­

cation. This is the nature of the religious life. It is

God's avenue of communication with man. PART II

THE MEANING OF KIERKEGAARD'S CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT

FOR

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Kierkegaard's thought is flowing powerfully today as though in a deep underground river which is providing mois­ ture for the growth of the green foliage on the surface.

Ample testimony for this fact is at hand. Students of contemporary theology have recognized "the strongely seminal thought of Soren Kierkegaard" to be the source of the theological "reconstructions" of our day.1 Mackintosh calls attention to the forceful presence in contemporary theology of the "categories of thought" which Kierkegaard brought to birth, such as "existence and essential, incognito, contem­ poraneousness, moment, offense, perpendicular, tension; decision and the like," especially in the continental O theologians. A recent study by Martin J. Heinecken analyzes

Kierkegaard's significance for contemporary theology from an American perspective.3

1Channing-Pearce, M., The Terrible Crystal, p. XVI. O Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology. p. 2 3 0 .

•^Martin J. Heinecken, The Moment Before God (Phila­ delphia: Muhlenberg Press, 79 80

As has been maintained in the introduction to this

study Kierkegaardian influence upon contemporary theologi­

cal movements has resulted quite naturally in the gradual

awareness of the importance of his thought for the founda­

tions of C hristian education especially,- and even for

religious education in the broader sense.

Kierkegaard made a clear distinction between C hristian

education and religious education. He had a place for both

types of education in the life of the individual. This

fact is often overlooked. His Christian categories are so

boldly constructed and declared that it appears that he

would have no place in his thinking for a broader and more general religious education. The study of his own education

reveals that for most of his life he was unable to go, in his faith, beyond a general religiousness which he describes as Religion A. The eighteen religious discourses to which he signed his own name, prior to his decision to term inate the use of the pseudonymous approach, were not decisively.

C hristian as such w riting was to become. The definite and deeply C hristian religiousness which he described so b ril­ liantly before he was able himself to embrace it, he called

Religion B. An analysis of these two types of religion w ill show that Kierkegaard saw the need of two types of edu­ cation to bring them into being, although he clearly held that C hristian education was the only fully adequate and mature education for the existing individual in his m aturity. Religion B, the full blown C hristian faith, is too demanding for children. "It is a rape—be it never so well meant— to force the child's existence into the decisive „li Christian categories. . . . This Kierkegaard knew from his own experiences. He knew that fully conceived

C hristian categories reflected the adult awareness of the split between "what I am and what I should and could become."

Therefore, Religion A, which to Kierkegaard was a universal kind of religiousness, was the foundational faith for chil­ dren. He added to this a gradual witnessing on the part of parents and the community of believers to the true C hristian categories. A deeper look at these two types of religion becomes essential.

------E------Kierkegaard, Concluding U nscientific Postscript. P. 532. CHAPTER V

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

Religion A. then, la the religion of immanence. God is felt to be in the Individual. It is intuitive. That is why it is for children. God is in everything. He is

"infinitely all." Education consists precisely in the fact that God is in man and God's mind and man's mind are in harmony. God's mind is beyond man's thoughts, but man's reason can comprehend God's truth. Religion A is homogene­ ous. It is interested in getting all things to cohere. In its more mature form it is interested in studying the con­ tent of the Christian faith, for Instance, or any religion, in terms of similarity and dissimilarity. It is objective.

It is speculative and it can be aesthetic (in that we get sat­ isfaction out of the wonder and awe that we experience as we feel that we are understanding something of the mystery of the Ultimate). It is universal and reasonable. It was the religion of the average "Christian" in Kierkegaard's day.

It was the religion which sought to mediate all forms of revelation and reason into a beautiful whole, in its best and most honest form, and a religion of the comfortable, the complacent, the nominal "Christian," in its worst form.

82 83 Its highest form Kierkegaard respected. "One must give speculative philosophy credit for holding fast to immanence

. . ., but speculative philosophy must not call itself

Christian. By me therefore religiousness A has never been called Christian or Christianity."1 Yet, he was severe In his criticism of clergymen and philosophers who sought to mediate the Christian revelation with Hegelian philosophy and still refer to their religion as Christian! This was not authentic. It did not meet the needs of the human situation.

Religion A could not be a religion of passion or decision. It was too universal to help a person arrive at any particular expression of the truth, since the dialectical process of thought could result in many facts for and against anv objective expression. Religion A, without the addition of Religion B, was in Kierkegaard's thinking, indecisive, paralyzing, and inadequate for the problems of mature living. It had its place*within the life of the person and in society, but it needed to be fulfilled by a genuine decisive religiousness.

Religion B, the Christian faith, was conceived by

Kierkegaard to be an absolute faith upon which the Individ­ ual could ground his life and his daily decisions. It was truly a faith and not a speculative religion. It was a

1Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. P. 498. 84 faith that went against reason if anything. As Kierkegaard said, any thinking person would see the absurdity of believ­ ing that God became manj Rellgbn B, the Christian faith, is a personal response to the revelation of God in Jesus

Christ, in his contemporaneousness with the believer. It is particularistic, definite, existential, selective, dis- O criminative, and polemical. It cannot be proved objec­ tively. In fact, this is a complete waste of time. The real issue is how the individual responds subjectively, inwardly, spiritually to the love of God in Christ. It is non-judgmental and therefore, in Kierkegaard's thinking, could not be dogmatic. It is a confessional faith in an act of God in history. It is both grounded in history and yet without objective proof historically. Most of all

Religion B is a paradox: That our lives can find their center in the Absolute Paradox, the revelation in Christ,

God in human form. Christianity cannot be mediated. It can be received only in faith and lived existentially or it must be honestly rejected. No Christian education could fail to make clear the offense of the Gospel, and the need for personal decision concerning the individual's absolute devotion to God in Christ. This kind of religiousness can­ not be taught to children because their experiences do not create any need for it, do not correspond to Its categories

2Ibld.. p.' 516. 85 of human sin and lostness (at least consciously) from which the answers, or "givens" of the faith saves the person.

Kierkegaard compared Christian education to the coming of

Christianity. "Just as Christianity did not come into the world during the childhood of mankind but in the fullness of time, so, too, in its decisive form it is not equally appropriate to every age in a man's life."3

Religion B, Christianity, is based upon man's nature as a spiritual being, a deciding self which can see itself in its actual situation but can also transcend itself and see the potential, both and good, in every situation.

This is because man is both finite and infinite. He is a synthesis of these two. He is a self which must decide, must choose its own destiny in freedom. This freedom is a gift from God. It is God's image in man that he can and must decide in dreadful freedom, a freedom which cannot have as a concomitant, divine knowledge and ultimate wisdom.

This existing self, who becomes what he decides, needs a faith concerning the absolute end (telos) for his existence; he needs to find meaning in his life which reason and gen­ eral religion cannot provide. They can bring the self to approximate truth, but not to absolute truth for the person. in his inwardness, in his decisiveness. Christianity pro­ vides the answer (of course, only in faith) for this human situation.

3i b i d .. p. 523. This truth can only be discovered through an act of

commitment, a "leap of faith" beyond reason. As Kierke­

gaard said in his Journals after his first "experience of

Joy" in 1838, "I mean to labour to achieve a far more

inward relation to Christianity; hitherto, I have fought

for its truth while in a sense standing outside it."^ The

meaning of the Christian faith is an experience of the inner

being within the faith relationship. It is a risk, a suf­

fering which can bring meaning and grounding to life.

Christian education, then, becomes preparation for the

encounter in faith with God as known through Christ. It

must lead the person in all honesty to the paradox and

leave him in his isolation "before God" to decide to "leap"

or to hesitate and mediate.

To Kierkegaard, Religion B is based upon the fact

that the human self is most fulfilled not as an object but

a subject. Just as it is dehumanizing to threat another

person as an object, to try to prove his love or trust, it

is irreligious to try to make God an object and try to

prove his love. The way of faith is like the way of love between persons. It is discovered in the giving, in the meeting. It is a risk. It may be thought through, studied

and compared, as in Religion A, but finally it must be a

"leap" beyond any proof.

------Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 59. 87

Kierkegaard makes his point clear when he says, “All decisiveness . . . is rooted in subjectivity. A contempla­ tive spirit . . . feels nowhere any need of a decision, and sees no decision anywhere."5 The individual who tries to become a Christian by proving that the scriptures are infall ible or that the church's interpretations are without error is both a tragic and comic figure. He is "tragic on account of his passion, and comical because he attaches" his faith "to an approximation" which he tries to absolutize.^

This conception of Christianity has been developed and adopted by many theologians today. Paul Tillich, who faces squarely man's existential situation and the paradoxi­ cal nature of the Christian answer, says in corroboration of Kierkegaard's position, "Whenever•the assertion that

Jesus is the Christ is maintained, there is the Christian message; wherever this assertion is denied, the Christian message is not affirmed. . . . For the event on which

Christianity is based has two sides: The fact which is called 'Jesus of Nazareth' and the reception of this fact by those who received him as the Christ.it is the believers' "leap of faith" that in Jesus as the Christ, God has paradoxically subjected himself to the "conditions of

5Ibid.. p. 3 3 .

6 Ibid., p. 42.

7paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Vol. II, p. 97. 88

existence without being conquered by them. If there were

no personal life in which existential estrangement had been

overcome, the New Being would have remained a quest and an

expectation and would not be a reality in time and space."®

Religions A and B. Religion A is seen in terms of a

quest for truth. Religion B is viewed as a response in

faith to a living truth that has brought meaning to the

lives of individuals in the past and can be a center of

meaning in the moments of decision for the believer. Yet,

the elements of "honest searching" and of "grateful receiv­

ing" are both needed in the Christian life. For, without a

sense of quest it is very natural and inevitable that the

Christian will tend to make some relative expression of his

faith into an absolute. To Kierkegaard, Religions A and B

are complimentary, on the one hand, and must be held in tension, on the other.

Kierkegaard recognizes that certain of the better

aspects of Religion A should be a part of the growing child’s

religious educatinn but that, "there will come a moment for him, when although a Christian he will ask what Christianity

is— in order to become a Christian."9 In this moment he must begin to receive Christian education, slowly but honestly. He must be brought to the paradox of Christ in

®Ibid.. p. 98.

9Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 333. which relationship his "consciousness of sin" will be dis­

covered and verbalized. His existential situation must be

analyzed. Reflection must take place, but a reflection

deeper than the wondering, questing reflection of his first

religiousness. Kierkegaard called this reflection in

Christian education "double reflection" by which he meant,

"what does this mean for me?" Yet, to Kierkegaard, Chris­

tian education, at the deepest level had not taken place

until the person had moved on to the final level of reflec­

tion which he termed, "infinite reflection." At this

level the questions must be geared to the theme: What do

my decisions mean to God as I know him in Christ? In this

process the person needs to be led into "existential commun­

ication" concerning the nature of the answers of the revela­

tion of Christ for his existence. 'Christianity has to do

with existence, with the act of existing.1"10

It becomes obvious, of course, that Kierkegaard is

passionately interested primarily in delineating the reason

for the need for Christian education. Nevertheless, he does

recognize the importance of another kind of religiousness

which can be integral to the Christian's educational process but which could equally take place within the context of

another or no organized faith.

1QIbld.. p. 339 Kierkegaard recognized a need for two kinds of faith as well as two qualities of religiousness. One kind of faith is developed in the interpersonal relationships within the family and community. It is a faith which is more appropriately called, self-confidence, a "vital confidence in oneself, in the world, in mankind, and (among other things) in God." Kierkegaard recognized from his own lack of self-confidence that this dimension of faith was essen­ tial for human growth. This kind of faith can be related to the education of the child in home and society, the result of which is his emerging self-concept and his sense of . Such a faith can be included as a part of the education of Religion A. This quality of faith, however,

Kierkegaard felt would not stand up under pressure. It is lacking in a genuine center outside of the self. And since the self is spiritual, with the Inevitable desire to trans­ cend itself and to want to relate itself to centers of mean­ ing outside of itself, the individual will necessarily put his faith in something, in some cehter of power, other than himself. The Issue is: What will the self have faith in?

Will It be the true source of power and meaning, God? Or, will the seLf have faith in some lesser, some relative power, some false God of social position, material solvency, or even religious dogmas which become ends in themselves.11

11Kierkegaard, For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself. p. 101. True faith, then, is beyond the person's understand­

ing of himself in relationship to other human beings and material things. True faith is beyond death, which is the

ominous symbol of man's finitude, of the limitations of his

faith only in himself. So, the Christian faith in a living

God, in and yet beyond this earthly life, is the end product

of Christian education. It is an education that prepares

the self to unite itself with God, not through a rational proving of God's existence, but through "the leap of faith."

The meaning of this leap is discovered just as the swimmer discovers that he can stay above the water, even though his

reason tells him that he will sink!

Christian education, then, must be honest. It is built upon a confession of faith. It is not irrational per se, but in its mature form it is beyond reason, if not against reason. It is discovered to be true in the leap;

it is not possible to rationalize it before the leap. It is discovered inside the faith, subjectively, by the individual believer. It cannot be objectively guaranteed. If it could, according to Kierkegaard, it would not be faith.

This concept of faith amounted to a revolution within liberal Protestant Christianity. It was slow to appear upon the scene but it is amply evident today. It calls for an authentic, honestly Christian, particularistic teaching of the faith. It avoids any sense of literalism or 92 which previously accompanied educational approaches centered in a special revelation in Christ.

Kierkegaard called for an authentic teaching of the New

Testament Christ, in all of his uniqueness. He wanted the attractiveness of his personal ministry held high as well as the offensiveness of his request for men to find themselves by losing themselves— the essential paradox in Christ's teaching and life.

This call for an authentic teaching of the Christian faith as revealed in Christ was given by Kierkegaard with­ out a rejection of the need for and value of the quest for objectivity in the study of religious symbols, dogmas, and institutions. The more universal elements of Religion A were not totally condemned. Rather, they were emphatically pronounced as inadequate to meet the problems of human existence. It would appear to me that Kierkegaard would approve the present-day desire for the study of religion in our universities and even in our public schools. Such study would not and could not be particularistic. It would seek to be enlightening and appreciative. This is vital in our human enterprise. It would not be viewed by Kierke­ gaard as adequate, however. It would rot lead to essential commitments or to action within the faith community. It would not lead to pathos and passion. It would be too detached and non-existential. It would leave a vacuum for the existing self which would be filled by a false faith, 93

by choices to satisfy the aesthetic or ethical dimensions

of life but not the truly religious. It would encourage

the student to see all forms of religious expression as

relative, which is good to a degree. Yet, if the student

is not led to the paradoxical and is encouraged to take the

"leap of faith" he will lack a true center for his life.

He will lack an absolute faith in God, which will fulfill

him and make him able to face life in its estrangement and

death in its awful reality.

Kierkegaard saw the need in the self for a unifying

faith in a center outside of the self, an Absolute. Yet, he

quarreled with Hegel and the rationalists because they

thought they could define the Absolute, and thereby syn­

thesize all of the Interrelationships of life. Kierkegaard

protected his thought from such presumptuousness by saying

that the man of faith should orient himself relatively to

all relative ends of the faith and absolutely to the abso­

lute end of God's love. This concept has preserved the human existential need for an absolute without the pitfall

of making any formulation or Interpretation of the faith into an absolute.

Emil Brunner, one of the present-day theologians who acknowledges great debt to Kierkegaard, reflects this horror of absolutizing the relative elements in the Christian faith. Brunner clarifies the meaning of "the leap of faith" which places Christ's revelation of God's love in an absolute position for the believer but which guards against the pre­ sumptions of objectivity:

Hence in the genuine Church nothing and no one has authority save ’the head,' Jesus Christ, His own spirit, his own word; no priest, and also no synod, no confession or dogma, not even the Holy Scriptures; the latter has authority only in so far as it is the word of God, not in itself, and therefore never as an entity which is at the dis­ posal of theology or ecclesiastical law. Cleri­ calism, however, makes the means which Jesus Christ uses to rule His church into the self- sufficient idolatrous authorities. . . . It is not the ecclesiastical office, nor the function of the credo which we question, but the fact that they are clothed with absolute divine author­ ity, binding on the . When this takes place the correlation of the individual and the community is destroyed, and its place is taken by a subordination of the individual to the collective power of the church. This is the most tertible thing that can ever happen; the sanctuary itself has been defiled. . . .^2

This kind of honesty and integrity is giving con­ temporary Protestantism a new source of power, a fulfillment of the . It is honestly educating within a faith community. It is confessing the meaning of personal faith in God through Christ. It is non-judgmental. It has an accepting attitude toward the light from other religions and quests for truth. It is cautious not to absolutize relative ends. Yet, it is not going to wait for a final proof of any religious before finding a relation ship with the absolute.

This new development within Protestantism has its roots in Kierkegaard's existentialism. It makes it possible

12Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt, p. 295. for modern Christian education to be particularistic with­

out being Judgmental. As John Hutchison of Columbia

University says in a recent volume on philosophy of

religion, "The confessional attitude . . . takes up its

position on the playing field, saying rather, 'This is the

way things look to me from where I stand. Therefore in

these terms I will play the game1. . . . The confessional

attitude, while holding squarely to its own position, seeks

what has called 'boundless communication' among

the many faiths and philosophies through which men seek to

confess and communicate the meaning of existence."^3

Such an attitude is present in the writings of the most discerning current philosophers of Christian education.

James D. Smart, discussing the approach of the Protestant

churches to the teaching of the revelation in Christ and to

the sharing of the insights from other philosophies and world religions, says that the Christian needs to be edu­ cated both in the humanistic and confessional patterns. We

should not seek to make forced syntheses of Christian and non-Christian faiths which would result in a "smudging of distinctions to the disadvantage of both elements." He

13 John Hutchison, Faith, Reason and Existence. p. 122. 96 continues, stating a position quite similar to Kierkegaard’s recognition of Religions A and B:

We must let Jesus Christ be Jesus Christ, and Plato Plato, and Confucius. We must let each speak in his own way. Our cultural responsibility is to listen to each in turn and to learn what they have to teach us. But our Christian responsibility is different. It does not ask of us a partisan loyalty to Jesus Christ and a corresponding antipathy to all others, but only that we recognize the impossibility of having more than one Lord over us, and that we make up our minds whether or not Jesus Christ is Lord of our life.l^

This position calls for an either/or decision. It is accepting of truth from others aspects of man's experience but it is frankly confessional in its approach. Dr. Smart criticizes the philosophy underlying the religious educa­ tion of liberal Protestant churches as being non-Christian.

It has followed the lead of "religion-ln-general," an out­ growth of the application of the concepts and methods of

John Dewey and the religious educators who studied at his feet, on the one hand, and the liberal theological tradition within Protestantism, on the other. One of the progressive religious educators, Ernest Chave, for instance, states as recently as 19^7 that, the "Two great handicaps to the effective functioning of religion in the modern world are sectarianism and super naturalism. "-*-5 By this he means that

-^James D. Smart, The Teaching Ministry of the Church, p. 197.

■ ^ E r n e s t chave, A Functional Approach to Religious Education. p . v . 97 it is wrong for Christianity to maintain that it has a loyalty to Christ as the supreme source of truth, and it is an outmoded superstition to believe in a personal God. To

Chave, the only divinity man can find is a divinity within himself. Smart says that such a foundation for Protestant

Christian education, which was the dominant one until the

1940's in America, "involves, not a false teaching about

Jesus Christ, but rather a total removal of Jesus Christ from the center of the scene, putting, in place of him, an unlimited faith in the power of human reason to solve all problems.

H. Shelton Smith expresses his discouragement with what he called "the progressive wing of religious nurture" in 19^1, and issued his manifesto for a truly Christian education, centered in a personal response to Jesus Christ.

In Kierkegaardian fashion he asked for Christian education to restore integrity to the church by restoring Christ to the curriculum. This was not a return to fundamentalism.

He guarded against such an interpretation as he stated, "in saying that the Christian educators should present Christ as the ultimate truth about human existence, there is no thought of implying that any particular interpretation of JesUs is

Itself the absolute t r u t h . "17 1 -i zr 1 1 Smart, op. cit., p . 6 0 .

17smith, op. cit. . p. 114. 98

Dr. Iris Cully, writing recently, has further devel­ oped this approach to Christian education and compares it to the of "democratic living" which was so close to the heart of the progressive religious educators. She says:

Christian education accepts the norm of American culture, but cannot regard this as in an absolute light. Democracy is part of the Biblical heritage and stems from man's rela­ tionship to God, who created him in freedom. But the norm for Christian education is God Himself, made known in Jesus Christ. . . . The church's norm is found in a historical person, who is alike the present head and the hope for time and eternity.^

Dr. Cully, as Kierkegaard, grounds her faith in an historical event, an objective appearance of Jesus Christ in time. Yet, she likewise realizes that this Person can only be known subjectivity and existentially. The New

Testament account of his life must be interpreted as the witness of faithful persons who responded to a living reality. She recognizes the relativity and symbolic nature of many of the New Testament descriptions. Nevertheless,

Christian education must lead persons to a sense of encoun­ ter with this same event, with the person of Christ. The result of the education program of the church must not be detached observers or religious thinkers. The student must be and, in fact, needs to be "a participant," "... His

Iris Cully, The Dynamics of Christian Education. P. 23. 99

whole life is bound up in the response that he makes to

what he reads in the Gospels."*9

For good or for ill Kierkegaard's corrective has

reached present-day Christian education. As we study his

"decisively Christian" categories at more depth we shall

discern that his themes are present today in the writings

of many other philosophers of Christian education. These

persons are not as extreme in their positions as Kierke­

gaard appeared to be. Many of them have been inspired to

take their stands as a result of the influence of present-

day theologians rather than Kierkegaard himself. Yet it

becomes clear that their positions are in line with the

revolution which Kierkegaard started.^

The attempts to broaden Christian education to become

religious education, which took place in American liberal

Protestantism, have appeared to fail. The result was a

religion which emphasized the mediation of Christian

insights with those coming from the scientific studies of man. It was practical in that it was related to the prob­

lems of daily living, but it did not succeed in bringing persons to decisions concerning ultimate meanings. All decisions were tentative and operational. Primary com­ mitments were not addressed. The self, needing a unifying

loyalty, was left afloat in a sea of probability and

19Ibld.. p. 5 3 . 100 possibility. Existentially, the "Christian" found his com­ mitments, on Kierkegaard's aesthetic level, by "drifting" into a faith in America, Democracy, Science, material power, social position, or himself. The God relationship was weakened and generalized. It was the gradual discovery of this failure that caused Christian educators to re-evaluate and to reconstruct their approach along more existential lines. These reconstructions, nevertheless, have sought to maintain a respect for and active interest in religious education in its more universal and rational dimensions, as well as its inter-faith dimensions.

Evidence of this can be seen in the work of the

Religious Education Association in which most Protestant

Christian educational philosophers are actively engaged.

They participate with educators who are Roman Catholics,

Jews, and liberal humanists. They employ scientific methods in the study of the nature and effectiveness of religious loyalties and insights, especially in Relationship to our democratic society. It Is not the attempt of the present

Protestant educators, in their theological emphasis, to dis­ credit the scientific study of religion or the inter- discipline approaches which were so central twenty years ago. Religion A still is recognized as important, to use

Kierkegaard's terminology; but, Religion B, the sharing of the distinctive nature of the Christian faith, is seen to be necessary if human existiantial needs are to be met. 101

To return to Kierkegaard, it must be reiterated that he recognized the place of religious education but he was very critical of its ability to bring men to decisions which related them to God in any ultimate or absolute sense. Kierkegaard adroitly illustrated why the human self needed the sense of the ultimate and how the Christian faith could meet this need without falling into the error of Pf) absolutizing relative truths. His passion, then, was to convince men of their need for a genuine relationship to God as known through Christ, a relationship which called for a personal decision, an agonizing decision to leap beyond knowledge, to find God in their inner selves.

The remainder of Part II will have two major purposes:

(l) to interpret the meaning of Kierkegaard's basic existen­ tial approach to the study of the Individual as a dynamic self and to relate his concepts to contemporary Christian education, (2) to study Kierkegaard's understanding of the decisively Christian categories Into which each person should be inducted (beyond religiousness A) if he is to "become a

Christian," and to discern the meaning of these categories for present-day Protestant Christian education.

20 Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 355. CHAPTER VI

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS EXISTENTIAL SITUATION

Repeatedly Kierkegaard reminded his reader that his category was "the individual," or as he often said, "the existing individual. "■*■ Any religion or system of philosophy had to speak to the "conditions of individual existence" or it was not realistic or applicable. The individual could not appropriate general and abstract systems which were devised to serve all men. "... existence as a particular human being is not a pure existence; it is only man in general who exists in that manner which means that this entity does not exist at all. Existence is always something particular, the abstract does not exist. From this to draw the conclusion that the abstract is without validity is a misunderstanding. . . . "2 Kierkegaard realized full well that the power of abstract thinking was one of man's dis­ tinctive qualities; and he realized that such thinking he used himself to analyze the problems of human existence.1

Yet, he maintained that the answers to man's dilemmas could

Kierkegaard's analysis of his use of the category of the individual is found in his posthumously published work, The Point of View.

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. p. 294. 102 103 not be abstract answers, detached from the persons who give the answers.

Kierkegaard's analysis of the thinking process was considerably ahead of his time. Only in a more recent period after the influence of depth psychology pervaded our con­ cepts, have we come to agree with Kierkegaard when he said:

What is abstract thought? It is thought with­ out a thinker. . . . What is concrete thought? It is thought with a relation to a thinker, and to a definite particular something which is thought, existence giving to the existing thinker, thought, time, and p l a c e .3

Kierkegaard's summons to men to make way for the cate­ gory of the individual does not appear to be distinctive, at first glance. Kant, for instance, had struck a solid note for individualism, Many philosophers before him and after him had done the same. Kant's views may remind us of this individualism that was present in philosophy prior to Hegel.

Kant analyzed the enlightenment period by saying that its motto was, "Have the to use your own reason." He asked individuals to quit relying upon "tutelage"; to stop looking for direction from the self-appointed guardians of society (the pastors, physicians, lawyers, etc.). Reminding men that they were too fond of relying upon others and that the "leaders" were too anxious to keep them tied to their guardianship, Kant asked men to "try to go alone . . . the

3Ibld.. p. 296. 104 danger Is not so great, for by falling a few times [you] would finally learn to walk alone."4

Of course, there was the individualism of the Protes­ tant Reformation and the individualism of the Renaissance.

These moves toward self-realization and the sacredness of the individual's conscience, were being submerged in Kierke­ gaard’s day, however. The Established Church had fairly well eliminated individualism in faith and Hegelian Philoso­ phy had made the individual a transition point in a rational system.

Kierkegaard's individualism was related to his under­ standing of existence. He took into account the individual­ ism inherent in the aesthetic existence sphere (where the person revolts against the norm, in self-expression) or the ethical sphere (where the person thinks for himself and stands out ethically). It is the religious sphere, however, that the individual in his existence experiences the deepest dilemma. Religiously, man finds himself out of relation with God. He discovers a sense of separation from ultimate meaning, from a relationship of divine love. No attempt to prove the truth of this ultimate meaning, or to experience it mystically, or to find security in the dogmas or sacra­ ments of the Church will suffice. There is actually a mysterious difference and distance between man and God.

^, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 286. 105

This difference the honest person acknowledges in the pathos and suffering of his existence. Religious faith must meet these existential conditions under which man lives or it becomes inhuman rather than life-giving. Any attempt to rationalize the transcendence of God, or to synthesize it becomes deceiving and misleading. It is dishonest. Kierke­ gaard's existentialism faces the reality of man's situation.

His honesty is not unlike that of the logical positivists, the pragmatists, and, of course, the atheistic existential­ ist such as Heidegger and Sartre. Yet, his analysis of the human self in its existence and his answers to the existen­ tial dilemma are quite different. They are the answers of faith. They are religious answers.

Kierkegaard maintains that the ohly way the person can come to face his need and appropriate the answers of faith is as he stands alone before God. When the Individual is encompassed in the group he is in a most Illusory situa­ tion. "For where there are many, there is externality, and comparison, and Indulgence, and excuse and erosion.When the individual through faith stands before God, suddenly he enters a relationship in which his consciousness of his responsible self is reborn. He can no longer blame the crowd or compare himself to the low standards of society and feel good. Before God in faith he feels remorse. He

^Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart. p, 211. 106 feels guilty. He knows that he is responsible for himself and no one else.

Kierkegaard believes that remorse is a central char­ acteristic of the existing individual. It is a symbol of his spiritual nature and destiny. It is Ma rare gift from

God." Remorse, which leads to genuine confession, is the path to the establishment of the God-relationship, the high­ est and most meaningful relationship possible for the individual. The consciousness of God, the sense of the

Eternal, can give the individual the strength to face himself and his self-deceptiveness and return to responsible rela­ tionships^ in society. Kierkegaard saw the individual as the real change agent in society or in the church. Kierkegaard even went so far as to proclaim that the consciousness of being an individual is the avenue to awareness of God.

". . . this consciousness of being an individual is the primary consciousness in a man, which Is his eternal con- sciousness.

Kierkegaard was not Impervious to the fact that the

Individual becomes a person in social interaction, as he is often denounced for being. In the Concept of Dread his pseudonym says, "the whole race participates in the individ­ ual and the individual in the whole race (thus if an indi­ vidual could fall away wholly and entirely from the race his

6Ibid,, p. 193. 107 fall would at the same time determine the race in a differ­ ent way; if, however, an animal falls away from the species this would make no difference at all). . . . The perfecting of the individual in himself is at the same time, and in so doing the perfect participation in the whole."7 He sees the social nature of the self but he maintains the divine source of the self. Since the divine dimension is present the self can be most responsible and most human before God in faith.

V/e shall analyze these factors more thoroughly in the chap­ ter on the self.

The real issue for Kierkegaard is the unsatisfactory and dehumanizing character of , such as that in

Hegel or in the practices of the Hegelian influenced clergy in the Church of Denmark. Essentialism is all right for

God. Only He can know the ultimate, essential dimensions of truth. All may be homogeneous from God’s perspective.

The paradoxical elements may be unified for God. But, for man, the existential dimension is the condition which is valid. From man’s stance truth is heterogeneous. The para­ dox is as far as man's experience and his mind go. The process of dialectical thinking which leads to the paradox is important for man, however. It is necessary in his edu­ cation, in his decision-making within the social scene. Yet, it will not bring the Individual to a religious faith that reaches into the depths of the self.

^Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, p. 22. 108

Hegel's essentialism considered most of the human

problems of failure and error which Kierkegaard put into

bold relief. Paul Tillich says in his study of essential­

ism and existentialism that Hegel was not at all naive. He

did not believe that human beings could escape the negative

elements of existence. "He created concepts like "estrange­

ment1 and 'unhappy consciousness'; he made freedom the aim

of the universal process of existence; he even brought the

Christian paradox into the frame of his system. But he

kept all of these existential elements from undermining the

essentialist structure of his thought."® To Hegel it was mandatory to insist that man in his existence is what he is

in his essence; that man's reason is the avenue of receiving

God's revelation of Himself. Man is the "microcosmos in whom

the powers of the universe are united. . . . Education and

political organization will overcome the lags of existence behind essense."9 There is no gap between man and God.

There is no split-ness, only lag which can be overcome

through Reason which is God's way of actualizing Himself

and revealing his purposes. The dialectical process is the way reason will close the gap.

Karl Barth, in a very fair study of Hegel, says that

Hegel could have been a Protestant Aquinas if he had been ------°Paul T illich, The Theology of Culture. Vol. II, p. 24. 9Ibid., p. 23. 109 successful in the uniting of science and religion, objec­ tivity and subjectivity. He sought to identify human reason and God's wisdom so that man could gain a new self-confi­ dence. Man could be confident, that his thought and the things which were thought by himwsre the same. There was no split. Man could believe that his scientific pursuits would actually yield God's truth, to the glory of God and not man.10 In Hegel's system God needs man to realize His pur­ poses. Moreover, man's philosophizing would actually yield religious truth. Philosophy and religion explain each other. As Hegel said, "The idea of mind is this: to be the

Absolute Mind, that is to say, to be the unity of the divine and human nature. . . the unity of divine and human nature is not only significant in determining human nature, but equally so in determining divine nature."11

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierke­ gaard develops at length his criticisms of essentialism. He looks at the existing individual in his confusion, guilt, and indecisiveness. He reflects upon Hegel's descriptions of divine and human unity and he finds the descriptions either tragic or comic. The only way for the existing individual to be united with God is through faith which

10Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: Prom Rousseau to Ritschl, pp. 275-276.

11George W. Hegel, . Ill, p. 38. 110 goes beyond Reason. This faith must be absolute In Its devotion to God, not relative or tentative. Yet, this unity never takes place fully In this life, only In moments of decision.

. . . the absolute telos exists for the Individ­ ual only when he yields it an absolute devotion. And since an eternal is a telos for existing individuals, these two (the absolute end and the existing individual) cannot be con­ ceived as realizing a union in existence. . .12

Existentialism does not see the unity of human thought and divine wisdom in time. It does not see man understand­ ing anything absolute in time. In its atheistic forms it sees any interest in the absolute telos as metaphysical, and therefore without any certainty.

Of the contemporary theologians Paul Tillich has incorporated existentialist thought, into his system perhaps more than any other. His explanation of the difference between essentialism and existentialism is helpful. He says that the word "to exist" means "to stand out." Essential­ ism implies "to stand out" of essential being. This implies the Platonic "fall" from essential being (the highest good) to the state of existence which is actual being. Man, therefore, is living in a state of split-ness. God who can actualize his own potential is beyond the split and is in the essential state. According to Tillich, "Platonic and

Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 355. Ill

Christian evaluations of existence coincide.f<13 Tillich joins Kierkegaard in believing that man's existential situ­ ation is in a state of estrangement from his essential nature.

Man in his existential state, therefore, is passion­ ately desirous of answers to his sense of lostness, his lack of unity. He cannot be detached about his personal destiny.

He is involved emotionally in every effort to think about his own meaning. Tillich does not take a position quite as extreme as Kierkegaard, however. He achieves an existential­ ism which is actually in tune with Kierkegaard's best per­ spectives, but which Kierkegaard did not make clear (due to his passion to be a corrective). Tillich finds that "the essential nature of man is present in all stages of his development, although in existential distortion.Tillich also sees the need for both involvement and detachment in existential analysis. Without some detachment the cate­ gories of existential involvement could not be clearly dis­ cerned. ^-5 Tillich builds his theological system in response to man's existential plight which is beyond rationalization.

He states: "Existentialism has analyzed the 'old eon,' namely, the predicament of man and his world in the state of estrangement. In doing so, existentialism is the natural

^Tillid} op. cit. . Vol. II, p. 23.

l4Ibid.. p. 33. 15ibld. . p. 26. ally of Christianity. . . . It has helped to rediscover the

classical Christian interpretation of human existence."^

Kierkegaard was firm in his position that man would have to struggle and suffer in his attempt to continue his

relationship to God in faith. He would continually be

tempted to fall back to the aesthetic or ethical levels of

existence. Tillich calls all theologians to a similar

awareness. The theologian should use his best powers of reason to analyze man's existential questions. He should

look for these questions where man speaks most honestly--

in the popular language, great literature, art, philosophy,

in science and psychology, in myth and liturgy, in religious expressions arid present experiences. Yet, he should parti­ cipate as an existing individual in the human predicament.

He should be honest about his own finitude and anxiety, "as though he had never received the revelatory answer of

'eternity.'"17

Tillich's system of theology proposes to face hon­ estly man's estrangement in existence and to correlate the

"given" answers of the Christian faith. These answers can­ not be proved. They can, however, be discovered to be genuine answers only as they are lived, only as the person takes "the leap of faith" and relates himself to the Ulti­ mate through Christ. The measure of this faith is seen to be In terms of a person's "ultimate concerns." Anyone may say that he is ultimately concerned about a unity with God, but his real concerns may be on the aesthetic level. Faith is existential or It is only nominal and a fraud. Tillich recognizes that his method of correlation must be existen- tially achieved. It is not safe from distortion. The per­ son, in his human limitations, must struggle for the answers that make sense to him in his inwardness and pathos. This fact saves the Christian from the arrogant claim that he has revelatory answers at his disposal. Tillich, as was true of

Kierkegaard, is against all dogmas that pretend to encompass final truth. These dogmas should be studied and known, but only as symbols of a truth which is beyond them, eventhough to some degree in them. He views the scriptures in a similar way— very important symbolically, and yet objectively impor­ tant as the channel of and record of revelatory experiences.

Lewis Sherrill, one of the most significant modern philosophers of Christian education, has adapted Tillich's method of correlation and has termed it, the Principle of

Correspondence. In his provocative book, The Gift of Power, he has a chapter entitled "Predicament and Theme." He attempts to analyze the human predicament in its existential dimensions and to set forth the answers of the Christian faith, to which the Bible is a witness. Sherrill analyzes the sense of predicament as arising "out of the profound anxiety which we carry as human creatures in an existence 114

where every form of security tends to be threatened sooner

or later."^ Sheriill pushes his definition of predicament

to an existential level. Predicament is a deeper condition

than a human "need" or "problem." These terms are more

specific and can be tackled more pragmatically. A predica­

ment is a total experience of the self who cannot find basic

answers to the meaning of his existence, or the direction he

should take. "... a sense of predicament arises when we

face some profound issue in personal or social life and

begin to recognize that the solution of particular problems,

one by one, is getting us nowhere, or is even getting us in

deeper. This is the beginnirg of hopelessness and despair."^

Kierkegaard is seen to be correct. Faith is the answer to

the despair of the existing self.

Sherrill's concept of education within the church is greatly influenced by existential thought and categories.

He is in line with the confessional approach which Kierke­ gaard stimulated. Sherrill, with his principle of corres­ pondence, would encourage teachers and students to share their deeper problems of self-anxiety and loss of meaning, and dynamically refer to the great themes of the Bible and theology as answers of faith. Each theme, such as Creation,

Lordship, Vocation, Redemption, or Providence is in

Lewis Sherrill, The Gift of Power, p. 107.

1^Ibid.. p. 108. 115 correspondence to an actual human predicament. In the dynamic sharing of existential experiences and the use of the symbols of the faith, changes in the self of the person take place. These changes are seen to be happening as the person, the learner, is responding to the encounter with

God through faith, within the confessing community, the church. Such experiences can have a revelatory character.

Charles Johnson, a Christian educator who has been greatly influenced by Tillich, is a new voice, calling for an existential approach. A professor at Southern Methodist

University he was sought to show how the deeper problems of existence will not bow to the "problem solving" approach of the progressives in religious nurture. Such problems "can never be solved within the problematic situation itself; they must always find answers in symbols which are outside the existential scene. Much of the cparrel with progressive education, so evident in current theological discussions lies right at this point."20 Johnson confirms his faith in the need for existential analysis and in the validity of the method of correlation, developed by Tillich. He understands the task of Christian education to be that of bringing per­ sons into a living relationship with an "existing reality," with Jesus of Nazareth in whom, through faith, we can find

20N. F. Forsyth (ed.), The Minister and Christian Nurture. p. 76. 116 a unity with the eternal. It is not the goal of Christian education to look at the "whole of reality." This is a worthy enterprise, but it is not the goal of Christian education. Christian education should bring persons into a relationship with a particular event in history which can serve "as the criterion and norm for the judgment of experi­ ence and history." Christian education should center in the revelation in Christ which is true revelation only if the existing person appropriates it in all inwardness and honesty. Here Johnson puts forth a goal which is very much in harmony with Kierkegaardian religiousness B. Johnson sees the goal of Christian education in terms of decision.

"The question above all others, posed in Christian teaching is, 'What will you do with Jesus Christ? Are you faithful to him? Will you yield your will to his, not once but a multitude of times in life's daily decisions?"2**-

Such an approach almost sounds as if a return to fundamentalism were on the way in Protestant Christian edu­ cation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Decisive

Christian language is being used, but it is existentially employed. Those following this emphasis view literalism as a closed system in which relative expressions of faith are made into absolutes, where idolatry of the Bible or a cer­ tain doctrine, such as the Virgin Birth, is substituted for

21Ibid.. p. 7 2 . 117 a relationship with God, the true and absolute telos. The

subjectivity of the learner’s honest response to the

"givens" of the faith is protected. Manipulative responses

of affirmation concerning the truth of any , moreover, are viewed as unauthentic and coercive. Genuine

personal response is the goal of the new philosophy of

Christian education. Only in an approach which preserves

personal integrity can the revelatory experience take place.

Kierkegaard chastised the religionists of his day for teaching a Christianity which was based on humanistic found­ ations. He was witnessing a mediated Christianity which set . low goals for students, a "little by little" philosophy of growth. Kierkegaard asked for a higher goal, a direction of persons to the absolute way of faith ite God, absolute devotion to His Will, and absolute agape love of neighbors.

These goals were the only ones that would meet the individ­ ual in his existential predicaments. Kierkegaard said that

"it pleases his reverance to forget that he disposes of the conditions of existence as no human being has the right to do. He sets up a telos in time, and his entire teaching about is a doctrine of prudence."22

The existential dimension in Kierkegaard's thought has reached Christian education and is causing a revolution there just as it did in philosophy and theology. The concept

22Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 361. 1 1 8 of the existing individual as a religious person, however, does not come into full focus without an understanding of

Kierkegaard's concept of the self. As it was forecasted in the introduction, the nature of the self is fundamental to the understanding of the shift in modern religious thought. CHAPTER VII

THE INDIVIDUAL AS A SELF

It is through the dynamics of selfhood that Kierke­

gaard's religious categories of despair, sin, "the leap of

faith," salvation,et cetera find deep significance. The

self was conceived by Kierkegaard to be a wonderful gift

from God, as much of a proof as is possible that man has a

spiritual nature.1 He unfolds his concept of the self in

his aesthetic and ethical writings, but he does not give the

self clear spiritual stature until his religious period of

writing after his 1848 experience. One of the mofet profound

pieces of writing in all literature is his Sickness Unto

Death from which comes most of our understanding of his self concept.

Before going into an analysis of the dimensions of

the self, it may be helpful to relate the existentialist

approach to the concept of the self. Such a relationship is

indeed essential if we are to see the rationale for the validity of existential analysis, whether it be employed in

the fields of philosophy, theology or psychology. John

Hutchison's discussion is the most complete. I shall not

•^Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 31,

119 120

analyze his five methods of approach to truth (authority,

intuition, rational, empirical,, and existential)— although

it would be a worthy and fruitful enterprise. It will be clarifying, however, to share his summary of the discussion

of the existential approach. The existential method, he

states:

. . . may be described as a way of testing proposi­ tions by their comformity to facts encountered by human selves in active existence. It includes rationalism's test of coherence, since, in the life of the mind, logical implications and con­ tradictions are encountered facts. It includes also the sense data emphasized by empiricism, since these too are encountered in experience. But it is not limited to either of them, for it draws upon the wider range of experience given in the encounter of the whole human self with the world. . . . A fact is anything given in that encounter. Some facts will be easily appre­ hended and tested; others are obscure and hard to get at, and even harder to verify. These difficulties, however, do not excuse us from making the effort. Still less do they excuse the procrustean method of declaring them mean­ ingless or nonexistent.2

In the existential approach, then the nature of the self that encounters the world is most important. In

Kierkegaard's view of the self he starts with a fact of experience, an inner state of the self known as despair.

He knew despair intimately in his own life, but he had wrestled or struggled through his despair to a position of faith. Kierkegaard interpreted despair as a sign of man's relationship as a self to the eternal. The fact that only

2John Hutchison, Faith. Reason and Existence. P. 31. 121 man can fall into despair is, at once, God’s gift and his demand upon man.

The self, in Kierkegaard's thought, is a synthesis.

It is both finite and infinite. Any attempt to interpret the self in purely naturalistic terms (finite) will not be true to man's powers of self-transcendence. Any purely idealistic interpretation will fail to take into account the fact that man as a self has a biological and social base.

Despair is a symbol of the truth of the presence of both finite and infinite dimensions. Despair 3s a symbol of the self’s endeavor to resolve the tension between finite and infinite, to find a unity and a center, to find itself and to be. itself. Kierkegaard saw the only answer to despair

(or anxiety) to be faith in God. Man is not a full self until he is related in faith to God.3

The spiritual aspect of man is to be found in the nature of his self. ''The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast, and this advantage dis­ tinguishes him far more essentially than the erect posture, for it implies the infinite erectness or loftiness of being spirit. The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast; to be sharply observant of this sickness

3 ^Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, pp. 17-19 . 122

constitutes the Christians advantage over the natural man;

to be healed of this sickness is the Christian bliss."^

The self despairs in various ways. It despairs at

not willing to be itself but wanting to be someone else or

have another existential situation than the one it has. It

despairs at willing to be itself and finding that it cannot

realize the potential that is there. The self in its

spiritual dimensions, has the power to get outside or above itself and judge itself. The self is strangely, then, related to itself just as it is related to others. Kierke­ gaard saw clearly when modern psychology understands:

"Despair (or anxiety) is not something man can get rid of himself— by himself— only in relation can he rid himself of it, and only as he keeps the relationship." Kierkegaard knew from his own struggles that much of his despair was caused by the quality of his interpersonal relationships with his father and his early associates. I tried to establish this face in my analysis of his religious develop­ ment. He understood the social nature of the self— the fact that the resolving of despair is effected in relation­ ship. He merely refused to believe that human relationships by themselves were of such quality to heal the sickness of despair. ". . . despair is a qualification of spirit."5

^Ibid.. p. 20.

5Ibid.. p. 2 3 . 123

Man is a spiritual being who needs a relationship to God as

well as to man.

In Either/Or Kierkegaard describes two types of

despair— finite despair and absolute despair. He saw, again

from his own experience, that finite despair (the result of

inadequate and unhealthy early human relationships) could

greatly damage the self. In this situation the self, “the

inmost being does not undergo its transformation in despair;

. . . it shuts itself up, it is hardened, so that finally

despair is obduracy. . . ,"D Kierkegaard observed another

dimension of despair which he believed to be universal. He

called it absolute despair in his earlier writings. In

Sickness Unto Death he did not spend as much time on finite

despair. He was concerned primarily with the absolute

despair that was a blessing, the despair that led the self

to God.

Kierkegaard's analysis of the social dimensions of

self was profound and anticipated a modern school of psycho­

therapy which understands the self's deepest quest to be for

meaning. or ultimate significance, rather than for sexual

gratification, social position or power, or even for produc­

tive interpersonal relationships.7 Kierkegaard understood

6Elther/Or. Vol. II, p. 186. ^This movement is represented in America by Rallo May who edited a recent study of the thought of Existential analysts of this country and Europe. Kierkegaard is given a prominent place as the thinker who foretold the point of view of many psychiatrists and therapists today. The volume 124 that It requires "courage for a man to choose himself."

The self has a history of relationships with other individ­ uals, with the race or culture as a whole. The self "is the man he is only in consequence of his history.Every man who breaks out of the "dreaming innocence" of childhood and becomes aware of his self despairs that he is the self he is or that he is not the self he hopes he can become. The individual, in seeking to rid himself of despair, and to find himself, cannot relinquish anything in his past social conditioning,even the most painful. The only thing he can do is to repent I He must become responsible for himself and not continue to blame others for his despair. Where finite despair is apparent (and it is in every self to some degree) Tt is important to seek to create interpersonal relationships in honesty and forgiveness. Still repentance and forgiveness are the ways even to this degree of self unification. Kierkegaard again knew this from experience.

He sees that the self "repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God."9

Profoundly Kierkegaard proposes in Either/Or that the only way a child or youth can choose himself is to come is. Existence 7New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1958). See May's Introduction.

^Kierkegaard, Either/Or. Vol. II, p. 181.

9Ibid.. pp. 181-182. 125 to enough Insight to be able to repent of his father's faults.1 He must voluntarily repent of the guilt of the par­ ent or persons who may have burdened him, because "he only thus can choose himself. Kierkegaard continues, "it is my sincere conviction that it is a man's true salvation to despair."

Kierkegaard certainly understood that a person could have a "self of a sort" without a relationship to the divine.

It was an immediate self which can recognize itself as hav­ ing the same patterns and responses.H It is even possible for a person to push his despair down to the unconscious level and deny that it exists. In fact, that is the most common form of despair. The immediate man's mad quest for external experiences which will fulfill the self is the obvious evidence that despair is present and deep.^2 "Prop­ erly speaking, immediacy has no self, it does not recognize itself, so neither can it recognize itself again, it termin­ ates therefore preferably in the romantic. When immediacy despairs it possesses not even enough self to wish or dream that it had become what it did not become."13 This is the form of despair what Kierkegaard regarded as the most

1QIbid. . p. 182.

■^Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 89.

12Ibid. . pp. 32, 82.

■^ibid. . p. 84. 126 dangerous. It Is the despair of "not being in despair, that is, not being aware of it."

To be aware of despair is not a depressing thing, to

Kierkegaard. "It is not depressing; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man in the aspect of the highest demand made upon him, that he be a spirit . . . it i s n o exaggeration.Kierkegaard maintained that without understanding the spiritual nature of man, it is impossible to account adequately for all of the dimensions of despair in human existence. The way Kierkegaard analyzes this phenomenon of despair is a powerful illustration of the existential approach which John Hutchison discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

In Kierkegaard's understanding of the self the objective and subjective aspects of selfhood come into proper balance. The subject-object split, which has plagued western scientific studies of man, Is overcome. Kierkegaard sees the self as both subject and object, to itself. The self as subject can transcend itself and view Itself as object. This is the spiritual dimension. The self needs to have relationships as a subject with other subjects— both human and divine. To relate to other persons as objects only dehumanizes the self doing the relating and, of course, the self to whom the person is trying to relate. To relate to

57} Ibid. . p. 34. 127

God as an object Is sterile. It is for this reason that the

self, through faith, can be religious only if it takes "the

leap of faith" without proof, or without first trying to

objectify God In some fashion. To objectify man or God is

to falsify the essential nature of both! This analysis is

absolutely fundamental to the understanding of present day movements in philosophy, anthropology, existential psychol­

ogy and theology. The most significant contemporary thinker who represents this position is Martin Buber. While his

thought is distinctly different from that of Kierkegaard it

is important to link the two historically.

It may be said that Kierkegaard's understanding of the subjective nature of interpersonal relations built a

foundation for the "l-Thou" philosophy which has since developed in Buber's thought. Buber agrees with Kierkegaard that the self is not fully human without a relationship and a grounding in the divine. He posits the Eternal Thou in the life of each existing person. When the "I!! treats his neighbor as "Thou" he discovers that he becomes a "Thou" and finds the Eternal Thou in his experience. When he treats another in an "i-it" way, when he treats the other person as an "it," a thing, an object instead of a subject, he experiences "it-ness" within himself. He dehumanizes both himself and the other person, and he denies the .1^ Buber realizes Just how significant

Kierkegaard's thought is. He criticizes Kierkegaard never­

theless for over-emphasis upon the Single One, the emphasis

in Kierkegaard's thought which makes God too transcendent,

a telos which must be chosen by the self by an individual

"leap of faith" which often if not always negated human

relationships.-1^ There is no doubt that Kierkegaard's

sense of discontinuity between the human and divine elements was severe. Yet, as Buber admits, "no-one can so refute

Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard himself.nl7 Kierkegaard, as I have sought to illustrate in the study of his own self development, used the categories that he did in order to be a corrective, "an alarm." He brought his thought into balance with his understanding of the necessity for continu­ ing human relationships of "I-Thou" quality, not only in his admission that he could have remained with Regina "had I had faith. . . .," but in his understanding of his father's key role in his despair as well as his religious conversion, and in other ways. His recognition of the integrity of the religious dimensions of the self in religiousness A also reveals his sense of perspective. The leap beyond religious­ ness A is a leap beyond a line, rather than a leap across a

^Martin Buber, I and Thou, p. 3 f. ljjMartin Buber, Between Man and Man. p. 57.

•L7ibid.. p. 57. 129 gulf, in the interpretation of some, such as Walter Lowrie.^

Of course, it must be recognized that Karl Barth preferred

to take Kierkegaard's extreme positions more literally and made Christianity the only path to God. Natural revelation was a delusion, in his thinking. Lowrie interprets Kierke­ gaard as a thinker whose "ideal was truly humane." The either/or, from his perspective, was "either aesthetic immediacy, whether it be eudaemonistic search for pleasure, or despair, or religious or metaphysical self-explanation/or the ethical along with the religion of immanence and imme­ diacy and (as its culmination) Christianity apprehended as paradox.Such an interpretation, made by one of the most profound students of Kierkegaard is quite different from that of Martin Buber. In Lowrie's Interpretation Buber and

Kierkegaard are on the same side of the either/or.

Emil Brunner, a close associate of Karl Barth in the early days of the Theological Renaissance in Europe but who later broke with him over the extreme transcendence of his position, has sought to correct the popular interpretation of Kierkegaard as one who rejects the human element in the

■^Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Lowrie's introduction, p. XIX. It must be made quite clear at this point that Kierkegaard believed in a qualitative difference between.God and Man. This difference was not altered by the decision to cross the line between Religion A and Christianity. A "leap" was necessary because it had to be a decision which went all the way. It was not experimental.

19Ibid.. p. XIX. 130 development of the religious self. Brunner says, “The

'Thou' as the theme of anthropology and philosophy dates from Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence, though in the narrower sense only since Buber and Ebner. . . ."20

Kierkegaard understood that to choose yourself was an ethical choice. The ethical always moves, in his mind, toward the religious and is almost always accompanied by a religious dimension, or orientation to some supreme purppse beyond the self. The self chooses itself in relationship to this center of devotion outside of itself. In modern thought, ErichFromm has supported this view. In his The

Sane Society, he seeks to give evidence that man must have, in order to be fully human or sane (along with the fulfill­ ment of the basic physical and emotional needs), a religious or philosophical orientation outside of himself. This supreme purpose brings out the best in the human self and provides a needed pointof reference and meaning.21

Yet, to Kierkegaard the ethical dimension and the religiousness A that often accompanied it was not passion­ ate, not absolute enough to give the self its fully unity and release the full spiritual power that was there. The self that chose itself ethically could and would tend to fall back into despair and live on the immediate, aesthetic 20 Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt. p. 23. Also, see his Christianity and Civilization, p. lSb for another analysis of this fact. p *1 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, p. 66. level. The ethical and religious dimensions of religious­ ness A were too couched in probability, too inclined toward the objective. True unity of the self was achieved in a passionate decision to leap beyond probability to the abso­ lute faith in God, a faith that was appropriated as a sub­ jective relationship of love for God as The Subject.

Christ's revelation of God's love, which could not be objectively proved, was the avenue that the self could take.

It was a relationship with God through Christ that had as a concomitant a relationship with God's other children in love and trust. The I-Thou relationship is evident in Kierke­ gaard's Works of Love. Buber presupposes the metaphysical reality of love. Kierkegaard also presupposes the existence of love and God in the other person. "No man can lay the foundation of love in another man's heart; nevertheless, love is the foundation, and one can only build on that foundation; hence one can only edify by presupposing love.

Take love away, then there is nothing which edifies, and no one who is edified."22 It must be underscored that for

Kierkegaard, it was his rapprochement with his father which opened the way for the conviction which he expressed later

— that "God is love," the Archimedean point upon which he built his life, and through which he unified his divided self. To Kierkegaard this love from God is before every­ thing, is the foundation of everything, and "abides when all

22Kierkegaard, Works of Love. p. 181. 132 else Is done away with."23 Kierkegaard insists upon main­ taining the transcendence of God and his love. Yet, he definitely does not deny His immanence. Without immanence the self could not experience the divine and therefore could not become a fully unified, spiritual self.

Kierkegaard understands the self in dynamic terms.

The self is never static. The self is always in process, always becoming something. Kierkegaard sees the self as free in its becoming. Freedom is symbolized by man's capacity to choose. He sees all ’'becoming" as the result of the choice or lack of choice (drifting) of the self.

"All becoming takes place within freedom, not by neces­ sity."2^ The issue for the individual self, then, is what does he choose to become. In terms of the Christian faith, the central concern is not how to be. a Christian but how to become one. The self cannot make Itself become Christian but it can choose to surrender to God's love in Christ, and

God will take the initiative and guide the process. Kierke gaard's category for this guidance was his category of

Governance, a quality of providence in which God's love becomes operative in the believer's life. Yet, how this happens is a mystery, and man can discern the presence of

23Ibld.. p. 182. pii Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 61. ' 133

God in his life only as he reflects backwards upon his decisions.

The choosing of a faith relationship to God in Christ was never a "once and for all" affair. It was something that the self had to repeat again and again. In every crisis of the self, the decision must be renewed. The self was always "becoming" in life's choices, never actually there. The categories of "decision" and "struggle" were essential in leading the Christian life. All rewards were a by-product of these choices and struggles and not the reason for them. The faith, then, was one of integrity where the self responds to the love of God In Christ for no other reason than for the nature of the quality of the relationship itself. To have faith for any other reasons would be to make God an object, and to use him rather than to love him.^5 category of the Moment, then, becomes

Important to Kierkegaard. The Moment of choice, the Mopient of faith is its own reward. It is the Moment when God's will and love are revealed anew to the believer.2 The revelation is not merely mystical. It is realized in choices that affect the existential elements in the man's life. Religious faith is very practical.

25Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life, p. 21.

2^Kierkegaard, Fragments. p. 51. Theologically in America Reinhold Niebuhr has fol­

lowed Kierkegaard's analysis of the self. He finds the

quality of self-transcendence to be the basis for man's

spiritual nature, as well as his discrete individuality.2?

Niebuhr seeks to show why the purely naturalistic or ideal­

istic interpretations of the self are inadequate. He

differs basically with the social theory of the self of

George H. Mead and John Dewey, for instance. He agrees with

then to a point, however. The self is. a product of social

interaction, but it is much more than that. It has a basic

spiritual which guarantees freedom of the self.

Without this innate freedom the self would be only the

result of the internalization of past social interaction.

There is too much evidence of a capacity within the self to

transcend past conditioning. This evidence cannot be

ignored.2®

The spiritual concept of the self has increasingly

replaced the purely social concept in the philosophy of most

contemporary Christian educators. James D. Smart, Reuel

Howe, Iris Cully, Randolph Crump Miller, Howard Grimes,

Charles Johnson, and D. Campbell Wyckoff would agree

^Educationally, Dr. Robert Ulich proftundly develops the concept of self-transcendence in his, The Human Career. A Philosophy of Self-transcendence. pQ °Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man. Vol. I, p. 55 f. 135

essentially with the interpretations of the late Lewis

Sherrill of Union Seminary in New York. Sherill's earlier books, Guilt and Redemption and The Struggle of the Soul.

were built upon a solid understanding of depth psychology

and theology, and analyzed the crises in human development

which called for answers far deeper than the "social self"

philosophers were able to give. His final book, The Gift

of Power, specifically is based upon an analysis of self­ hood— how in the Christian religion the self can be pre­ pared to receive in faith "an interior spiritual power

sufficient to enable [him] to cope with the gift of exter­

ior physical power which has been granted." Sherrill, believing that modern man has lost himself in his immediacy,

joins Kierkegaard and modern theologians such as the

Niebuhrs, Qnil Brunner and others in asking for a recogni­ tion of the fact that the human self is much more than a function of a biological organism.

Sherrill analyzes the self as "vital," with an inter­ action between soma and psyche; as capable of determining its own destiny; as conscious of being itself; and as self- transcending. The later characteristic is a key quality in man's capacity for and response to a religious education.

Reflecting a view very similar to Kierkegaard's, Sherrill says, "... self-transcendence means that the human crea­ ture, who is in nature and subject to nature, is able also at the same time to transcend nature. He dwells in the finite world of nature which cradles him. And yet he dwells also in a realm of spirit.11^ Sherrill's analysis finds the selfhood of man a counterpart of the selfhood which is

God and an answer to it. The self of man is a being which is, that is, it is ontologically real and its essence pre­ cedes its existence. This position is again in tune with

Kierkegaard's religious existentialism. This basic ground­ ing of the self in is not developed into a syfetem, but is posited as basic presupposition, making possible communication between the ground of Being, God, and the existing being, the self. The Self of God, then, can be conceived to be in interaction with the self of man. This interaction takes place within the faith community. It can take place anywhere, actually; but within the faith commun­ ity the self of the person is given the possibility of self- development and self-understanding in an accepting personal environment— the Body of Christ, the Church. "When man as a personal being knows himself as "I" he is then able to enter consciously into a relationship with the infinite

Personal Being who is God. . . . Who is within man, and who yet is also infinitely beyond man. . . ."30 Sherrill's thought reflects elements of Kierkegaard and Buber. His use of existential analysis in understanding the nature of "the

2^Lewis Sherrill, The Gift of Power, p. 10.

3°Ibld.. pp. 16, 17. 137 existing self" (in its particular moments of crisis), and

"the potential self" (the self in terms of what it may become), reflects Kierkegaard. His faith in the I-Thou relationship within the community of faith reflects Buber's positions.

It must be observed that in studying the self con­ cepts of most of the Christian educators the credit for the subjective understanding of the self goes to Buber.31 Also, the redemptive nature of I-Thou relationships within the community, the church, is seen to be more promising than the individual decision to take the "leap of faith." Modern

Christian educators seem too inclined to identify the faith dimension with the church-community. Kierkegaard's individ­ ualism is a dimension which must not be lost, or the individ­ ual self will tend to be dependent upon a group context for his encounter with the Eternal. This would be immanence of the worst kind, from Kierkegaard's perspective. And yet, it is true that Kierkegaard saw the social nature of the self, and in his better moments, he made clear his faith in the presence of Eternal love within each person, a love which would respond to love from the faithful self. Nevertheless, to Kierkegaard there would always be a "fallen" dimension in these human relationships— within or outside of the church.

Buber accounts for this dimension in his category of "1-it" relationships. Kierkegaard uses the category of sin.

3lReuel Howe, Man's Need and God's Action, p. 113j and Howard Grimes, The Church Redemptive, p. 26. CHAPTER VIII

THE INDIVIDUAL AS A SINNER

The concept of man as a sinner Is repellent to most educators as it is to most laymen. Certainly within the writings of professional religious educators during the first third of this century the concept of sin was almost never used, except negatively. Following the guidance given by general educational theorists, religious educators

saw the human being in naturalistic terms. Many, such as one of the central leaders, Harrison Sackett Elliott, pre­ ferred to be known as "naturalistic theists."1 These leaders, including George Albert Coe, William Bower, George

Herbert Betts, Ernest Chave and others, were dedicated to the social theory of the self, and could see no validity for a concept of sin. Man became what he became as a result of the unique reaction that he had to his experiences in his environment. The goal of religious education was to sur­ round man with creative opportunities to experience the most health-giving climate of trust, love, and understanding. It was also a primary goal to make it possible for the self to learn by acting upon his environment, by reconstructing and changing the expressions of the religious life. An immense

■J-Mary Frances Thelen, Man as Sinner, p. 38.

138- 139 confidence in man's intelligence and in his innate ability to solve his own problems was in evidence. Elliott, in

19^0, rejected outright the Christian doctrine of sin. He relates the emphasis upon sin in the theological Renaissance to the authoritarian nature of the church, and particularly to the German and Lutheran background of the followers of

Barth.^ He believes that the concept of sin is psychologi­ cally harmful and also lacking in confirmation from research in the psychological, sociological, and anthropological fields. He remains firm in his belief that intelligence can channel the egoistic strivings of men and finally put the

"will to power” within men to good use.3

Yet, this optimism was greatly damaged by World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. Man does not seem to be able to do the "right" thing, even for himself, just because he has received a progresslvereligious or general education.

More recent religious educators have a place in their thought for sin. This fact makes Kierkegaard's understand­ ing of the nature of sin particularly meaningful, especially in view of the fact that his interpretation has new dimen­ sions which are being found to be salutary today.

Reinhold Niebuhr has encouraged contemporary thinkers to return to Kierkegaard. He says, "Kierkegaard's analysis

^Harrison S. Elliott, Can Religious Education be Christian? p. 162.

3Ibid., p. 215. 140 of the relation of anxiety to sin is the profoundest in

Christian thought."2* He agrees with Kierkegaard that the spiritual nature of the self (which is finite and infinite, or possessing both necessity and freedom) makes anxiety inevitable. "Anxiety is the precondition of sin. It is the inevitable spiritual state of man. . . .

Kierkegaard says in the Concept of Dread. "Anxiety is the psychological condition which precedes sin. It is so near, so fearfully near to sin, and yet it is not the explanation for sin."^ Paul Tillich gives Kierkegaard credit for bringing a new dimension to the concept of sin.

He says that, "Through Kierkegaard the word has become a central concept of existentialism. It expresses the awareness of being finite, of being a mixture of being and non-being, or of being threatened by non-being."7 The concept of sin is returning to Christian thought as a reality; yet, it is not literal but symbolic.

TTllich gives a needed sense of perspective as he asks theologians to emphasize the "positive valuation of man in his essential nature." Theology must, for instance,

"join classical in protecting man's created

**Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man.Vol.I. p. 182.

3Ibid.. p. 182.

^Kierkegaard, Concept of Dread, p. 89.

7paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Vol. II. 141

goodness against naturalistic and existentialistic denials

of his goodness and dignity. At the same time, theology

should reinterpret the doctrine of original sin by showing

man's existential self-estrangement and by using the help­

ful existentialist analysis of the human predicament. In

doing so, it must develop a realistic doctrine of man, in

which the ethical and the tragic element in his self­

estrangement are balanced."® Tillich says that we need to

replace the term "original sin" but that the condition is real, if properly interpreted.

Man in his anxiety is tempted to grasp security by making "himself existentially the center of himself and his world." This inner condition Tillich calls, Hubris. which

is a "self-elevation of man into the sphere of the divine."9

Man, then, falls into Concupiscence which is the attempt to guarantee his security by seeking to draw the whole world

unto himself (eat it, drink it, experience every sensation

in it, etc.).

Kierkegaard has been a central, but not the only

source of Tillich's interpretations^ as well as for

Rienhold Niebuhr's, both of whom have vastly influenced con­ temporary Christian educators. Now to Kierkegaard himself.

8Ibid., p. 39.

^Ibid.. p. 50.

10Ibid.. pp. 51-53. 142

The most mature Interpretation of the condition of

sin is to be found in his Sickness Unto Death. His concept of anxiety which is a precondition to sin we have already discussed in the previous chapter/ and by inference in the writings of Niebuhr and Tillich. Dread, or anxiety, is both the way to sin and it is the way to salvation] It is a con­ comitant of a spiritual self, and will eventually lead the person to seek the true center and ground of his life, God.

In terms of education, Kierkegaard correctly noted that the Socratic explanation of evil as lack of knowledge will not hold up before the facts. "... Christianly understood, sin lies in the will, not in the intellect; and this corruption of the will goes well beyond the conscious­ ness of the individual,"-^ The freeing of intelligence which the progressive general and religious educators desired will not conquer the evil in man. Universally, man is in the condition of knowing the right thing to do for the good of all, but doing the opposite] This is his existen­ tial situation of self-estrangement and estrangement from his brothers. Many who are in a state of sin (of un-faith) are unaware of it. To Kierkegaard the reason for this sense of ignorance of sin is because sin is only identified as such when man is before God. Therefore, sin is a posi­ tion, a position before God. The individual does not feel

Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 155. 143 •that he is in sin when he is before his fellowmen. When

the individual self in despair (and in his strivings to

conquer despair in concupiscence) measures himself by his

associates, he does not experience a sense of sin. But,

when he, through faith, finally stands before God and meas­

ures himself by the absolute pattern, Christ, he knows he is

in sinj He knows that most of the time he is seeking to play God. He knows that his inner self is crippled without

a true center in His Creator.^2 Kierkegaard then defines

sin in this way. "Sin is: before God in despair not to

will to be oneself, or before God in despair to will to be oneself."13

Faith is, to Kierkegaard, that inner condition where

the "self in being itself and in willing to be itself is

grounded transparently in God."lz* The role of the Church is

to help men to come before God in Christ so that they will

have a "consciousness of sin," so that they will realize

their need for God in Christ and respond freely in faith.

This faith will bring the individual self to a new inner

unity, to a center which is not transitory but eternal. It

is for this reason that Kierkegaard understands that the

center must be absolute. He would be very quick to add

12Ibid.. p. 129.

13lbid.. p. 130.

14Ibid.. p. 130. 144 that all human descriptions of this absolute must be viewed as relative, and the believer must orient himself relatively to relative ends just as he must orient himself absolutely to the absolute telos. Now let us see if the concept of sin as Kierkegaard understood it can be found in the writings of our Christian educators.

Contemporary Protestant educators are being inspired by the writings of Dr. Reuel Howe, who is the initiator of an approach to Christian education which is called "the language of relationships." He identifies in most sensitive ways how relationships between persons seem always to reach the dimension of alienation and separation. The universal cry of human beings is for restoration of their relation­ ships of alienation to those of trust and loving acceptance.

He portrays the sense of separation which men most charac­ teristically feel toward God as well as other persons. His desire is for the church to be the community in which the

Person of God can meet persons in need so that they will, through faith, be related to Him and each other.

Howe's approach is very much like Buber's "I-Thou" approach, but he places man's dilemma within the framework of sin. He says, "We can understand this sin as being our assertion that we are sufficient of ourselves, that we do not need relationship with God and man. Even more, our anxious seeking for our own being keeps us from finding 145 our being in Him and in our relations with one another.

Essentially Howe's use of the concept of sin is one of position, as Kierkegaard developed it. Our sin is seen as our lack of standing before God, our deliberate or "drift­ ing*' separation from His love. The purpose of Christian education in the church is to witness to the atonement in

Christ, or as he expresses it, the "at-one-ment" with God and each other that Christ's love on the Cross has drama­ tized ft>r those who will receive its deep meaning. Each person within the church who will receive this gift of restoration of relationship with God (a new centering in

God in faith) is then in a position to be an Instrument of reconciliation to other persons in their moments of separa­ tion. Such an approach incorporates the understanding of sin that Kierkegaard and contemporary theologians have made vital to their thought, but it tempers Kierkegaard's indi­ vidualism with the sense of community in Buber.

The curriculum materials of the Presbyterians and

Episcopalians, both of which have been developed during the period of the theological Renaissance, reflect a strong sense of community but also an attempt to breathe new mean­ ing into the basic and decisively Christian categories such as sin, creation, redemption, etc. A general movement in this direction is most evident in the statements of the

•^Reuel Howe, Man's Need and God's Action, p. 33 . 146

curriculum committees of the National Council of Churches

as well as denominational groups and leaders.

D. Campbell Wyckoff of Princeton Theological Seminary

speaks for this trend when he asks Christian education to

be centered in the Gospel itself, in the good news that in

Christ man's separation from himself and God has been and

can be reconciled. Wyckoff conceives of the educational

work of the church to be (1) the sharing of the message

that in man's situation of estrangement God has acted in

forgiveness and redeeming power in Christ, and that he con­

tinues to act within persons, (2) helping persons outside

and inside the Church to respond in faith, (3) showing them

how to respond, (4) helping persons work out the fullness of

the implications of the Gospel for themselves and the world.

Wyckoff understands the Gospel to be the clue to the meaning

of history, the meaning of existence, the dynamic presence

of God in human life, and the reason for the church's exis­

tence. If persons in the church do not teach and seek to be

instruments of the Gospel message (not judgmentally but with

conviction) they can have no integrity, and the church will not fulfill its meaning and function in human society.

Such a strong shift in emphasis by such a responsible

leader, a shift away from the naturalistic of the

■^D. Campbell Wyckoff, The Gospel and Christian Edu­ cation. pp. 98-108. progressive leaders in religious education, cannot be taken lightly. The "decisively Christian categories" are in contemporary Christian thought in a new, non-literalistic but, none the less, realistic sense. A new awareness of the inner condition of human sin, which Kierkegaard, Barth,

Brunner, Niebuhr and Tillich have made convincingly real, must be seen as a fundamental cause for a return to the decisive Christian categories. CHAPTER IX

THE INDIVIDUAL AND HIS GOD RELATIONSHIP IN CHRIST

Man’s need for a God relationship is the basic pre­ supposition for all religious discussion. It is also the underlying reason why man is a "theological animal," why he is incurably religious.'1'

Kierkegaard recognized in his own existential strug­ gle just how much he needed, with an absolute inner cer­ tainty, a sense of relationship with a personal God of Love.

This subjective faith-response was to him the true Archimedlan point. In his analysis of the spiritual nature of the self he sought to illustrate the absolute need of the self for a point of unity and security to which it could give itself and thereby discover itself. Kierkegaard observed that the self in its despair (or deep anxiety) would find some absolute around which to build. The issue was precisely:

What absolute?

Kierkegaard discerned what modern day theologians are echoing. If the self does not find an absolute unity and security in an absolute relationship to the true source of

■^See Walter H. Clark, The Psychology of Religion. p. ^19. This need is being "confirmed by empirical find­ ings." 149

Its being (the Ground of Being, God), the self will tend to find a false or abortive security and sense of meaning in false Gods such as the state, the family, science, pleasure seeking, or in any number of vain strivings for completeness which the self attempts when it puts itself at the center.

The inexorable question is: Will man put his faith in the true God or will he succumb to idolatry? In Kierke- gaardian language, will the Individual continue to speculate about the question until he drifts (aesthetically) or falls

(ethically) Into idolatry; or, will the individual think his way through to the Paradox and decide to take "the .leap of faith" beyond knowledge to an absolute relationship with the true Source of his Being?

In his Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard states in more philosophical terms just how idolatry can be effected even within the fellowship of believers, the Church. He says that God is God only for the individual in his sense of contemporaneousness with Christ. The third party, a child growing up among the faithful, for Instance, always p makes the contemporary his God. In other words, parents or other important persons become God substitutes for those who have not as yet acted decisively in their relationship to the Ultimate. This observation is psychologically and religiously defensible. The only way, then, for the

- Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments. p. 85. 150

individual to escape some form of idolatry (even faith in

sacraments or dogmas) is for him to be led to see that all

relative ends, all human attempts to capture the ultimate

truth, fail. The individual must be led to the Paradox: man's need for God and his inability to find God through

Reason. Then he must be asked to view passionately, sub-

Jectively his need for an answer. The answer of the Chris­

tian faith is shared in a first hand sense. The individual

as a "first hand disciple" must decide to make "the leap of

faith" or not to make it.

The objective question, whether Jesus of Nazareth did

or did not live, whether he was or was not the God-man in

history, becomes secondary. The real question is the sub­

jective one. Can the individual find Christ to be the path

to an absolute relationship to God? This is not to say that

the objective questions are unimportant and that they should not be studied by Christians. It is to say that results of the studies will not materially affect the individual's

response to the image of Christ that is found in the scrip­ tures and within the lives of faithful persons with whom he comes into relationships of trust.

Kierkegaard set up a vigorous standard. The individ­

ual must relate himself to God existentially or not at allj3

If the person wants a God relationship along with other

^Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. P. 352. 151

"good things of life" such as "a good living, a pretty wife, health, a social position on a level with an alderman," he

does not understand the true nature of the God relation­

ship.^ "If the idea of eternal happiness does not transform

his existence absolutely, he does not stand related to it;

if there is anything he is not willing to give up for its

sake, the relationship is not there."5 God is God. There

is only one God. Man cannot be faithful to both God and mammon. The purity of the heart of the individual is measured by his singleness of heart: his desire to "will

one thing"— to love God absolutely and to obey his leading by loving his children absolutely. This does not mean per­ fectly. Kierkegaard was no perfectionist. Yet, he under­

stood the extreme ease with which the self in anxiety could be tempted to worship "other Gods." Purity of heart is a matter of will, it is to be seen as a direction, an honest , . 6 desire.

Kierkegaard believed that the religious man would be empowered to be different. If his relationship to God in faith was his highest telos. he would be able to relate to others in their sickness and poverty (as Christ did)— while the aesthetic man would have little awareness of or inter­ est in their plight. The religious man could not be a spectator in life's problematical situations. He would be

” 4Ibld.. p.' 351. 5ibid. • P. 352.

^Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, p. 31. 152 a participant, an instrument of God's peace. The aesthetic man, in his immediacy, is always prone to be a spectator in regard to the serious matters of life. He is a participant only in the matters of self-gratification. The religious man is against fate and believes God can bring changes while the aesthetic man is inclined to see all men, great and small, equally exposed to the blows of fate. He is without hope. The man of faith is willing to hope and, further, he is willing to suffer for the changes which God is seeking to bring about through him (even as Christ did).? The God relationship must be operative in man's existence if it is to be real.8

Nevertheless, it must be admitted, according to

Kierkegaard, that human beings are in a dilemma concerning their relationship to God. They cannot prove God exists (or as Kierkegaard Insisted, that God is in his Ultimate Being).9

While science and philosophy can give evidence of God's

^Through his pseudonym, Kierkegaard discusses these coalitions of belief and unbelief in The Stages. pp. 415-423. Q See For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself. for the fact that the life of faith is observable, pp. 42,43. 9 This is a key concept in Kierkegaard's thought which has been misunderstood. Tillich has used this concept; namely, that God does not exist. He is beyond existence and is the Ground of Being from which all that does exist comes. For Kierkegaard God existed only when He became man. Tillich makes this a cardinal point in his theology. God became man and conquered man's estrangement in the fullness of time. 153

existence, of his orderliness or his design, these arguments

are impersonal and will not give man the faith to make ‘'the

leap,"*1'0 Man's only course of action, therefore, is to

posit God, But, the moment the postulate is no longer out­

side him, and he lives in it (through an act of faith), then

and only then does it cease to be a postulate for him and

becomes a reality,11 While the latter was said very early

in Kierkegaardfe pilgrimage it remained his basic assumption.

The individual could appropriate a relationship with God

that was more than an abstraction only within the faith

relationship.

Once he had taken "the leap of faith," once he had

responded to the Christ (the absolute Paradox), he was in a

position for God to be his Teacher, Kierkegaard interpreted

this relationship in terms of the contemporaneous Christ

who, in faith, was God teaching men as individuals. The

believer through the New Testament picture of Christ should

allow the God-man to be his teacher in faith. To study the

scriptures critically had its place in Religiousness A, but

this approach would not bring a faithful relationship to

God. God could teach man only within a relationship of

faith. Kierkegaard couches the whole inner experience of the believer in terms of a relationship to God as his Teacher.

10Kierkegaard, Journals. pp. 182, 186.

11Ibid.. p. 16. 154

When the disciple stands before Christ, God made man, as the Teacher he realizes that he is in error or in bondage.

The Teacher offers the truth which frees man from bondage to self, and the conditions for accepting the truth— the response of faith and "the leap" which is an act of the whole personality. Once he has had the faith to leap he becomes aware suddenly that he is different, that he is changed within his self. He is "a new creature." Then and then only can he know what the differences really are between the old being and the new. Then he can apprehend that this experience can actually be called Conversion.12

Kierkegaard continues his analysis by saying that there is a certain sense of sadness about leaving the old being, of taking leave consciously of old values and ways of living. This sadness can be called Repentance. The Teacher who opens the way to this movement "from non-being to being," this Teacher who has been the occasion (as all teachers should be) for this new birth may be called not a

Teacher but a Saviour, a Redeemer. In a real sense His relationship to the disciple (the learner) atones for the disciple's past Error or unfaith and the inner guilt that he has concerning it. The disciple feels restored and for­ given. This relationship can only happen in the Moment which is The Fullness of Time. The divine Teacher comes ip Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 12, 13. 155 when the disciple has been prepared, when he is ready for the encounter in faith. Human teachers can witness to this meeting but they cannot play God. They cannot be the'

Teacher. Also, such a meeting cannot take place en masse.

". . . it is not possible to be born anew en masse.

This relationship must be a conscious one. "in the

Moment man becomes conscious that he is born; for his ante­ cedent state, to which he may not cling, was one of non- being. In the Moment man also becomes conscious of the new birth, for his antecedent state was one of non-being. Had his preceding state in either instance been one of being, the Moment would not have received decisive significance for him. . . ."1^

God the Teacher is moved by love for the learner so much that He is willing to do what all teachers must do.

He is willing to come to a point of equality with the learner. The learner, man, does not think that this is possible] He does not think he deserves such a great sacri­ fice, but he forgets or does not know how much the Teacher is motivated out of love for him. Man and God are unlike

(even though man was created in God's image), due to man's individual and existential centering of himself in himself

(Sin), The absolute Paradox of God as a Teacher in Christ is this: That God who is not like man, out of love

I3Ibld.. p. 14. 14Ibid.. p. 15. Hto make himself like the individual man, so that he might

understand him fully."Yet, man in his sin cannot be

expected to recognize this fact. He must be taught that he

is in a state of unlikeness, that he is in a state of sin

(of centering in self). Kierkegaard concludes that this is

part of the Absolute Paradox— "negatively by revealing the

absolute unlikeness of sin, positively by proposing to do 1 fi away with the absolute unlikeness in absolute likeness.'

The human teacher (Kierkegaard saw himself in this

role) was interpreted to be "a forerunner" of the Teacher,

God through Christ. "Such a forerunner may then serve to

arouse the learner's attention, but nothing more."1? The human teacher can prepare the way, can witness to the pos­

sibility of the encounter with the divine Teacher, can

stand with the learner in love and trust. The learner, the

first hand disciple, must decide what he wants to learn, whether he wants to be taught, and be willing to struggle

inwardly to make the decision "to leap," to receive, to be teachable at the loving Hands of God.

Whether or not this position is valid, it must be agreed by all that Kierkegaard has written profoundly and beautifully about the possibility of the individual as a spiritual self allowing God to enter his life as Teacher,

15Ibid.. pp. 21-37. l6Ibid., p. 37. 1?Ibld.. p. M2. and thus as Saviour. Of extreme significance is the fact that the role of the human teacher becomes quite different from that which it is usually conceived to be. The nature of the teaching community, the church, is by inference one of faithful witnessing to the power of God to bring man into a new relationship with Himself and to unite the human self in the true center and Ground of Being. It must be admitted quickly that Kierkegaard's criticism of the Estab­ lished Church caused him not to delineate a clear conception of the nature and role of the church. It may have been this criticism that stimulated him to Interpret true faith so individually, at times almost eliminating the possibility of God's love reaching the individual within the community TO of believers or within the family setting. ° I have sought to give evidence that Kierkegaard did have, in his own life and in his writings, a belief in the immanence of God in human personality. Yet, it must be clearly stated that he tended to emphasize the absolute demand for an individual decision (conscious) to transcend all previous teaching and conditioning, to let God through Christ be the true Teacher.

There is a very great element of truth in what Kierkegaard says regarding individual response. Yet, his understanding of the importance of love in interpersonal human relationships ------T. H. Croxall, Kierkegaard Commentary, p. 8. The author defends Kierkegaard's individualism, asking how can society be changed except through individuals? 158

must never be overlooked, or interpreted to be other than

under the Governance of this same divine Teacher, the

source of all Being.

It is also to be emphasized at this point that

Kierkegaard understood deeply that the ordinary person, hav­

ing been led by the human teacher to confront the Christ in

all of his honest hum ility, poverty, likeness, and yet power,

would either be greatly attracted to him or exceedingly

offended by h i m . T h e offense is part of the honest strug­ gle of the self to believe that God really cares, really

wants to teach the individual the way of absolute faith and

love. Kierkegaard criticized the Established Church so

soundly because the clergy had glossed over the offense and had emphasized only Christ in his exaltation and not in his

hum iliation on the cross or in his rejection by the important

and proper people of his time. Kierkegaard felt that the

contemporaneous C hrist would shock most "faith fu l1' C hris­

tians and perhaps cause them to be honest and reject C hrist, on or to repent and to enter a new relationship.

Kierkegaard never forgot his difference of opinion with rationalism and returned to the battle often. He

■^Kierkegaard, Training in C hristianity, p. I f . "Blessed is the man who really sees Christ and is not offended by Him." pn ^T his theme runs through many of his w ritings, particularly, Training In C hristianity, and Attack Upon Christendom . reminded "his readers" that for a long time "we men, from generation to generation, have been . . . educated in accordance with man's conception of what it is to be a man. 21 Behold therefore what we lack. . . Christ gave man a new image of what man could be and become. The early con­ temporaries of Christ caught the image, but slowly genera­ tion after generation, the image was clouded over and almost lost. Men began to measure themselves by each other but continued to say that they were faithful to Christ's image.

With considerable sensitivity Kierkegaard seemed to under­ stand that most "Christians" actually did not realize that they were not followers of Christ. It was for this reason that Kierkegaard asked men to become first hand disciples, rather than second h a n d . 32 jt appears that his cry "of alarm" concerning this situation, and the "twaddle" that was being taught as Christianity, is appropriate to our time as much as to his— if hot more so. Our modern theolo­ gians have made similar judgments. Our Christian educators are waking up to the fact that Christianity has not often been taught, in its wholeness and integrity, in modern

Protestantism. It Is a sharp sense of awareness of this situation which has prompted many present-day theologians

on Kierkegaard, For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself. p . 105. O p Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments. See ChapterIV, P.44. 160 and educators to listen to Kierkegaard’s witness— pointed and extreme as it is.

Returning to our analysis of the shift in present-day

Christian education, it is significant to note that the followers of Dewey such as George Albert Coe and Harrison

S. Elliott centered their theories primarily in man and his social relationships. The concept of God was almost com­ pletely naturalistic and immanent, a situation not dissimi­ lar to the rationalism of Kierkegaard's time. In defense of these leaders, they Interpreted their theories to be cen­ tered in God. The issue, according to Elliott is: How is

God experienced?2^ q 0Q answered this question in this way.

He believed, in his more mature writings, that . . the deepening of personal life (which Is social), and the deep­ ening of our faith in God, must take place at the same point, and through the same process." Coe, in all good faith, could center his religious education in the social concerns of man because the solutions to these concerns oh indicate to him God's activity among men. Group approaches to religious education were encouraged over emphasis upon individual decision. Christlike character development was the goal rather than a personal conversion. The God

23Harrison S. Elliott, Can Religious Education be Christian? p . 275.

2^George A. Coe, What is Christian Education? p. 268. 161

relationship in Coe's thought seemed fuzzy, and often was

not verbalized with clarity or distinctiveness.

Such^ prevailing condition among liberal Protestant

churches caused Wilfred Evans Powell, H. Shelton Smith and

others to protest. Powell criticized the quality of

Christian education in 1934 because it had little sense of

the reality of God. "God seems sometimes to be not so much

a metaphysical reality as a sort of symbol for the deepest,

most truly shared, and most unselfishly motivated aspects

of social experience." He sought for Christian education to

lift "all of life to the level of a conscious relationship

to God," which would give men the inner power to be change

factors in the social scene.

Following H. Shelton Smith's challenge in 1941 a

great amount of soul searching took place within Christian

education cricles. One of the educators who became most

vocal in his interpretation of the "theological phase" of

the movement was Randolph Crump Miller, Professor at Yale

University Divinity School. His philosophy of Christian

Education was promulgated in his 1950 publication, The Clue

to Christian Education. In this book he asked for a new

definition of the purpose of Christian education. He high­

lighted the need for a sound theological foundation for

Christian education, but he refused to let theology itself

Wilfred E. Powell', Education for Life with God. pp. 47-51. 162 become the center of the curriculum In Protestant churches.

"The center of the curriculum is a twofold relationship between God and the learner. The curriculum is both God- centered and experience centered."2^ The task of Christian education is not to teach theology but to use honest theo­

logical presuppositions to help the learner to interpret the meaning of his experiences and help him come into a rela­ tionship with his Creator through faith— "in the fellowship

of the Church." Dr. M iller recognized the danger of indoc­ trination and the emphasis upon dry content at the expense

of dynamic C hristian growth. He m aintained that safeguards could be employed which would correct the previous weaknesses

of the progressive approach and also prevent the confessional approach from becoming authoritarian.

M iller made the revelation in Christ the path to a decisive faith in God. Previous curriculum approaches had viewed C hrist as a "good man" or as a divine person who was detached from human experience. M iller returned to the

Christ concept— the God-man who has conquered man's situa­ tion of separation from others and God. Christ was a man just as Socrates or Buddha, but through faith he became God in human form. The C hristian claim is "that God was in

Jesus in a unique way, and so we say Jesus was 'God

^ R a n d o l p h Crump Miller, The Clue to Christian Education, p . 5. 163

incarnate,' God in humanity, God in the flesh. It is a

paradox, with only a hyphen between God-man to help us."27

In a later book Miller says, "The Gospels reflect the

faith of the Church that Jesus is the Christ. When the

Gospels are read in faith, we also see him as the Messiah,

the son of God, the Word made flesh. We cannot prove it.

All we can prove is that the essence of the belief of the

early Church was that Jesus was their Savior."2®

The confessional approach to Christian education was greatly stimulated by the work of H. Richard Niebuhr who

sought to illustrate the subjective nature of the self and

its loyalties. He wrote a brief but most discerning and

influential volume in 1941, The Meaning of Revelation, which

defined how the response to Christ had to be within the

faith community in order to be revelatory and decisive for

life situations. Niebuhr understands revelation to be an

experience of the individual Christian within his faith com­ munity. It is an event (Christ's revelation) in the inner history of the self just as it is an event of the inner history of the faith community. The church remembers the event and it continues to be revelatory, through faith. It

is frankly confessional because of our limited standpoint in history and our lack of knowledge or proof. The Christian

27Ibld.. p. 24. oo Randolph Crump Miller, Biblical Theology and Christian Education, p . 92. 164 confesses what has happened to him in the faith community, how he came to believe, how he reasons about things. He does not judge others. He only confesses why he Is judged by Christ In his own life, and why he is fulfilled in

C hrist. "Christian theology must begin today with revela­ tion because it knows that men cannot think about God save as historic, communal beings and save as believers. It must ask what revelation means for Christians rather than what it ought to mean for all men, everywhere," Niebuhr concludes.2^

This prospective, as well as other efforts of Impor­ tant theologians to whom we have already alluded, gave

Christian educators such as Miller the confidence to write,

"The purpose of Christian Education is that everyone should acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord, and thus glorify God the

Father. . . . The starting point for Christian education is the realization that the historical Jesus is the Christ, that we come into communion with God through faith in him.

. . ."30 Thj_s theme seems to pervade the thinking of the most able Christian educators. Using Tillich's existential analysis and his method of correlation, Charles H. Johnson

n. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, pp. 40-42. Also see, John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought. Press, 195& for a more recent assessment.

^Miller, op. cit.. p. 94. This statement makes sense when interpreted in terms of the faith community which remembers within its inner history, the event of Christ's revelation and allows that event to be repeated in faith.

v interprets the process of Christian education to be an

activity which takes place within the faith community, a

process where the biblical witness to the revelation is

repeated. The witnessing community prepares the individual

by helping him face his existential situation, his anxiety

and his guilt, his need for an absolute center for his being,

his Inability to find such a center through Reason, and his

need for Revelation. Within this community of faith the

Individual participates in the "new reality in Christ" and

is brought to the point of decision concerning the meaning

of Christ's revelation for his l i f e . 3^ This is not a once

and for all decision, but must be made again, existentially,

in each decision that confronts the person in his daily

l i f e . 32 As Kierkegaard said, these decisions are avenues of

God's presence within the self of the individual. The capacity to choose in freedom is a sign of man's spiritual nature.

The shift in Protestant Christian education is evident

in the writing of most of the professors in our most dis­ tinguished institutions of theological education. As we have noted already Professor Wyckoff at Princeton is perhaps

31 Charles H. Johnson, The Minister and Christian. edited by N. F. Forsyth.

Kierkegaard believed this deeply. The element of struggle was always present. See Postscript, p. 411. In Christian Education literature this point of view is also found in Lewis Sherrill's, The Struggle of the Soul (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951). the most thorough-going of the Christian education philoso­ phers. Putting a stress on the tremendous power of the cultural situation to educate the individual, he calls attention to the fact that the ultimate loyalties of those in the faith community, the Church members, must be centered in God through Christ or there will be nothing distinctive about the education in the church over that which the child receives in the wider community. The church should be the

Church. It should educate growing persons to confront them­ selves and God through the Gospel,^3 Such a position is the flowering of Kierkegaard's call for an authentic education within the Church, for a facing of the contemporaneous

Christ, in all honesty and simplicity. If the growing per­ son has not had the experience of meeting Christ through faith in the Church, he has not received a Christian educa­ tion. Such an education is not oblivious to the insights that may come from other sources, religious and secular, but is seeking to meet the deeper needs of the existing self for a Center and Source of meaning. This is Christian education in Its mature form. It is education for religious­ ness B, in Kierkegaardian language. It Is education in the decisively Christian categories. It is preparation for encounter with God, The Teacher, in Christ.

D. Campbell Wyckoff, The Gospel and Christian Education, p. 112. The essential difference between Kierkegaard's

approach and that of modern Christian educators in the con­

fessional school is: Modern approaches have a stronger

doctrine of the Church (the way God works in and through the

lives of his children) than is to be found in Kierkegaard.

While contemporary Christian educators see the necessity for

decision on the part of the self before God they see more

clearly that the person may encounter God as he encounters

other persons in their trust and concern. The faith com­

munity becomes the Body of Christ, a community at the head

of which is the spirit of Christ, the members of which become

potential channels of God's revelation of H i m s e l f . 3^ As

Paul Tillich has said, "Christ is not Christ without the

C h u r c h . Kierkegaard did not attack directly the problem

of the nature of the Church and the responsibility which it

had to bring the existing individual into a personal rela­

tionship with God through Christ. His criticism of the

failures of the Church, however, did infer a concept of the

Church which is not out of tune with the confessional

approach. Nevertheless, the approach itself cannot be credited to Kierkegaard. Yet, without Kierkegaard's under­

standing of the existential dimension the confessional

3^Howard Grimes, The Church Redemptive, pp. 14-16.

25paul Tillich, Systematic Theology. Vol. II, p. 180. 168

approach as we know It presently, could not have evolved In

the way that It did.

Lewis Sherrill's interpretation of the God relation­

ship within the fellowship of believers is representative.

Using the concept of the spiritual dimension of the self

(ruach, pneuma, spirltus) he finds real being in God and man united in spirit. The spiritual dimension is an "aspect

of man's being and nature which corresponds to an aspect of

God's being and nature, so making communication between them possible through a medium common to both." In this way it

is possible better to grasp the concept that "God is within man yet not identical . with him. He is unutterably beyond man, and yet not separated from man by an absolute other­ ness. "3° Sherrill's corrective to Kierkegaard contains

several insights which Kierkegaard had, if we view his total writings in relationship to his life, but he did not dedi­ cate himself to the task of clarifying the way God moves through human personality. He was more concerned about making clear the fact that our conception of God, which we receive as a by-product of our relationships with human beings and the nature of the true God as revealed In Christ, are usually very different. Therefore, the existing self must free himself from the illusions which he has received within the family and community setting (including the

3°Lewis Sherrill, The Gift of Power. p. 12. 169 faith community) and yet confirm the truth that has come through these relationships* This truth, of course, must be found to be true as measured by Christ's life, after the individual has decided to follow that life absolutely.

Kierkegaard understood God to be personal but not in an anthropomorphic sense. Seeing God as the Source of

Being, he could have fallen into an impersonal description of God. Yet, his understanding of the nature of the self, of the nature of the existential condition of persons, made it mandatory for him to retain a personal quality in his God concept. Tillich, who is often accused of having an imper­ sonal God concept, understands the need for a personal God.

Nevertheless, he says that the symbol of a personal God is absolutely fundamental because the existential relation is a person-to-person relation. "Man cannot be ultimately con­ cerned about anything that is less than personal. . . ."37

Tillich is true to Kierkegaard in such an interpretation.

Tillich continues to clarify the concept when he says that a personal God "does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal. ..."

Admitting that the concept of a personal God is confusing

(because it implies a person above the world and not a God with universal participation), Tillich, nevertheless,

37Tillich, op. c it. . Vol. I, p. 244. 170 believes it Is an essential description of man*s relation­ ship to the Source of his Being. Such a clarification is helpful in answering the criticisms of progressive religious educators (Chave's criticism, for instance) that a "personal God" concept is superstitious and out-moded. PART III

THE MEANING AND INFLUENCE OF KIERKEGAARD'S THOUGHT

IN REGARD TO THE METHODS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION

It is now clear that Kierkegaard was exceedingly

interested in the Christian education of the individual.

Who is to be responsible for this education and how it is to be accomplished is not so clear. Kierkegaard was often so involved in solving his own inner problems that he saw life in one-to-one relationships rather than in terms of the responsibility of a group or an institution for the growth of the individual. All real responsibility is an individual matter. When the serious responsibility of teaching Chris­ tianity is evaluated it must be done in relation to individ­ ual clergymen, individual theological professors, individual lay teachers or parents. This passion for focusing upon the individual and his honest witnessing to the truth has made

Kierkegaard's thought wonderfully sharp, but at the same time not as easy to adapt to the group situation or to the teaching agent, the institutional church. This fact is evident as we study the methods of Christian education which

Kierkegaard thought to be most effective.

171 172

All methods of teaching were to be employed by indi­ vidual teachers in relation to individual learners.

Communication was a person-to-person affair. And yet,

Kierkegaard understood the individual's deep need for com­ munity. He knew this primarily out of his own suffering, his own need for personal relationships and his difficulty in opening his life to others. The church as a teaching- learning fellowship of believers was not too well developed in his thought. Only by inference is it possible to dis­ cover this dimension to his thought. Yet, in his criticisms of the Established Church it is possible to infer his long­ ing for a genuine fellowship within which the individual's integrity and responsibility would be preserved. Occasion­ ally he was more direct in this regard. In his Journals he writes:

There are after all few men equal to bearing the Protestant view of life, and if it 3s really to be a source of strength to the average man it must either constitute itself into a smaller community . . . or become more like Catholicism, so as in both cases to promote a Communal bear­ ing on the burden of life in society, which only the most gifted individuals can afford to be without.1

It is interesting to note that both of the directions which Kierkegaard thought important can be found in contem­ porary Protestantism. There is a much stronger doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ on earth, a traditionally

■^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 57. 173

Catholic concept. There is also a very strong movement within the Protestant church to create small, dynamic com­ munities of believers within the framework of large congre­ gations. Attention to the individual is much more possible.

Hie contemporary Protestant church is an example, in its worst form, of the indecisive, vaculating, mediating, gener­ alized church of Kierkegaard's description. On its growing edge the contemporary church is Juc^gfrig itself and seeking to correct itself very much in line with Kierkegaard's observa­ tions. This trend has been traced throughout our study and will continue to be evaluated as we analyze the methods of

Christian education. The leaders of Protestantism today are committed to the necessity of the teaching church; and their writings are from the viewpoint of the church as a witness­ ing community. To this extent Kierkegaard would rejoice.

He could not rejoice, however, at the gap between the theories of theologians (including the philosophers of

Christian education) and the actual quality of church life.

When we study Kierkegaard's interpretation of methods we must keep in mind his individual stance and infer its meaning for the teaching church. When we study contemporary methods of Christian education we must remember that they are written at a time when the doctrine of the church as an authentic community of believers is central. CHAPTER X

THE ROLE OP THE TEACHER

According to Kierkegaard the human teacher of

Christianity is in a dangerous position. He has a great responsibility to be an instrument of God's love as he relates to the growing individuals under his care. It is through him that children, youth or adults come to an under­ standing of what it means to be or become a Christian. In order for the teacher of Christianity to be effective he must lead the student to the point of faith in the divine

Teacher. The human teacher, as we have already discovered in the Philosophical Fragments and The Concluding Unscien­ tific Postscript, is a forerunner, a preparer of the way, for the true Teacher, God in Christ. The human teacher, then, is a witness to the meaning of the absolute relation­ ship to the divine Teacher, a meaning which he must know existentially and not theoretically.

Kierkegaard was inclined to caricature teachers of

Christianity. He allowed a bit of his hostility to slip out in this respect. To be sure, he had experienced the results of their teaching and he had enough evidence to convict them of trying to be objective about something that

17^ 175 could only be subjective— a man's ultimate faith. Kierke­ gaard refers to the teachers of Christianity as the False

Knights of faith. In his early aesthetic writings he asserted: "The False readily betrays him­ self by his proficiency in guiding. . . . He does not com­ prehend what it is all about. . . . The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and therein lies his deep humanity. . . ,1,1 The official teachers of Christianity were given to mediating and synthesizing the faith. They loved to seek to prove the historically objective source of the faith in the scriptures. They were inclined to be detached and speculative. Therefore, it was Kierkegaard's early belief that a teacher could not bring a person to the decisive Moment of faith.

Later, he developed the theme, particularly In his

Training in Christianity, that the human teacher could be a witness and had to be a witness to the truth in order for the individual to be prepared to meet the real Teacher. The teacher's role was always seen to be a very sensitive one.

He must guard against mis-using his position and manipulat­ ing the learner. He must always allow the individual to be a free agent, who in his Inner struggle had to work out his own salvation in fear and trembling. As Niebuhr and Beach declare, "Rightly or wrongly, Kierkegaard saw the issues of

^■Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 122. 176 the moral and religious life in terms of which kind of inner enthusiasm and passion a man might let rule his life. Every man had to overcome his own world, and all that one man could do for another was not to overcome it for him, but free him by the indirection of compassion, love, mercy, and even thought, to the high honor of facing the choice. . . ."

The teacher should teach in such a way that the individual would respond personally at the existential level. The teacher who “guides" his students to the proper definitions and gets his students to memorize the correct answers is not teaching Christianity.

If the individual is to remain free to choose, he must be helped to understand that the teacher is interested in his inner, essential self in its integrity rather than in any outward conformity to the theories of the teacher.

Kierkegaard interpreted Socrates' physical unattractiveness as a blessing because his disciples were attracted to his approach to truth rather than to him. The teacher and the student should be united in respect but not at the level of intimate friendship.3 Friendship makes the teacher too involved with the student's situation so that he may be inclined to save the student the inner anguish which comes

2H. Richard Niebuhr and Waldo Beach, . p. 421.

^Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p. 121. 177 from facing his own deep need, his own consciousness of sin.

There should be distance enough between the teacher and the

student for each to remain an existing Individual In truth

and reality.^* If the teacher were to spare the student the despair and struggle that comes with facing his own sin he must be prepared to accept the responsibility for keep­

ing the student from meeting the true Teacher, to whom the

student must go If he is to find a unifying center, the absolute God of Love, for his divided self.

Kierkegaard was very careful to delimit the Influence of the human teacher. Nevertheless, he wanted the teacher always related In integrity to the content of his teaching.

He understood the teacher of Christianity to be important to his teaching. The Hegelians had tried to make the teaching (the Ideas) more important than the teacher. In their interpretation of Christ, for instance, they had sought to divorce Christ's teachings from the historical teacher (in his honest existence as a poor rabbi in an obscure country). The Hegelian teachers had made Christ's teachings so abstract and speculative that they failed to lead the learner to any realistic encounter with the Christ in his historical setting, in his contemporaneousness. The humble, humiliated Christ was mediated to the level of the exalted Christ, a part of the eternal system of ultimate truth.

^Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, p. 307. 178

Kierkegaard declares In opposition to this kind of teaching, "Wherever It Is the case that the teacher Is essentially involved In the teaching, there is a reduplica­ tion. Reduplication consists In the fact that the teacher is a part of it. . . ,"5 This follows consistently Kierke­ gaard's Insistence that all thought must he related to a thinkerJ

The teacher must be completely honest about his own struggles to become a Christian. In his witnessing he should not be tempted to claim too much or to fall into the aesthetic or ethical "existence spheres" as he shares his faith. Kierkegaard perceptively put his finger on the most sensitive spot when it comes to witnessing to a religious commitment. He observed correctly that there is a sense In which a person cannot share his relationship to God without perverting it. Witnessing is seen to be a painful experi­ ence. To a real degree we must conceal the depths of our experience, our faith and our inner sin. If we share our relationship with God in the wrong way we will succumb to the temptation to gain personal reward and praise (aesthetic level) or by making universal and general something that is so very particular and personal (ethical level).^ In a sense, in order for the relationship to be authentic it must

5lbld.. p. 123. 6 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 133. 179 remain unspoken. This does not preclude the genuine pos­

sibility that true witnessing can take place in the

existential reconstruction of the life of the teacher. The

relationship of the teacher to the student then becomes the

deepest form of witnessing to the falth-relationship to God

in Christ.

The teacher of Christianity should admit that he is

not a true Christian in the New Testament sense, but that he is seeking to become one. He is a first hand disciple,

learning from Christ, the true Teacher. He invites others, his students, to become first hand disciples and become

Christians with him. It is granted that neither the human teacher nor his disciples will ever arrive at being Chris­ tians in this life, but they will always be in process.

This is dynamic. It is realistic. Yet, it provides for

Moments of new being. Moments of absolute certainty. Each new decision in life is an occasion to be taught by God or to drift into idolatry. The struggle is on as long as deci­ sions must be made. The Christian faith must be exlsten- tially appropriated or it is only a form without meaning.

Anyone who practices the faith as an empty form is making

God a ’’fool" everytime he goes to a service of worship.7

^Kierkegaard, The Attack on Christendom., p. 85. 180

In the Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard describes the way the human teacher may be a witness. The human teacher’s goal is to help the disciple come before the

Paradox, to meet the contemporaneous Christ. The human teacher can do this by witnessing to the content of the

Biblical revelation. He may do this by centering his teach­ ing in the Biblical context in which it took place and to which the Biblical writers witness. He asks the learner to approach this moving, Christ-centered content existentially, as one who would be meeting the contemporaneous Christ in all reality. The teacher should help the student encounter

Christ in all of his attraction and his offense. The stu­ dent should develop a sense of inner awareness of estrange­ ment from this Christ, and yet he should be led to see some­ thing of the meaning of commitment to him. It is clearly at this point that the life of the teacher is as important as his words.

Kierkegaard gives a test to the teacher, "if the testimony is what it ought to be, namely the testimony of a believer, it will give occasion for precisely the same of aroused attention as the witness himself has experienced. . . ."8 jf this ambiguity and this aroused attention (calling for a decision) are not present, the teaching is done by an historian or a philosopher— one of

^Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 8 8 . 181

whom Is presenting Information about Christ and the

religious life, the other of whom is mediating the Paradox

away. Both fail to arouse the learner existentially in terms

of a faith response.9

The approach of the teacher of Christianity should be

that of wonder rather than doubt. Kierkegaard agreed with

Aristotle that the proper starting place for philosophy was

wonder rather than doubt, the latter of which was the case in

the Denmark of his day. Wonder will stimulate the learner

to ask deep questions just as much as doubt, but it will not

lead him to doubt himself and his own ground of being in

order to think.'1'0 Doubt is not even appropriate, in a full­

blown sense, for education in religiousness A, which is

noted for employing it in its comparative and objective

analyses. Doubt is certainly not the effective starting

place for the teacher of Christianity. Wonder is the posi­

tive approach to learning. Doubt is the negative. The

approach of wonder accompanies very well two other quali­

ties which have great teaching power. The teacher will be more effective if he is genuinely enthusiastic (in that his teaching reflects his deepest inner loyalties and enthusi­ asms) and if he is loving in his relationships with the

9 I b i d .

10Kierkegaard, Journals. pp. 89, 91. 182

learner (in that he desires the learner to find himself and 11 come to decisions that are authentic).

Finally, the teacher of Christianity should lift up

the Absolute telos. and guard against absolutizing any rela

tlve ends. He should help the student to be discerning at

this point— even as the teacher must be. Walter Lowrie has been most helpful in his discussion of this problem in

Protestantism. He reminds us that Luther's conception of the sanctity of the secular calling was criticized by

Kierkegaard. Luther's conception, which appears to be noble and worthy, has actually encouraged Protestants to identify relative ethics with the absolute telos. To put it the other way, the absolute was seen to be expressed concretely in the relative. The result of this has been the particular relative ethic (such as drinking, smoking, slave holding, capitalism, etcetera) has been defended as absolute. This has led to the teaching of moralisms in

Protestantism and has greatly weakened the witness of the faith to the existing man who has been repelled in honesty by such audacity of assumption.^-2 It is therefore most important that Kierkegaard's principle be followed by the teacher of Christianity: "To comport oneself at the same time absolutely with regard to the absolute telos and

■^Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart. p. 6 7 .

12Lowrie, op. clt. . p. 3 3 2 . 183 relatively with regard to the relative."^3 jn order to

keep from doing the opposite the teacher must remain

dialectical. To overlook the dialectical factor is to

fall into mediation. All the truths of Christianity become

much too demonstrative. The faith becomes, curiously

enough, not a faith but a part of a higher wisdom. The mystery of the absolute Paradox is resolved. But in so

resolving the mystery we pervert the truth of the absolute

telos which is the true center of meaning.^

Recent writings in the field of Christian education have almost been unanimous in their interpretation of the role of the teacher as a witness. This is rather convinc­ ing evidence of the effectiveness of the efforts of con­ temporary theologians to put new meaning into all termin­ ology. These theologians, as we have seen, have drawn heavily upon Kierkegaard whose existential posture gave the

"decisively Christian categories" new dimensions of meaning.

The concept of a witness is a dramatic case in point. Not very long ago in liberal Protestant churches the term'Wit­ ness" would have conjured up images of fundamentalism.

Today the concept has new non-literalistlc connotations.

Even a defender of the progressive religious educational phil osophers has incorporated the concept into his thinking.

•^Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. P. 3^7. lZiIbid., p. 385. 184

Dr. Harry C. Munro, one of the veteran Christian edu­ cators in America, seeks to balance the democratic and social theory of George Albert Coe and others with the more recent emphasis upon encounter with and response to the person of Christ. He interprets Christian education in terms of witnessing to the meaning of the encounter with

God through Christ in a community of faith which is thor­ oughly democratic and non-authoritarian. To witness, in his thinking, is what it means to be a Protestant. He declares:

The very word 'Protestant,' in its root mean­ ing, further emphasizes this personal and unique experience of each individual as essential Christianity. From the Latin verb 'testari' (to affirm; to aver, to testify, to bear witness), and the prefix 'pro' (for) the meaning 'to testify for1 or 'to bear witness on behalf of! is clear. A Protestant is one who has a testimony to give, a witness to bear. He has an inner experience of God, uniquely his own. to affirm, to witness to, to share with others.^

Munro further believes that such an attitude is con­ firmed by scientific studies of religious experience such as those made by Dr. Gordon Allport who reports, "The con­ clusion we came to is that the subjective religious atti­ tude of every individual is, in both its essential and non- essential features, unlike that of any other individual

. . . uniformity of product is impossible."1^

^Harry C. Munro, Protefetant Nurture, p. 3 5 ,

ADGordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion. pp. 2 6 , 2 7 . Most of the leading contemporary Christian educators are extending the concept of the teacher as a witness to include every professing Christian. In this approach the entire membership of the faith community is participating in both teaching and learning. The motto is "the whole church teaching and the whole church learning." Witnessing to the existential meaning of faith, rather than seeking to prove or rationalize the faith, is the center of the life of the church. Dr. Howard Grimes has been a strong advocate of the teaching church where each person is understood to be a part of the Body of Christ, accepting the role of a witness, taking responsibility for nurturing others within the fellow­ ship. ■*■7 This must be done, as he states existentially and not theoretically. It is frankly confessional. It does not maintain that the church is the only medium through which

God works. Such an approach allows the church to be the church, a faith community nurturing persons to come to personal faith.18

The teacher of Christianity is seen as one who pre­ pares the way for "divine-human encounter." This is language coming from finil Brunner,^9 but the idea is not too far from Kierkegaard's understanding of allowing God to become

1^Howard Grimes, The Church Redemptive, p. 16.

•^Ibid. . p. 18.

19Emil Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter. one's Teacher. As Professor Charles Johnson says, "The witness of faith speaks to the condition of the human soul, to help make it ready and ahle to reach out with its ques­ tions to Him who stands ready to answ e r ."20 Johnson's entire approach to Christian education is couched in the method of correlation which Tillich has developed. The role of the teacher is to help the student share his existential questions concerning the deeper meaning and significance of his life, questions which are so profound that rational proof is Impossible to offer as answers. The teacher helps the learner, through dialogue, to confront the Biblical answers of faith— In a dynamic, honest witnessing to the existential meaning of the faith answers. Biblical symbols are employed, is avoided. All absolutiz­ ing of relative explanations of the revelation in Christ is guarded against. The teacher must never seek to manipulate the results of his work. He surrenders the results to the

"grace of God." Tfte major factor in teaching is for the teacher to live a life which witnesses to the learner that the faith is authentic. "This Is a witness of changed lives and self-fulfillment through a new relationship to

God in Christ."2:L

PO Charles Johnson, The Minister and Christian Nur­ ture . edited by N. P. Forsyth, p. 30.

2!lris Cully, The Dynamics of Christian Education. P. 30. Kierkegaard's extreme sensitivity to the real pit­ falls to witnessing (the real possibility for it to degen­ erate into aesthetic reward or ethical generality) is an important corrective to put forth upon the present scene.

Also, his understanding of the need for and, in fact, foundational nature of religiousness A, must be added as a corrective to those who would be tempted to prove the

"truth" of any Christian position merely because an entire faith community witnesses to the truth of it.22 Such a development would make Christianity again into a terrible center of superstition, which Kierkegaard himself understood and stated in the Postscript,23 Scientific analysis and sound reason should be used to protect the believer from absolutizing any relative end. Yet to witness to the necessity of an absolute relationship to a God of Love is the heart of Christian teaching.

22 Reinhold Niebuhr cautions us to interpret Kierke­ gaard in a way which will preserve the search for coherence along with the recognition of the inobherent nature of much of human experience. See, "Coherence, Incoherence, and the Christian Faith," The Journal of Religion. Vol. XXXI, p. 163.

23Kierkegaard, Postscript. p. 385. CHAPTER XI

TEACHING: METHODS OF COMMUNICATION

The goal of Christian education, as in all education, is change. In Christian education the goal might be expressed as a deep change of the self in its inner being, a continual becoming like unto Christ. The question before the teacher of Christianity is: How does this change come about?

Modern educational theorists especially have inter­ preted the educational process in terms of change, and have related this change to the individual's experiences both past and present. Experience, and reflection upon its mean­ ings, becomes the real teacher. According to a dominant educational philosophy, education is the conscious recon­ struction of experience in terms of the specific problems which are confronting the individual in his on-going-ness, in his growth and self-realization as these ends are related to his life with other individuals.1 Man learns as he acts in an environment which makes demands upon him to act in one way or another, in order to proceed with his innate need to

^John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 89 ff.

188 189 2 grow. He must make decisions regarding his actions. Edu­

cation, then, Is the freeing of his intelligence so that he may make workable decisions. It 1b equipping the person

with a means for solving his problems and adapting himself

appropriately in terms of subsequent action.3

At this point it may be helpful to analyze more deeply the thought of John Dewey, the philosopher who most fully developed the pragmatic conception of the reconstruc­

tion of experience. While Dewey in his later writings

(Knowing and the Known. 19^9) preferred to be very cautious

&out the use of the term, experience, in his earlier inter­ pretations he used the term often and deliberately. Orig­ inally, Dewey proposed the concept of experience in order to safeguard the full acknowledgment of what he called the

"existential condition" in which man finds himself. Dewey was reacting against all philosophical or theological posi­ tions which rationalized away the existential element. He asserted in his Experience and Nature:

When the varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, the uncertain, irrational, hateful, receive the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable and true, then philosophy may conceivably dis­ pense with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, like experience, to remind us

2John Dewey, Experience in Education, pp. 109-10.

3oewey, Democracy and Education, op. cit.. pp, 9 0 , 179. 190

that the world which is lived, suffered and enjoyed as well as logically thought of, has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises.4

Dewey recognized the existential dimensions of life.

His statements actually remind us of Kierkegaard from time

to time. For instance, he said, "The world is a scene of

risk; it is uncertain; unstable; uncannily unstable. Its

dangers are irregular, inconsistent, not to be counted upon

as to their times and s e a s o n s . "5 These factors in the

"existential world" must be faced by man and worked through

in his experience just as much as the predictable, orderly

and up-lifting aspects of life. Both the threatening and

supporting aspects of experience must be recognized and dealt with intellegently by the individual self in his on- going-ness. Dewey fought for an empirical approach to

experience which viewed the threats and problems of life as

the real spurs to learning, and the reason why reconstruc­ tion of experience had to be a continuing, open-ended process.

In contrast to Kierkegaard's reactions to idealism,

Dewey believed that a frankly naturalistic was the philosophical grounding which would guarantee the preservation of the full scope of human experience. He recognized the natural evolution of the human species. He Zj John Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 12.

5 Ibid., p. 45. 191

had great faith in the developed capacities of man to

reflect upon his experiences, to transcend his specific

situation and to project himself into the future, as well

as to study and interpret the meanings from the past. Dewey

understood the ideals of man to be vastly important, but he

believed that these ideals were always related to man's

human, concrete situations. The efforts to attain ideals

which freed man to fulfill himself and to make possible the

fulfillment of others must be encouraged. Those who are

taught to use their intelligence functionally and concretely,

those who thereby see the need for extending themselves

(even suffering) in order to search for, discover and test

the meanings of life may be said to be truly religious per­

sons in their attitudes. It was this quality of thought

which led many religious educators to employ Dewey's

theories in their work.

Moreover, Dewey identified the nature of the human

self as the key to his thought--just as did Kierkegaard.

Both philosophers understood that the self must be united by a faith in something outside of itself, but their respec­

tive understandings of that "something" were very different.

Dewey said, . . it is pertinent to note that the unifi­ cation of the self throughout the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers, and achieves, cannot be attained in terms of

itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond

itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the Integration of the shifting scenes of the world Into that Imaginative totality we call the Universe."^ Dewey recognized the need for an unseen power to unite the self

Just as Kierkegaard maintained. Dewey's interpretation of the nature of the divided self and the nature of the power which could unite the self were completely naturalistic, however. He saw the self's capacity to transcend the momentary situation and to form integrating ideals as the path to purposeful action. He declared, "An unseen power controlling our destiny becomes the power of an ideal. All possibilities, as possibilities, are ideal in character."7

In Dewey's thought it is necessary for the self to learn from the ideals which have accrued from the experiences of the race, but these ideals must always be reconstructed in terms of the specific problems of the present and the antic­ ipated problems of the future, Dewey's naturalism, of course, prevented him from embracing any God concept, not even a naturalistic one such as Henry N. Weiman proposed.

While Dewey honestly recognized the threatening character of the "existential world" he interpreted these threats primarily in terms of nature. He was not as inter­ ested in the subjective reactions of the self to these threats. He understood that such subjective dimensions of

°John Dewey, A Common Faith, p. 19.

7Ibid.. p. 28. experience were in existence, but he appeared to believe

that the use of human intelligence was the best means men

possess to control these tendencies. He stated that the

term.experience. in his thought, should be used in the

sense in which a person "uses the term when he professes to be faithful to the empirical method, not in the sense in

which he uses it when he implies that experience is momen­

tary, private, and psychical."8

It is precisely at this point that we can see the difference between Dewey's understanding of the existential

situation and that of Kierkegaard. The latter understood

that the subjective, private, psychical elements in man were important and genuine indications of nature of his inner

life. Kierkegaard saw that the subjective dimension was the avenue to decision-making concerning ultimate direction

and meaning for life. The use of reason, in Kierkegaard's thought, was deemed very important but not the means for the true unification cf the existing self. Kierkegaard's study of the subjective elements in man's existence led him to conclude that the quest for ultimate grounding of the self was a central factor in man's nature. Man's struggles to identify himself with and to unite himself to the source of his being was a need which man would meet in one way or another, either by decisive action or by drifting into an

Q °Dewey, Experience and Nature, op. cit., p. 2. alliance with some false ultimate. Dewey, in his attempt to be consistently naturalistic, never seems to articulate any awareness of this tendency within man in his attempt to unite the self. Dewey admonishes man to look for evidence of the truth of the ideals in which he places his faith.

This evidence, he says, tends to be predominately "extrinsic

This position, if followed, could make the individual into a "scientist" who somehow believes he has the capacity to remain detached in his commitments until the evidence comes in; or, it implies that the subjective elements in human nature can be controlled by the steps in reflective thought.

This is essentially the same stance against which Kierke­ gaard fought when he reacted against Hegel. While Dewey had some real awareness of the existential dimensions of life

(just as Hegel did) it cannot be said that his concept of experience was existential in the Kierkegaardian sense.

Dewey does not recognize the deep significance of m an’s inner experiences of anxiety, meaninglessness, fragmentation and lack of ultin&e grounding. Kierkegaard understood man as a spiritual self. Dewey's reconstruction of experience is appropriate for a naturalistic and social self but it is inadequate if the position is maintained that man is a spiritual being, grounded in Ultimate Being.

Kierkegaard understood man's need to learn on the natural level through his experiences and the reconstruction of them. He, perhaps, could have approved of Dewey's method for education for religiousness A, for instance. The developing self must first relate strongly to the persons and environmental factors around him in order for the self to learn to be human. The religious concepts of religious­ ness A, in their immanence, could well be learned as Dewey suggests. If the self is created with the need to be re­ lated to the absolute Being, however, it must learn on a deeper, more existential level. Kierkegaard proposed a method of education which would be appropriate for the spiritual dimensions of the self. This deeper, decisively

Christian education would also bring change. The change would be an inner change of the whole self in its relation­ ships to God and man. This change is calculated to meet the inner anxiety of the self in its lack of ultimate grounding and meaning. It is not a change primarily related to the natural situation in which man finds himself, as Dewey sug­ gested. It is a change which is needed because of the individual's awareness of the estrangement and predicament in his total human situation as a finite and yet infinite self. Kierkegaard's use of the term "existential” was designed to address this more profound human dilemma.

Dewey's use of the concept of "existence" did not Include the dimensions of personal and psychic threat which Kierke­ gaard's interpretation encompassed. Kierkegaard's under­ standing of the nature of the educational task, therefore, 196

was correlated with his conception of the spiritual needs

of the existing self.

He called for an education for the spiritual self

which he described as "reconstructing existence In a c t i o n . "9

It was through what may be called "existential communica­

tion" that he hoped to help the teacher of the spiritual

self to bring about a deeper kind of change— a change related

to the person's being and to his becoming. The change was

conceived to be a total turning of one's orientation to life

from that which centers in man and human arrangements to a

decision to center life in God. As a fulfillment of God's

will and His love, the self does not reject human relation­

ships but viewing them in a new light. The self in its new

inner security is freed to act intelligently rather than

compulsively within the human scene. The self is not

tempted to color its judgments because it has united itself

in loyalties to less worthy securities such as financial

security, family concerns, the state, or the scientific method.

Methods of teaching in contemporary Protestant Christian education have been influenced profoundly by

JDewey's concept of the reconstructionof experience. Many helpful results can be discerned within the educational programs of churches. Yet, it must be recognized that

^Kierkegaard, Concluding Scientific Postscript. P. 387. 197

Dewey's approach is naturalistic. His approach may be

appropriate for religious education but it is not adequate

for a decisively Christian education of the self in its

awareness of its deep existential dilemma.

Kierkegaard's understanding of the need for the self

to "reconstruct existence in action" appears to be a much more adequate approach for Christian education. He recog­

nizes that "learning by doing" or learning in response to

action that must be taken does bring change, and that it is

necessary. This approach has real limitations, however.

As he asserts, "action outwardly directed may indeed trans­

form existence . . . but not the individual's own exist­

ence."10 In other words, a learner may learn to think

reflectively and even to internalize his observations and meanings and thus be able to solve his problems and those

in his social situation satisfactorily, but he may still be

an indecisive and vacilating person in regard to the deeper issues of his existence, the solutions to which will not be

reduced to scientific validation. It is these deeper issues

of existence which the teacher of Christianity must address.

His methods must be conceived In relation to these deeper problems to which he is seeking to help the learner find

answers. Interestingly enough, in the modern progressive

10Ibid.. p. 387 198 approach to education both the teacher and the learner participate in integrity in the reconstructing of experi­ ence. In Kierkegaard's approach to religious education both the teacher and the learner participate as existing individuals of Integrity in the "reconstruction of existence in action." This is because both have the same existential situation; because they are both spiritual selves, needing to find in their existence a unifying center of purpose and meaning.

The concept of action is a key one. Kierkegaard understands that no one will become a Christian just by thinking about it, by speculating whether or not it is true.

The learner becomes aware that he is in a predicament sit­ uation (this is similar to but more threatening to the total self than the pragmatic concept of a "felt need"or a

"disturbed equilibrium") and he must find an existentially profound answer in order to go on as a unified self. Since his predicament has ultimate dimensions he must have an ultimately meaningful answer. The only way he will find this answer (in terms of whether or not Christ's Revelation is the answer, for instance) is in decisive action. Kierke­ gaard declares:

The Saviour of the World, our Lord Jesus Christ, did not come to the world to bring a doctrine; He never lectured. Since He did not bring a doctrine, neither did He seek to prevail upon anyone by reasomto accept the doctrine, nor seek with proofs to substantiate it. His teaching in fact was His life. His presence among men. If anyone 199

desired to be His disciple, His way of going about It, as can be seen In the Gospel, was quite another way than the method of lecturing. He said to such a man something like this: •Adventure a decisive action, then we can begin.'11

Kierkegaard felt that the existing individual would have to experience the inner tension which came In a moment of ultimate predicament before he would be humble enough even to let Christ into his life, deeply and absolutely.

The only way he could be taught by Christ was to "adventure upon a decisive action," to take the leap of faith that

Christ is the answer for him. Then he would be in a posi­ tion to learn. Out of personal suffering and need, he would be willing to struggle for the depth of meaning which

Christ's life has for him. Kierkegaard illustrated his point by referring to Luther's predicament and his decisive action. Luther became a great Christian because he acted upon his faith in Christ. In the acting his faith became powerful and sure. He learned from the inside. He did not allow his positions to be mere opinion. Without the leap of faith, without the decision to act, he would not have been a reformer. While Kierkegaard criticized some of Luther's exaggerations of by faith he saw him as authentic. The next generation, however, "transformed the

Lutheran passion into a doctrine, and with this they diminished also the vital power of faith. In this way it

•^Kierkegaard, For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself. p. 200. 200 was diminished from generation to generation.1,12 Finally being a Lutheran in Denmark was almost a matter of birth.

The decisive action which is essential in becoming a

Christian was not dreamed of, or thought to be necessary.

Christianity then was taught by teachers using the lecture method. It was taught as doctrine, not.as personal encounter with God in Christ. It called for only an "opinion" not for a decision. To have an opinion about Christ or to follow

Christ are vastly different end products. To become a

Christian involves the latter course of actioni

The teacher, according to Kierkegaard, should not

Just lecture or have the students memorize by rote the ideas and theories about Christianity.13 He believed that it had been a monstrous error in history for Christianity to have been imparted through lecturing. "And now . . . may be seen in the fact that all expressions have been con­ structed in view of the notion that truth is understanding, knowledge (one constantly talks of comprehending, speculat­ ing, reflecting, etc.), whereas in primitive Christianity all expressions were constructed with a view to truth as a form of being.n1^ When truth is viewed as knowledge there is a significant gulf between the teacher and the student.

12Ibld.. p. 202.

■^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 155,

^Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p. 202. 201

When truth is viewed as being, when it is a way rather than a result "it is not possible for any essential difference to exist as between the foregoer and the s u c c e s s o r . it is obvious that in some respects the teacher is above the learner because the teacher must have been educated in objective knowledge concerning Christianity (a type of edu­ cation for religiousness A) and he must induct the learner into an understanding of these relationships and movements of the past. Yet, in terms of being and becoming followers of Christ in their existential situations, the teacher and the disciple are on the same level.

The teacher, in order to establish a sense of reality and honest encounter, must put himself into his teaching.

The "i" of the teacher is dead when he allows the specula­ tive Issues to be uppermost in his teaching. And, if the

"i" of the teacher is dead it is a certainty that the "Thou" of the learner has been done away withj1^ The teacher must be personal but he must never deal in personalities.1^ He should relate the disciple in a first hand way to the con­ temporaneous Christ. In so doing the teacher must witness to the meaning of Christ's way of life in answering his own existential predicaments, but this must be done by indirec­ tion. If it is done by the teacher through direct communi­ cation it will be over-simplified and all of the offense

^ Ibid., p. 204. l6Ibid. . p. 230. ^ Ibid. 202 will tend to be taken out of it; and to that degree it is dishonest and does not call forth a decision but only a response of "opinion."

Direct Communication, in Christian education, makes the teacher employ the deadening methods of lecturing, proving, begging, beseeching, warning or even threatening.

A sensitive student will resist all of these methods initial­ ly, and if he finally gives his assent, it will be intellec­ tual.1® Indirect Communication, according to Kierkegaard, does not mediate all of the paradox out of life. It uses life itself (in Christian Education, the dynamic life of

Christ in relation to the deep personal needs of the disciple) as its content. Indirect Communication is a mat­ ter of dialogue. It allows the contradiction and offense to come out into the open. It demands, therefore, honest inner struggle to come to a choice. "There is no direct communication, and no direct reception— there is a choice.Ml9

Putting Christ before the learner in all honesty should bring with it a deep sense of contradiction (that in a man God is revealed). Yet this contradiction is essential to self-knowledge and decision. "A contradiction placed directly in front of a man--if only one can get him to look upon it— is a mirror; while he is judging what dwells within him must be revealed. It is a riddle, but while he is

l8Ibid., p. 140. 19Ibid. 203 guessing, what dwells within him is revealed by how he guesses. The contradiction puts before him a choice, and while he is choosing, he himself is revealed."2° Kierke­ gaard reminded his readers that if Christ himself were their

teacher they would not understand him in his incognito any better than did those who crucified him. If any person believes that he would have recognized Christ as the Truth, as God incarnate, he is quite unconscious that he thereby betrays the fact that he does not know himselfJ21 Teaching by indirection, therefore, helps the teacher identify the

inner condition of faith or lack of faith of the learner and it also helps the learner discover his own loyalties as he is led to the necessity of decision.

A teacher may use "direct" communication in that he declares his own commitment. Kierkegaard did this himself in his later life. It is a false description, however, to call such a declaration, direct communication. The teacher may seek to communicate his commitments directly, but this is really impossible. He cannot share his inner commitments because they come out of his inner life in its subjectivity and no one else can really appropriate them objectively.

Kierkegaard lifts up two approaches to teaching indirectly. The first approach is concerned primarily with the dialectical method of teaching and the second is

2QIbid.. p. 126. 21Ibld.. p. 128. 2 0 4 concerned with the quality of relationship between the teacher and the student. In the first approach "the teacher becomes nothing. His own position and his own loyalties are hidden (incognito). The teacher, using dialogue, brings to light the paradoxical nature of truth, and leaves the situa­ tion in a dialectical knot. The student must untie the knot for himself in order to learn and come to decisions. Or, the teacher may use defense and attack procedures so well that each side of an argument identifies him with its position.

Both the believer and the free thinker agree with him. The important result of the use of this method is that the teacher thereby discovers who the free thinker and who the believer is! This Is a very important step in religious education.

The teacher may then use another indirect method in which he ceases to be nothing to the learner but becomes something. This something is discovered as a by-product of the relationship between the teacher and the learner. The teacher communicates by indirection his own loyalties not so much by what he declares verbally but by whether or not he lives his commitment (for instance, to Christ) in his rela­ tionships with others. The learner then begins to be led to take the "leap of faith" not because of the teacher’s direct admonitions but because of the existential communication that has taken place. If the teacher is not living his avowed commitment (which he should share but not be deceived 205 into thinking he has communicated), he is soon discovered to be a mere lecturer by the student. Indirect Communica­ tion gets at the roots of the loyalties of both the teacher and learner; and, in a real sense, as the contradictions, predicaments and testimonies of meaning are shared, the roles of the teacher and learner become reversed and compli­ mentary.22

Kierkegaard realized that the teacher is often in the position of concealing his true loyalties or his deeper understanding. Looking to the model teacher, Christ, he was aware that even He had to conceal "something" from his disciples "because they could not bear it."23 The problem of teaching is always the problem of identifying where the learner is in his inner being and development. The teacher must stand where the learner is and conceal certain ideas and facts from him because he is not ready to assimilate them and internalize them. Kierkegaard's conception of the stages of life, or the "existence spheres," is most crucial for the teacher to comprehend, in this respect.

If a learner is discovered to be living on the aesthetic level, in a condition of immediacy, it is impera­ tive for the teacher to start on this level with the learner.

The teacher must make contact with the learner, using language

22Ibid.. pp. 136-154.

2^Kierkegaard, Journals. p. 114. which communicates to him and stimulate him to "despair" at the adequacy of this kind of existence; and, in this condi­ tion of despair he may struggle to find another form of

existence. Even if the learner is living on the ethical

level (full of religious feeling and universal design) the teacher of Christianity must be able to communicate with the learner until he discovers that his ethical life is perhaps a source of pride and actually separates him from an absolute faith in God. The result of teaching on this level, according to Kierkegaard, is for the learner volun­ tarily to "repent" and seek to move deeply into the religious sphere of existence. The important consideration in our discussion of methods of teaching is that the teacher must be acquainted with all the levels of existence (both through introspection and through intense observation) and be able to meet the learner realistically where he is. This approach to teaching implies that the teacher of Christian­ ity must also be a teacher of religiousness A as well as religiousness B. He must never be a narrow person intellec­ tually or spiritually. The more acquainted he is with him­ self and with the existential problems of existence for others, the more acquainted he is with the influences of his culture, the better he may be able to relate to learners at various levels of existence and in similar or different cultural situations. Such is the case, however, only if the teacher is consciously seeking to become a Christian. 2 0 7

Certainly, the teacher of Christianity ought to be so

oriented.

The teacher should employ individualized methods of

teaching, Kierkegaard felt that the teacher should encour­

age the learner to face himself before God and not before

his fellow students, in comparison and evasion. In his own

writing, he asked his readers to read aloud to themselves,

"If it be possible, read aloud, . . . By reading aloud thou

wilt receive the impression most strongly that thou hast to

do here only with thyself, not with me, for I am without

authority, and not with any other people at all, for that

would be a distraction."2^ At this point Kierkegaard was a bit unrealistic. Modern studies of the learning habits of

students in our church schools have discovered that students

seem not to be motivated to do private reading. Neverthe­

less, this situation may only reveal a tremendous condition­

ing against private reading which has taken place more

recently in Protestantism, The extreme emphasis upon group

setting and interaction as the environment for learning may be subject to some genuine criticism. It is interesting to

observe that the Christian Scientists are committed to pri­ vate reading and study in their religious education approach.

Christian Scientists, as a result, are usually avid readers

of religious materials and are highly self-motivated,

Kierkegaard, For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself. p, 29. 2 0 8

even though enjoying the support of the church fellowship

and participating within the context of this ethos.

Kierkegaard's admonition to the teacher to be

patient, to go slowly, to reach each person as a person,

is worth underscoring. He urged the clergy not to be too

hasty in "striking a bargain" with a learner. He reminded

the "numbers conscious" clergy to remember that Christ him­

self really only won eleven persons, in any deep sense, in 2S three and a half yearsJ J A person can become a Christian

only by individual decision, never as a part of a group.

Kierkegaard has been judged to be too harsh in this position.

Even though he held it as a corrective, he held it firmly.

I suppose that the very beginning of the test of becoming and being a Christian was for one to be so introverted that it is as if all the others do not exist for one, so introverted that one is quite literally alone in the whole world, alone before God, alone with the Holy Scriptures as guide, alone with the Pattern before one's eyes.

The teacher of Christianity who leads his students

one by one to this point of confrontation with God, must never forget that he is in precisely the same need of introversion. Kierkegaard was devastating in his use of irony in regard to the clergy in this respect. He said that the clergyman teaches Christianity upon occasion but he allows it to escape his attention that what he is saying

2^Kierkegaard, The Attack upon Christendom, p. 160.

^Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p. 219. 209 “applies to him, and applies to him in endless introver­ sion, whereas he has the notion that what he says applies to the congregation, and only the salary and the advance­ ments apply to him."2? it is essential, therefore, for the teacher to employ the method not only of reflection but that of double reflection (the meaning of any statement of truth for the teacher himself). Moreover, he should always be moving toward the employment of the highest method, infinite reflection which looks at all statements from the point of view of what they may mean to GodI

It is not difficult to discern that the methods dis­ cussed by Kierkegaard are applicable mostly for older youth and adults. This is because he believed that the teaching of the decisive categories of Christianity was a concomi­ tant of the "consciousness of sin," the awareness of the deep existential predicaments in which the individual in his maturity found himself. Children should not be taught

Christianity because they have not developed to the place where the decisive answers of the Christian faith have meaning for their lives. By inference, we may assume that

Kierkegaard believed that the "experience centered" approach to the teaching of religiousness A was appropriate. He was inclined to encourage children to "play with holy things" in their innocence, to identify God as immanence rather than as

2? Ibid.. p. 220. 210

transcendence. His recognition of the great importance of

human relationships and identifications in the development

of the self concept, and in the formation of the idea of the

divine, would imply that he would support the use of informal

teaching through relationships of trust and love. Kierke­

gaard's early training in the use of dialectics was so much

a part of him that he could hardly escape this basic approach

to teaching. Of course, such an approach was not suitable

for children, a fact which he knew from experience. We

shall further assess his understanding of the needs of

children, youth, and adults, in the next chapter.

It is to be acknowledged with gratitude that most of

the methods used in contemporary Christian education in

local churches or Institutions are those originally con­

ceived and developed by leaders in general education. It

should be mentioned in passing that some of the great

leaders of the past have had religious motivations and

their methods of teaching were proposed with real hope that

the spiritual dimensions of the students would be culti­

vated. Comenius and Pestalozzi immediately come to mind as so motivated but whose methods have been applied primarily to general education. The major advance in methodology came

as a result of the pioneering philosophical work of John

Dewey in America. With the studies of Froebel, Herbart and

others in Europe as a background, Dewey laid the foundations 211 for the philosophy and methods of American general education and, it must be recognized, of Protestant religious educa­ tion. Most religious educators acknowledge their indebted­ ness to Dewey and his followers, such as William Kilpatrick,

Boyd H. Bode, John Childs, George Counts and many others.

Even in our present situation in Christian education, with a shift toward a theological and confessional emphasis, leaders sympathetic to the shift such as Randolph Crump

Miller of Yale Divinity School give Dewey full credit for his contributions.

Professor Miller identifies the philosophical approach of experimentalism as producing a sound, middle-of- the-road methodology, in between the extremes of tradition­ alism (which assumes that truth is outside of man and must be put into him) and a laissez faire progressivism (which assume that truth is within man and needs ample freedom to unfold and be expressed).^® Miller believes that experi­ mentalism or pragmatism as developed by Dewey and his asso­ ciates is a successful attempt to combine the values of the authoritarian and laissez faire approaches without being a synthesis of both. Miller believes that Dewey's methods are sound and should be employed in the educational life of

^Randolph Crump Miller, Education for Christian Living. p. 15. Miller recognizes the source of his analysis to be John P. Wynne in Philosophies of Education (New York: Prentice-Hall, 19^7). the church, "because the ways of learning do not change with the subject matter."2^ While giving credit to Dewey and recommending and illustrating Dewey's steps in reflective thinking, Miller cautions against accepting Dewey's world view with his methods. He believes Christian educators should take their clue from a new understanding of the place of theology in relation to the learning process.

Miller and many leading Christian educators seek to integrate Dewey's methods with the new Biblical theology but they do not seem to be able to succeed completely. Such a strained situation is evident in the latest survey of religious education (i960). Albert E. Bailey, writing on

"Philosophies of Education and Religious Education," asserts

There is a strong feeling in some circles that the wedding of theology and educational disciplines, of content and method, is not being effected too successfully. The finiings of psychology and soci­ ology are not taken seriously enough, but where religious educators do borrow from these findings there is a tendency to adapt understandings of theology and of the church to conform to them. This often results in the definition of religious education principles in humanistic and natural­ istic terms while intending to confess a theistic and supernaturalistic faith.30

The attempted wedding Just may not be possible in all honesty. However, the two parties should be able to be very close friends and cooperate with each other toward the

29Ibid.. p. 45.

30Klerkegaard, Religious Education— A Comprehensive Survey, p. 32. 213 common good. The present attem pts to Integrate theology and educational method seem to lack a sound conceptual frame­ work. Kierkegaard's understanding of the kind of religious education needed for religiousness A could provide such a framework. Viewing God as immanent in man, the religion of religiousness A becomes a m atter of the reconstruction of human experience. It is in harmony with the goal of free­ ing man's God-given creativity and intelligence. The methods of "problem solving," of the reconstruction and application of human values w ithin a social setting by a social self are most necessary. Kierkegaard agrees that such education is part of becoming human. Such education w ill not bring a person to the decision to become a Chris­ tian, however. Religiousness B, C hristianity, must be "a leap of faith" which the existing self in its inner need for absolute security must be w illing to risk. As we have said, the first education may properly be called, religious education. Only the second may be designated as C hristian education. The more decisive and particularistic faith calls for a deeper and more adequate methodology. The con­ cept of the "reconstruction of existence in action" which

Kierkegaard suggests may have real value for C hristian educators as they seek to help persons to become aware of the nature of their deep human predicam ents and their need for the reconstruction of their existence through a con­ scious faith relationship to the Ground of their being, God. 214

Dr. Cully of Garrett Biblical Institute urges the acceptance of the need for a more existential methodology in order to meet the problems inherent in the human predica­ ment. She says, "Pragmatic methods are helpful but are not penetrating enough. They have tended to focus largely on rational deductions and subsequent actions. . . . Pragmatic methods have limitations for appreciating the place of the historical within education. . . . "^ While the full appli­ cation of pragmatism, particularly as interpreted by George

Counts, would not sustain Dr. Cully's evaluation she does indicate correctly a tendency.32 she continues her analy­ sis by asking for a more existential methodology which she identifies as "historical remembrance." Every self has a personal history, couched within a social setting which it­ self has a history. This larger history is full of events which persons are taught and which they remember. These events are revelatory for the person in that they give meaning to the past and become stimuli to the future. The self finds its meaning in terms of these events which have brought meaning and purpose to other selves. With these facts in mind, Dr. Cully joins Randolph Crump Miller and

rr Iris Cully, The Dynamics of Christian Education. P. 174. 32 See George Counts, Education and American Civili­ zation (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University). 215 most of the theologically oriented Christian educators in approving a confessional stance for education within the faith community. In this community, built upon the revela­ tion of God in Christ, the existing self may again experi­ ence the revelatory power of the events and themes of the scriptures. As Professor Cully says, "Historical remem­ brance refers not so much to putting oneself in the physical situation of Biblical people as to experiencing what they experienced in the pivotal moments of existence."-^

Cully, aware of the central importance of helping persons grow as they are prepared to do the developmental tasks that are before them, is interested in studying the religious developmental tasks which confront the growing person.3^ These religious tasks would be both recurring t and non-recurring tasks,35 From the Kierkegaardian point of view the non-recurring tasks (such as the child identifying the security and love of parents with the love of God) could be addressed by religious education (within the approach of religiousness A). The recurring tasks would not be met by such an approach. These perennial human pre­ dicaments (which result from the self being able to trans­ cend itself and to be anxious about its final destiny and

33Ibld. 34Ibjd.. pe 112.

35see Robert J. Havighurst, Developmental Tasks and Education. p. 31. 216 meaning) could only be solved by Christian education (appro­ priate to the absolute and decisive leap of faith in religiousness B).

As Kierkegaard implies by his insistence that reli­ giousness A is a foundation for religiousness B, the person must gain a sense of God's love in his family and in his simple relationships of childhood (he must be able to per­ form these religious tasks at the correct time in his development) if he is going to be able to mature to the point of taking the "leap of faith." The recurring reli­ gious tasks will not fall before the method of the recon­ struction of human experience, however. These tasks may be done only by those who live and act by faith— since they are tasks which Involve the whole self, not just reasoning. To use Dewey's steps in reflective thinking on the problem of human anxiety will not make the person free of anxiety, even though it may assist him to rearrange his life to les­ sen what Kierkegaard called finite anxiety. Absolute anxiety will still remain and can be conquered only by a faith that the self really does have ultimate significance, by the grace of God.

Lewis Sherrill's analysis of the existential approach to the predicaments of human existence has been shared in a prior section. It will be helpful, nevertheless, to develop his approach more fully at this time— and in relation to methodology. Sherrill develops what he terms the method of cor­ respondence. C hristian education is the process by which the individual comes to an understanding of the nature of his predicam ent, becomes aware of his need for ultim ate answers, and enters into a conscious relationship with God through the symbols of the faith which speak unto his inner condition. These symbols refer to the "mighty acts of God" as witnessed by other persons in sim ilar predicam ents at other times in history. The events of the past, alive in the B iblical record, were discovered by the faithful in the past to be answers to their situations and can be discov­ ered to correspond with the predicam ents of persons now.

Sherrill interprets the B iblical answers in terms of themes which again and again "spring out of the Bible and are not foisted upon it." He believes that, "Each theme is rele­ vant to a profound human predicament. This is the nature of the ultim ate relevance of the themes. They have to do with the profoundest needs of men, those persisting pre­ dicaments which are rooted in the normal anxiety of human e x i s t e n c e .

An illustration of one of the B iblical themes and the corresponding human predicam ent should be clarifying.

^Lewis Sherrill, The Gift of Power, p. 111. 218

Sherrill delineates several themes, one of which is Lordship.

Sherrill states:

Qod's disclosure of himself in lordship is his confronting men as the sovereign of all that has been, and of all that is, . . . . I n the Biblical view nothing is excluded from his sovereignty, for he who created is Lord over all that he has made. The theme of lordship is pointed toward the predicament of man's freedom. As a created being he is under the lordship of God. But as man he is given the freedom to choose, and this freedom, high-water mark Of his humanity, threatens always to be his undoing. This holds true in many respects, but here attention can be restricted to the necessity of constantly choosing between competing claims upon a man's supreme loyalty and devotion. Biblically this necessity is constantly being pointed up by facing us with some form of the demand, 'choose ye this day whom ye will serve.37

Randolph Crump Miller, using the Biblical analyses of

Bernhard Anderson, joins Sherrill in interpreting the

Christian education of the person as an encounter of the person, the learner, with the "Word of God" (not the words in their literalistic form), found in and through the scrip­ tures and in and through the lives of persons of faith, both in the past and in the present. Studies of the nature and content of the Bible then become a means to, a preparation for, an encounter with God in faith. These encounters in faith have the power to heal the person's predicament due to anxiety and separation.38

37Ibld.. p. 113.

38Miller, o p . c i t .. p. ^9 The present emphasis upon the community of believers and upon group approaches to teaching, are in line with the social theory of education as proposed by pragmatism. They are also in harmony with the insights from social psychology from George H. Mead on to the present period. The group approach to learning is essential in order for the self to find itself in relationship to other selves and its environ­ ment. This social theory can be completely naturalistic.

Largely due to the thought of Martin Buber, however, learning in the community setting need not be viewed as lacking reli­ gious significance for the self. Positing the Eternal Thou within each self, Buber says that encounter with God takes place as man meets man and treats him as a Thou. The method of dialogue, of honest and trustful encounter between per­ sons becomes the most adequate method of finding truth.

Contemporary Christian educators have largely accepted and applied Buber's thought to their methodology. Much in the social theory of learning and its deepened form in Buber's dialogical approach is commendable. Nevertheless, Kierke­ gaard's analysis of the necessity for individual decision and responsibility must not be lost. Contemporary Christian education has succumbed to the group-centered methods of teaching to such an extent that the individual's essential freedom has been threatened.39

39por a fine analysis of the influence of Buber's thought on religious education see "Martin Buber's 'Theol­ ogy' and Religious Education" by Maurice Friedman in the Journal, Religious Education. January-February, 1959, p. 5. 220

Some Christian educators are recognizing this tend­

ency. Randolph Crump Miller gives some evidence of concern.

He says, "The purpose of Christian education is to lead each

person into a decision to live as a Christian." He further

states, as he recognizes the importance of teaching within the community of faith, "The church provides an 'atmosphere

in which grace flourishes,1 but it cannot guarantee the decision of faith, which is an act of the individual"^° A recent treatise on the condition of the Protestant Church in

America astutely analyzes the over-emphasis upon group

approaches in the church. Dr. Martin Marty, the author, quotes William Kirkland in his criticism of this condition.

Describing the trend toward over-organization and other- directedness in the church, Kirkland declares:

. . . perhaps we have now grown so sensitive to the dangers of bold and boastful individualism that we have dropped our guard against the equally dangerous advances of excessive groupism and togetherness, in which the inevitable aloneness of man in his radical freedom and personal responsi­ bility is slowly absorbed and dissolved. . . . The individual person is in danger of so blending into the group that his thought and action becomes but a reflection or echo of the group. . . . From the Christian perspective, the obliteration of self­ hood is the consequence.41

Such a statement is certainly very close to the evaluation which Kierkegaard made of the church in Danish

**°Miller. op. cit.. pp. 54, 6 7 . 4l Martin Marty, The New Shape of American Religion. pp. 113, 114. 221

society of 1830-1855. The restoration of the radical

nature of the freedom of the self Is a major issue in a

confessional approach to Christian education. More individ­

ualistic methods should be conceived as a balance to the

present group-centered approach. Kierkegaard's understanding

of direct and indirect communication may have ramifications

for this reconstruction.

It is fair to say that his emphasis upon the existen­

tial nature of the self has already reached the thought of

contemporary C hristian educational leaders, even though his

conceptual framework has not been discerned or employed.

Kierkegaardian concerns may be seen in Iris C ully's summary

of the approach needed In present-day C hristian education.

She proposes an existential approach, a continued use of

induction, an awareness of the thinking person as an ele­ ment in what he thinks, and a recognition that the concept

of paradox "gives the necessary m ultidim ensional view of

life which alone can prevent distortion."^2

K ierkegaard's emphasis upon the existing individual

in his subjectivity as a self and the inevitability of the paradoxical dimension can be seen to have filtered down through contemporary theology to C hristian educational philosophy and method. In particular, Kierkegaard's use of

Zip Cully, op. cit.. p. 35. the dialectical approach to teaching the Christian faith may be helpful today in order to bring persons to the awareness of the paradoxical nature of faith, and also to assist them to guard against making any relative expression of the faith into an absolute. CHAPTER XII

THE LEARNER AS A FIRST HAND DISCIPLE

As I have already sought to illustrate in the analy­

ses of K ierkegaard's own religious development as well as in

his understanding of religiousness A, Kierkegaard was very

aware of the crucial nature of parent-child relationships.

As he saw it, parents had to come to solid decisions con­

cerning the most important aspects of life and then take

responsibility for sharing these values with their children.

They should not be content merely to reflect the values of

the culture (or "of the crowd," as Kierkegaard said). Par­

ents, moreover, should be responsible as individuals for

sharing their highest commitments. In Purity of Heart

Kierkegaard asserts, "With respect to your children's up­ bringing you can weigh various m atters with your wife, or your friends. But how you act and the responsibility for it is finally yours as an individual. . . . Eternity scatters the crowd by giving each an infinite weight, by making him heavy-as-an-individual.T he individual parent must take full responsibility for deciding what he believes to be the

■^Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, pp. 189-193.

223 224 highest good Into which to lead his children— each child as an individual.

A happy upbringing is really a "presupposition."

The individual child, as a learner, can easily be defrauded if he does not receive the treasure of his parent's loyal­ ties, If he does not acquire the sacred heritage. But, eventually he will be defrauded even worse if he is not helped by the parents to understand that what they have

shared with him is not necessarily the absolute truth, but that it is a presupposition; it is truth as they saw it in all honesty and yet in their human finitude.^2 Parents should not fail to share the Christian faith, for instance, as a faith in a loving father whose will is for the child to grow in faith arid love. Yet, the parents must face the hard fact that their children will have to come to their own first hand faith; and when they so strive to do this, they will have to come to their own presuppositions.

Kierkegaard became exceedingly extreme in his attack of the Christian education of the parents under the tutelage of the Established Church. In his final battle with the church he wrote some of his most misunderstood statements about Christian education— statements which frankly do not fit in with his analysis of the value of religiousness A or

^Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life. p. 17. 225

his interpretation of the need for children to be taught

through play, or through satisfying human relations, or by

sharing the myths of the faith. He says that children must

grow up to realize that what they have been taught by their

parents and the church was "twaddle," was a lie] He believed that the youth in his awakening should forgive his

parents, "out of a sense of human love," for over-simplify­

ing the Christian faith. For, they had always talked about

love and goodness. They had never told him about the Cross,

about the fact that he must suffer in order to learn the

truth of God's love. They never helped him see how easily

he could be deceived by accepting the standards of his com­ munity and his church as Christian standards. Indeed, they

were not really Christian. Such a youth, Kierkegaard said,

"will need perhaps a long, long, time, the most painful

cure, to get all that out of him which under the name of

Christian education of children has been poured into him."3

The parents, in making God immanent and making the world

look "good" before the child's eyes, actually mislead him.

The sense of lostness which men experience, the fact of human separation and sin, the parents fail to share. Since

Christianity is really a religion which deals decisively with man's lostness and sin, the parents and the church

have not really taught the child to be a Christian]

^Kierkegaard, The Attack on Christendom, pp. 223-225. 226

The Learner as a Child

In order to restore a sense of balance we must see

Kierkegaard's thought In its wholeness. His understanding of

the child in his Immediacy and his innocence must be the

starting place. Kierkegaard was deeply aware of the horrible

consequences of sharing the fullness of the existential sit­

uation with children. They should be assisted to build

secure foundations w ithin the family and also a secure feel­

ing of God's loving presence in their lives (the intuitive

religion of religiousness A). In fact, if anything, he was

a bit over-protective of children in regard to their facing

the reality of "split-ness" or as Buber says, "it-ness" in

human life. Children often do experience the same anxiety,-

unconsciously, of course, that adults do. Modern studies of

the anxiety or dispalr of children are most revealing. Dr.

Karen Horney in her psychoanalytical theory has employed

K ierkegaard's understandings of the nature of the existing

self in its freedom and anxiety. She recognizes that most children cannot receive perfect love from their parents because the latter are crippled em otionally with their own

anxiety and are seeking to save themselves. This means to

Dr. Horney that many children, and all children to some degree, soon develop what she terms basic anxiety

^Karen Horney, Our Inner C onflicts,pp. 183 a n d 4l f f . 227

It is in answer to thia sense of anxiety that the child develops neurotic personality patterns which have a compulsive nature. In short, most children very quickly develop defense mechanisms in order to cope with life with others (parents or substitute parents) who already exist In a state of separation from themselves (in that they lack a unified inner self) and from others. This means that chil­ dren often, relatively soon, experience deep unconscious anxiety and perhaps often genuine despair as they become increasingly aware of their inability to affirm themselves, or as Kierkegaard said, not to be the self that they seem to be]

Modern Christian educators, who have taken seriously the theological emphasis as well as the best in depth psychology, are recommending a Christian education for par­ ents and children which unknowingly combines the approaches of religiousness A and B, in Kierkegaardlan language.

Christian parents are being educated to see how they may share their love with their children as a foundation for the later religious development of the children. Yet, parents are being helped to build a theological base for their relationships with their children— which is quite different than the approach of the parents who were a product of the progressive religious education of a few years past. In present materials for parents the approach is confessional.

Parents and children are viewed as real persons with their 228 strengths and weaknesses. Parents are not urged to believe that they are capable of sharing a quality of love which will liberate and meet the deepest needs of the child as a self seeking to discover and find itself. God's love is needed by both the child and the parents. Parents are led to face their own need for forgiveness and reconciliation; and, they are guided to admit their human tendency to pride and self-protection; to communicate in the family through non-verbal as well as verbal relationships that they and their children find their true meaning and significance through the Source of their lives, God as known through

Christ. Worship of God is understood to be genuinely existential in the values of the parents or it is a fraud.

The scriptures are to be used by parents with their children as symbols of the ways that human beings have always and still do seek to find meaning for their lives.

Reuel Howe's book, Man's Need and God's Action, is one of the most influential in this respect. He has sought to Interpret the existential dimensions of separation which children experience with their parents and the resources of an absolute trust in God through Christ. He says:

Children experience alienation from their important people and try in various ways to be at one with them again. And have you not noticed how they try ways that the people of God tried through the cen­ turies and which are portrayed in the Old Testa­ ment? A little boy will go out and pick up some little thing that is of value to him but of no value to the parent, bring it in to her and say, 'Mother, I'm sorry. Here's a present for you.' 229

The gift may be a sign of repentance and good will, but it cannot effect atonement. Or the little child will come to the mother and say, •Mother, I'm sorry I was bad; from now on I will be good. I'll never do anything wrong again.' And religious people have gone to their God and said, 'God, we are sorry that we broke your laws, and from now on we will be perfectly obedient.' How pathetic! You know the little child cannot be that good, and if he can, why was he not? Furthermore, present goodness cannot cancel past badness. . . • There is nothing the child can do to create the forgiveness. He can only ask that he be taken back. Forgiveness is 'beforehand giveness' of self. It can come only from the injured side.5

The Christian life in the family is a matter of grace.

It is a matter of parents believing themselves (beyond

rational proof) that at the heart of all things there is a

God who loves and forgives them and whose spirit is present

in their lives, through their faith, giving them the strength

to love and forgive their own children and other people.

This emphasis can be found in its most fully developed form

in the new curriculum of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

Parents are asked to participate fully in the religious

education of their children; and they are asked to start by facing honestly their own deeper questions and predicaments

in light of the significance of Christ's answers. The approach is dynamic. Parents are asked to v-erbalize their

own sense of need, their own experiences of separation from their children of whatever age. The parents' manuals are in

^Reuel Howe, Man's Need and God's Action, p. 134 230

line with the confessional approach, and reflect a strong

existentialist bent. Kierkegaard's challenge for individ­

uals to make decisions regarding the patterns of life they will follow and to confront the Pattern, Christ, in his contemporaneousness is one of the discussion approaches sug­ gested. His parable of The Divine Incognito (the king who wishes to woo the humble maiden by making himself like unto her, by hiding his true identity in order for her to respond to his love genuinely), is presented for parents as individ- als to discuss in terms of their relationships to God and /r each other. In this approach to Christian nurture in the home the parents are channels of God's grace to their chil­ dren; but, there is no tendency to over-simplify this process. Parents are most realistic when they help their children to confront their own deeper needs in terms of

Christ's revelation of God. Encounter, through faith, with

God Is the goal.

Kierkegaard wanted to start where people were. In reference to education in the family, he implied in his theory of indirect communication (from the aesthetic to the religious existence spheres) and in his understanding of

Christ's teaching methods with his disciples, that a sensi­ tive and gradual approach was the correct one. Children should be led to encounter, as first hand disciples, the £*' ■ ■ ■ - Apostles in the Home (Greenwich, Conn.: The Seabury Press, 1956), p. 32. 231

contemporaneous Christ and to confirm or deny him in their

daily decisions. This should not take place too soon, how­

ever. In his Training in Christianity Kierkegaard reveals more sensitivity to the educational task of parents who hold back the full truth than he did in his attack of the "Chris­

tian education of children" as reported above. He states

that Christ did not tell the disciples "all that they would

suffer; indeed, when He was departed from them He had still much to say to them, but did not say it because they were not able to bear it." Referring to the growing child, he continues to admonish parents to share the deeper truth of

Christ in his suffering as the child becomes aware of the reality of man's sin.

Parents, at the proper time, should not hold back the story of the Cross. He believed that children should face the humiliation of Christ and be led to see the love that

God through Christ had for all mankind. Parents and teachers should be graphic enough that the child will identify with

Christ's suffering and his faithful and forgiving nature.

Let this happen to such a depth that the child will make a revelation of his own inner state of faith or confusion. He believed that the proper sharing of this experience could lead children, who are becoming aware of human estrangement, tobe drawn by Christ's love and also be willing to suffer, 232

if need be, for this l o v e . 7 They could be led to see that love for God is greater but not unlike human love. True human love demands a response, a decision to believe it is genuine, and a willingness to suffer when the loved one is in need or pain. The element of the child's individual integrity and decision must be maintained. Nevertheless, it is the parent's responsibility to move the child to this deeper understanding of the Christian faith, rather than leave the impression that Christianity is "sweetness and light."

Contemporary Christian educators are returning to the theories of an American theologian and educator who wrote at about the same period in history as Kierkegaard. Horace

Bushnell (1802-1876) is being interpreted today as one of the great prophets of the value of Christian nurture in the family. His concepts may be compared to Kierkegaard's with profit. Bushnell, writing at a time when individual conver­ sion experiences were thought to be the only way for a child to become a true Christian,opposed this tendency. He believed that God's love should surround the child in the

Christian home and community so that the child should "grow up a Christian, and never know himself to be otherwise."

Bushnell saw God working in and through organic laws that

?Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p. 180. 233 are operative in human growth. He could see no reason why

children could not be taught the love of God through rela­

tionships with parents. "... the operative truth neces­

sary to a new life may possibly be communicated through and

from the parents, being revealed in his looks, manners, and

ways of life, before they are of an age to understand the

teaching of words, for the Christian scheme, the gospel, is

really wrapped up in the life of every Christian parent,and beams out from him as a living epistle, before it escapes ,6 from the lips or is taught in words. Bushnell understood the individual as a result of his social interaction. He said, "We possess a mixed individuality all our life long.

A pure, separate, individual man, living wholly within and from himself is a mere fiction. No such person ever existed or ever can."^ While Bushnell was not naive concerning the need for the individual to affirm or reject his past condi- tioning, he tended to view this process as one of continuity with the loyalties of his Christian parents rather than in discontinuity with them, as Kierkegaard tended to imply.10

Bushnell also had a concept of sin. He believed that growth of a child into a Christian is not a vegetable process. "It

Involves a struggle with evil, a fall, and a rescue."11

°Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, p. 14.

9lbid. . P. 22. 10Ibld.. p. 21.

1:LIbld.. p. 15. Bushnell's present influence upon education within the

Christian family has been most helpful. His understanding

of the existential dilemmas of parents as existing persons

themselves, however, is limited. Kierkegaard's call for an

existential faith on the part of each person, his call for

the facing of the deeper dimensions of the faith as known in

encounter with Christ, the Paradox, does not negate the

importance of Bushnell's emphasis upon early childhood; it

does make possible a Christian nurture that is more discern­

ing, more profoundly decisive for the adolescent who is

naturally revolting and who must come to a first hand faith

with his conscious mind. Kierkegaard's emphasis upon dis­

continuity is a needed corrective. It makes possible recon­

struction and rebirth for the youth. Bushnell's emphasis

upon continuity, on the other hand, is an adequate symbol of

the fact that the youth himself is a product of the faith

community and, in fact, will probably be a parent himself

and will be telling the story again to his children. Both

dimensions are needed.

The Learner as a Youth

Kierkegaard saw the inevitability of the autonomous

spirit in the development of youth. In terms of their religious faith they should be encouraged to be exceedingly honest and searching. They must never be led to believe, however, that the condition of quest and search is an ade­ quate one for decisive action in life. 235

The church should recognize the need for youth to

come to first hand faith. Kierkegaard, at a time when he

himself had recently gone through a long period of revolt,

wrote in Fear and Trembling that the church should follow

the analogy of the mother who blaakens her breast to wean her

infant. Those aspects of the life of the church on which

the child has fed must be criticized in an autonomous spirit, must temporarily be made to appear "black” in order for the youth to cease depending upon this external source of power and be encouraged to develop inner securities before God in faith. ^ The church must have stronger foods in readiness for youth. Kierkegaard declares, "When the child must be weaned, the mother has. stronger food in readiness, lest the child should perish. Happy the person who has stronger food in readiness.”^3

Youth should be allowed to use their natural quali­ ties of wonder, of reckless daring, of striving, of deep wishing and desiring, of passion.1^ Youth-should be encour­ aged to realize that their conditioning in school to think in terms of examinations is a correct clue to the meaning of life. "So little by little it becomes for the individual a serious truth that to live is to be examined, and the high­ est examination is this: whether one will be in truth a

12Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 12.

13ibid.. p. 15.

Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life. p. 18. 236

Christian or n o t . 111^ This was the ultimate question with which Kierkegaard himself as a youth wrestled for ten yearsi

Kierkegaard adds to his list of youthful traits two others: imagination and will. I t is with their sense of keen imagination that they can be led to follow Christ as their ideal. The quality of strong will may be harnessed so that the youth will follow Christ tenaciously if he can come to a decision to do so that is authentic, and the result of a real confrontation with Christ. This is not an easy road to follow, however.

In Training in Christianity Kierkegaard gives a rather fully developed picture of the pilgrimage of faith of youth whose imaginations are being employed. In his poetic way,

Kierkegaard adroitly observes that youth tend to think in terms of perfection. Their imaginations are not too realis­ tic. They picture Christ in his glory; not in his suffering and pain. They see the Christian life as one of victory, not as a life that may lead to real day-to-day suffering for the truth's sake. He says, "But this is what the imagina­ tion cannot render— in fact it cannot be rendered, it can only be, and hence it is that the picture of perfection as imagination presents it always looks so easy, so presua- -| sive.,IJ-D In teaching youth imagination must be used in

^Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p, 184.

l6Ibid.. p. 185. 237 presenting person's lives who are not present for direct confrontation. The use of this approach has limitations, however, because imagination never can capture a sense of reality. Reality is never perfect. This realization must finally dawn on youth.

The realization, if it comes, may bring despair.

This despair must not be a despair to nothingness but a despair which makes the youth want to conquer his despair through a "leap of faith." To follow the contemporaneous

Christ even in his suffering is the decision. If the youth halts, if he does not see himself in this realistic picture, he is in serious trouble. This is so, because some form of suffering in this life is unavoidable. It is either point­ less suffering caused by a divided and vacilating self, or it is suffering for the truth which really has an element of joy in it, certainly of meaning.

If the youth decides to keep the picture of Christ's life as his goal to resemble, and he will not give it up

(even though reality repeatedly reveals to him that he will suffer as he seeks to attain it or as he may be tempted to deny it), he will become^a Christian in the process. If the

Christian teaching has been sound it will help him sense the humiliation of Christ as well as his exaltation, and will help the youth hold firm to the picture because he is per­ suaded that Christ's life is true. "Now let us suppose,"

Kierkegaard continues, "that he holds out until his death— 238 then he has passed the examination. He himself became that picture of perfection which he loved, and verily imagination has not deceived him, nor has governance.It is through

God's loving governance that the individual youth is tested and tried in preparation for the final examination which is IP death. ° Kierkegaard definitely saw the meaning of education in this life in terms of preparation for eternity— both eternity breaking into time through individual choices and eternity at the end of this life. Although his position is far removed from the Christian Idealist, Herman H. Horne, the understanding of education in this life as preparation for a spiritual existence is not too different.^9

Lewis Sherrill in his book, The Struggle of the Soul.

Interprets each stage in the development of the individual as a challenge to the self. For instance, during adolescence the person is tested in a prolonged way by his response to his own sexual maturation within and by his handling of his relationships with the opposite sex in his interpersonal life. Life in its crises situations is a series of tests for the individual. Facing death as a possibility and

^ Ibid.. pp. 186-190.

■^Suffering is involved in the process of learning to be independent and still to find God's Will. A percep­ tive discussion of the educative powers of suffering is found in Kierkegaard's The Gospel of Suffering, pp. 47 ff.

■^Herman H. Horne, The Democratic Philosophy of Educatlon. p. 42. 239

actuality Is both a final and continuing test as the person

moves along through life. Each stage of development from

infancy to old age presents a situation in which the indi­

vidual must struggle to maintain the unity of himself and

perspective upon his highest values. This view is not too

different from Kierkegaard's, particularly at the point of

the youth's decision to become a Christian.

As I have pointed out in an earlier section Kierke­

gaard's own decision to become a Christian was related very

closely to his attempt to free himself from his father's

domination and melancholy. Sherrill recognizes this factor

and joins Kierkegaard in maintaining the need for the youth

to decide for the absolute sovereignty of God over any other

authority including his parents. He says:

In proportion as the individual is weaned from his parents he is psychologically free to admit the absolute sovereignty of God over the self. In proportion as he remains psychologically unweaned he tends unconsciously to identify Church and God with parents or even with one parent; and then he tends to respond to the authority of the church or of God in a manner which befits his deepest feelings toward one or both parents.20

According to Kierkegaard's own experience and accord­

ing to his better reflections upon the subject the individual must put his faith absolutely in God, but this need not mean that he must reject all human authorities or relation­

ships. In fact, it was not until he had worked through his

on Lewis Sherrill, The Struggle of the Soul, p. 68. 240 estrangement with his father that he was able to make the decision to surrender to the love and Governance of God.

Sherrill understands the dynamics of the decisions of youth to follow Christ in this light. It is for this reason that middle or late adolescence is the most opportune time for the young person to be given the opportunity to decide pub­ licly to surrender to the sovereignty of God in Christ, over any other authority for his life. If the symbolic expression of faith corresponds to an inward experience of genuine decision the youth "goes literally and consciously under the sovereignty of God, seeking to govern all of life accordingly." In this way the self of the individual finds a secure unity and has a principle by which to judge between competing claims, even though the decisions for and against such claims will continue to entail personal suffering.

Sherrill believes that the youth who can make a firm deci­ sion to put his God relationship first is protected from being "awed by human demands or tyrannies, whether emanating from parents, family, state, or church."21

Dr. Ross Snyder of the Feder­ ated Theological faculty recognizes the pivotal importance of youth making profound decisions regarding ultimate loyalty to God, but he criticizes Kierkegaard's tendency to fcake such decisions appear to be a negation of human

21Ibld.. p. 6 9 . relationships in favor of the God relationship. He prefers

Buber's I-Thou approach which calls for decision to affirm

God, and at the same time, to affirm man to man relation­

ships. He states in an unpublished document, that the "I-

Thou" approach unites and holds together for youth the things that are often kept apart. He calls Buber's approach a "field theory" approach and not "a world divided into paradoxes, horizontals and verticals, layers and classes."22

He asserts that the I-Thou approach "has all the Intensity of Kierkegaard's emphasis upon the single one— the call to life is addressed to me, has my name on it. But it does not fall off into his egocentricity and his model of surrender and obedience as the religious llfe."23 Snyder believes

Buber's approach is more true to human nature. It puts the needs for ultimate identity and human intimacy together.

Kierkegaard is unduly concerned about the individual "sell­ ing his soul" for human security in place of a "leap of faith" which gives absolute unity in a God relationship.

The love of man and the love of God are held together for

Buber. Kierkegaard puts the two together in his Works of

Love but he always puts love of God first. Love of man is a matter of obedience to a God of love whose will is that

22Ross Snyder, Contribution of Martin Buber to Human Development. an unpublished paper, p. 13.

23ibid.. p. 14. 242 his children should love each other. Snyder believes that youth need to find ways to love God as they love and free each other for selfhood and integrity of life. Snyder is also concerned that the Kierkegaardian choice to love God could disintegrate into an "individualistic romance where the youth thinks of 'Me und Gott' in a selfish way rather oh than in a flexible and socially responsible manner. ^ All of these concerns are points where Kierkegaard has been cor­ rected by Buber and others.

It is my contention that Kierkegaard's emphasis upon the category of individual existence and decision is itself a corrective for his time and not to be interpreted in the extreme. The Kierkegaardian summons for youth to face

Christ and to make an either/or decision is still a neces­ sity in order for the self to find the center in God which faith should bring. Kierkegaard did not negate human rela­ tionships of love. He did, without a doubt, make them secondary. Buber's corrective at this point is helpful and needed for youth especially, but for adults as well.

In fact, the tendency for modern youth (who have sought to live the religious life existentlally) to defy all previous authorities and loyalties has been amply documented.

Dr. , in his observations on the many college campuses he has visited, writes that there are two types of

^ Ibld., p< 14. religious youth. There are those who are religious in a conventional sense, following still the mores of their family and home church, and there are those who have come to a first hand religion which shakes the foundations of their lives. This latter type he calls, existential religion.

This, of course, is the deep pervading quality of faith about which Kierkegaard wrote. Dr. Herberg, a Jewish theologian at Drew University, describes one student who came from a conventionally religious family, but who came up against the newer religious thinking, particularly the writings of Paul Tillich. The youth was shaken by his con­ frontation with "the unyielding ultimacy" of the "ultimate concern." He had "a blinding revelation" that convinced him of the "relatively of all moral standards and of the danger of losing oneself in the routine conventionalities of life."25

As a consequence the youth's attitudes became highly uncon­ ventional and seemingly irresponsible, as interpreted by his religious parents. Actually he was moving in^o a new sense of responsibility to change conventional religion into a more existential form. This illustration is a very ade­ quate one for our purposes. The youth's decisiveness was

Kierkegaardian. His over-emphasis and his revolt illustrate a misunderstanding (when it is in extreme and negative forms)

25 w m Herberg, "Religious Revival and Moral Crisis," an article in Union Seminary Quarterly Review. March i9 6 0 , P. 217. 244 of Kierkegaardian individualism and subjectivity. Buber's corrective is perhaps an answer to this condition— provid­ ing the sense of risk and urgency, the sensitivity to the superficial nature of conventional faith, are not lost.

Paul Tillich attempts to give perspective to the need for autonomous decisions. He emphasizes the great need for solid religious education at two levels. First, children and youth must be inducted into the religious tradition.

They must be given "the symbols of the tradition to which they belong." Secondly, youth must be encouraged to be critical. "Here the great moment for the religious educator has come. Children must be shown that the religious sym­ bols they have learned are not to be taken literally, but are symbols which answer their questions. If this is done the critical period passes and the danger of a mere negative rebellion against religion will be avoided. The symbols will be understood as living answers to living questions.

In Tillich's formulation the insights of Kierkegaardian existentialism and the sense of responsible relationship to the church and to society are balanced. Kierkegaard might be concerned, however, about the possibility of youth mis­ understanding myth and thereby failing to take seriously the confrontation with Christ in his contemporaneousness.

2^Paul Tillich, "Freedom and the Ultimate Concern," Religion in America, p , 280. 2^5

The Learner as an Adult

Kierkegaard was truly profound in his understanding of the adult situation. Adults who are seeking to be and become Christians have a special route to follow. They are at a stage in life when they must face up to where they are, why they have become what they have become, what their true loyalties really are. When an adult is convicted by life or some crisis that he should reassess his inner condition he must begin what Kierkegaard describes as converse learning.

He is in a position of having to learn backwards, to go back to his childhood and learn from it. The adult must go back to the experiences, loyalties, hurts, blocks, and relation­ ships of his childhood in order to discover how he came to be what he is.2? In so doing, the adult is seeking unity and re-direction. His desire is to find "that one's life in a deeper sense might be a personal life essentially in agree­ ment with oneself."2®

The adult must not only learn from his past but he must face the facts of his present existence. On what level of life does he find himself? Is he aethetlcally oriented or is he moving toward the ethico-religious form of exist­ ence? What are his allegiances? What in his culture does he value and affirm? What is causing him to be divided in

^ — 2?Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, p. 1^6.

28Ibid. 246 his loyalties? The adult must search his soul in order to learn to be a Christian. But, more than that he must decide to take the "leap of faith," to surrender to the true Teacher, God in Christ.

Within a relationship to the Teacher he must be will­ ing to become again both a child and a youth. He must be willing to become as a little child, "to become as nothing, without any selfishness," humble, full of wonder, teachable.

Then, he must be willing to surrender his adult shrewdness and worldly wisdom and "will to be a youth, to will to retain youth's enthusiasm with its spontaneity unabated, to will to reacquire it by valiant effort. . . ,"2^ The adult must be willing to take the youthful risks that accompany a faith in a contemporaneous Christ in all his quiet power.

The adult must agree to begin from the beginning.

There is no short cut to becoming a Christian. "... every generation and every individual in the generation must essentially begin from the s t a r t . "3° The adult may not rest on his previous understanding of Christ. He must be willing to confront Him alone. The adult's knowledge will not assist him as such. It is not harmful, if it does not keep him from realizing that truth is a life. It is not in knowing but in being. It is not in doing something but in being

gn Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, p. 190.

3QIbid.. p. 194. 247 something. The truth was and Is In Christ's being. He can teach the truth because He Is the truth.The truth is not in a system of thought or in a doctrine. Adults are so prone to believe the latter.

Kierkegaard understood the adult's essential lack of interest in the speculative. He had an amazing awareness of the relationship of adult learning to the every day tasks that adults must perform. He said, ", . . the adult learns in a different manner, and if we were to learn the Holy

Scriptures by heart, there might be something beautiful in the procedure, in so far as there was something childlike

In it; but essentially, a mature person learns only by appropriation, and he appropriates essentially only that which is essential to living."32 In Kierkegaard's mind the adult would have to affirm or deny his Christian faith in his daily decisions. The crisis nature of many decisions may go unnoticed by adults, living in the aesthetical world of immediacy. Once the adult has been brought before

Christ, the Teacher, he will become conscious of his sin, however. When he is in a state of conviction of sin (in that he admits that he has sought to unify and give meaning to himself by being loyal to lesser securities) he is then

31Ibld.. p. 201. •52 Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life. p. 41. 248

willing to be taught, willing to learn from his divine

Teacher.

There is one dimension of adult awareness which may

assist in his Christian education, according to Kierkegaard.

It is his dread of death— a fact which becomes increasingly

evident as he moves from year to year. Kierkegaard under­

stood one of the functions of death to be that of teaching.

Death can become the adult's teacher. Kierkegaard declared

that a man's view of life could be discerned by what he

called death, whether he viewed it as "a transition, a

transformation, a suffering, a struggle, the last struggle,

a punishment, the wages of sin."33 The adult must have an explanation of the meaning of death. Not because death needs to be explained, but because the adult lives his life out in accordance with his own honest explanation.

Kierkegaard saw the uncertainty of death as "a strict examiner of the learner; and when he recites the explana­ tion, the uncertainty says to him, 'Well, then, I shall inquire whether this is really your opinion, for now, in this moment, it Is over.'"3^ Kierkegaard maintained the existential stance in this respect also. He reminded the adult that he could not learn any explanation of death "by rote, it cannot be learned by reading about it, it is only slowly acquired . . . by him who worked himself weary in

33jbid.. p. 110. 3^ibid.t p# 112. 249 the service of the good, who wandered himself tired on the right way, who bore anxiety in a righteous cause, who was misunderstood in a noble striving, and only thus well acquired. . . .”35 Kierkegaard's existential stance is much more profound in his interpretation of uncertainty than that of Dewey's, for instance. Kierkegaard saw the individ­ ual's deeper predicament. He said that death is the teacher and is always present when uncertainty is present.

Dewey understood uncertainty as a challenge to the intelligence of man to question, quest, hypothesize, test, amass evidence, and take away uncertainty to the degree that the individual could act in a warranted way.36 Dewey does not face the uncertainty which most threatens man--his own death.37 Marjorie Grene analyzes the difference between

Deweyan and Kierkegaardian understandings of the human situ­ ation. Dr. Grene describes Dewey's conception of death by referring to his argument against the traditional means-ends approach to life (in his Human Nature and Conduct). She says,

"Dewey analyzes the situation of a man building a house.

The man is not building the house in order to live in it,

Dewey says, for he might die before it is finished; so he is

35Ibld., P. 113.

-5 John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, pp. 3-20.

37jn Experience and Nature, however, Dewey recqg- nozes death as a basic condition of the existential world. He does not discern man's subjective reaction to death, however. See pp. 7 and 8. 250

building it for the sake of the present activity itself.

Compare this glancing reference to the continual imminence

of death with Kierkegaard's conception of the way in which

death constantly determines or should determine the manner

of our lives. The conception of 'being glad over 70,000

fathoms,' of living constantly in the face of death, in the

awareness that here and now may be the last moment— that is

for Kierkegaard, as for contemporary existentialism, a

central and terribly serious motif in the interpretation of

human life."38

In Kierkegaard's thinking the most central issue for

adults is their arrival at an inner unity, a singleness of

heart, an earnestness of purpose. The adult who is double- minded is in a state of confusion and potential despair.

Such a person cannot will one thing. He is willing a multi­

tude of things which have conflicting values for him.

Kierkegaard reminds the mature person, ". . . a person who

wills in this fashion is not only double-minded but is at

odds with himself." The double-minded cries for change in

an attempt to gain unity and meaning, but the changes are

only temporarily satisfying. He soon becomes "weary and

sated." To this condition, into which scores of adults of

every era in history have fallen, Kierkegaard gives the clarion call for a true inner change which will last. The

3“Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism. pp. 2 6 , 2 7 . 251 real change is the ‘'change of eternity, whirh changes all.

Then only the Good remains and it remains the blessed pos­ session of the man that has willed only one thing.This one thing is to will to love God with the whole self, to center one's life in eternal life which gives meaning to the events of this life and conquers the threat of death.

Kierkegaard gave little or no attention to the teach­ ing approach for adults. As we have seen, he was not inter­ ested in group settings for learning. His central passion was for the individual to awaken to his true existential situation. He seemed to think that the adult who read his works aloud to himself, away from the distractions of what others thought, would "learn" more quickly. The adult should confront the highest Pattern of life, Christ, and seek to surrender to and imitate Him. If he talks to his neighbors about the Christian life, he may well be misled. The com­ mon man allows experience to be his teacher, Kierkegaard asserts. Experience teaches that very, very few people reach the top. The lowly soldier may hold out in his desire to become a general, but if he does, it will be against what experience teaches. For experience teaches that there are so few who are made generals, that the average soldier should not even think about it. So, Kierkegaard felt that the individual was in danger in the group, because there is

39Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, p. 57. 252 too much interest in the average, the "possible." This was particularly true in the church. "So it is in the Christian sphere. Instead of proclaiming the ideals. they educe what experience teaches, what the experience of all the centuries has taught, that the millions get no further than mediocrity.

Thus they apply Christianity tranauilllzingly . . . whereas instead it is in the deepest sense arousing, disquieting

. . . the via media is the true wisdom; be tranquil, you are completely like the millions; and the experience of all the centuries teaches that one gets no further!

This observation lifts up one of the most profound blocks to adult learning. Adults tend to want to settle down in complacency. Modern Christian education of adults, however, has produced evidence that this condition of "low expectation of change" is not necessarily a concomitant of adulthood. Nor will modern adult educators agree that the individual's inner integrity is necessarily lost in the group learning situation. There is a great movement across the world for adult education in general, and for adult

Christian education, in particular. Leaders of these vary­ ing educational enterprises have sought to use the self-.— directive tendency of adults, on the one hand, and their need for Interpersonal relationships of depth, on the other

^°Kierkegaard, The Attack on Christendom, p. 262. 253

hand. Both of these dimensions are being protected and

cultivated in contemporary adult C hristian education.

The present approach is centered in the dynamic,

inform al education that accompanies the adult’s participa­

tion in the faith community, the church.^ More mature

Christians relate in trust to less mature. Both witness to

the meaning of their relationships to Gp.d through C hrist.

This happens today ideally in small face-to-face adult

groups, where each individual is recognized as sacred and

possessing integrity. Theoretically, in these small adult

groups the individual is not lost. His honest doubts and

his inner certainties are shared with other adults who in

turn, are encouraged to do the same. Individual decisions

are encouraged, but they must be decisions which the person

comes to in a genuine way, rather than to coincide with any

doctrinal standard or group decision. This kind of adult

C hristian education is described and promulgated by Robert

S. Clemmons as he says, "This kind of learning involves the

recognition and treatm ent of others as persons. It is more

than the m astering of simple biblical or complex theological

ideas. It Involves a living relationship between man and

God, between man and man, and between man and the deep

^Howard Grimes, The Church Redemptive. This book emphasizes this approach, showing how changes may come about w ithin Individuals in the faith community. 254

recesses of his own soul."2*2 Clemmons cautions adults by

saying, "You can't be C hristianalone. "^3 of course, this

stance is the exact opposite of Kierkegaard's admonition, on the surface. His belief that the individual can only be

C hristian "alone before God" seems to be irreconcilable with

modern practice. This is not the case, however. Kierkegaard

recognized the social interaction needed for the learning

process. He even reflected in his Journals the need of the

individual for a relationship to the church that was more

intim ate, that provided for an atmosphere in which the

individual could share his burdens and at the same time be

allowed to exist in his integrity. The present tendency to

view adult C hristian education as a function of the faith

community w ithin a group context can only be genuinely fru it­

ful if it takes serious Kierkegaard's demand for the protec­

tion of the individual's need to be led to confront the

truth and to make decisions that are not mere reflections of

the lowest common denominator of the group life. The neces­

sity for C hristian education to center in Christ rather than

in the mores of the group must never be lost sight of by

adults. The fact that C hrist's spirit may and does pervade

and change individuals within the group is the other side of

the coin. It is a possibility which Kierkegaard almost lost

sight of in his passion to be a corrective. ------£2------Robert S. Clemmons, Dynamics of Christian Adult Education, p. 17.

43Ibld.. p. 30. 255

The importance of the adult reaching a point of inner,

subjective commitment was correctly emphasized by K ierke­ gaard. The whole personality of the individual may be changed by such a decision. This fact has been corroborated by our best psychologists. Dr. Gardner Murphy points out:

Life depends, to a large degree, on relatively irreversible commitments and each commitment constitutes a field. Many collegemen want at the same time to become doctors and to become lawyers. When a man decides at last what he is going to do, much of his personality is rapidly reworked. Old interests and attitudes drop out, and new ones are soon crystallized, and w ithin a few years the regim entation of the professional attitude is practically absolute. Personality may be so deeply invaded by the outer situation that it can see no human problem from a non­ professional point of view. . . . Field determ ination goes deep; and when once a commitment has been made, there is usually no kh possibility of going back to the unformed stage.^

So it becomes apparent that the possibility of the individual as a youth, young adult, middle adult, or even older adult, coming to a point of commitment to follow

Christ in his contemporaneousness, is genuine and far-reach­ ing. This possibility is one of Kierkegaard's primary categories of thought. In his approach the individual, as he faces himself in his honest existential situation and as he despairs at the meaning of his mode of life, is educated by the possibility of a deep inner change. He is educated by the possibility that God has a destiny for him which is

' iih ^G ardner Murphy, Personality (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 19^7), PP. 888-89. PIEASE NOTE: Page 256 seems to be lacking in page numbering only.

University Microfilms, Inc.

Filmed as received. 257 eternal and significant. He can appropriate this possibil­

ity only in a decision to leap beyond the present existence to the possible e x i s t e n c e . ^5

The Kierkegaardian insistence upon the need for the person to decide his own destiny and thereby to become what he decides is an important ingredient to put into contem­ porary adult Christian education. His belief that the decisively Christian categories should be shared and embraced by adults, in their situations of existential split-ness, is certainly capable of deepening contemporary adult education in our churches and bringing it into focus within a genuinely confessional community. Another vitally important emphasis for adults in Kierkegaard's thought is the orientation of the individual relatively to relative ends and absolutely to the absolute. This emphasis is particularly needed by adults who, in their anxiety and insecurities, are highly prone to absolutize some relative expression of the Christian faith. Also, adults can save their children from such idolatry, if the Insights of

Kierkegaard can be shared with them and understood by them.

^Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, p. 99. CONCLUSIONS

It should now be sufficiently evident that the thought of Soren Kierkegaard has been a significant factor in recent developments in the philosophy of Protestant Christian educa­ tion. This shift in emphasis, which started in the 1930's and early 19^0 's, is toward an existential, confessional, theological foundation for Christian education. This move­ ment from a theologically liberal and educationally prag­ matic base has been accomplished with due appreciation and respect for the contributions of the liberal theologians and biblical scholars as well as for the great leaders of the philosophy of general education. Kierkegaard's call for an authentic Christianity, frankly centered in the contempor­ aneous Christ, honestly embraced by the existing individual in need of an inner unity and grounding for the spiritual self, is a major factor in the present emphasis in Christian education on a Christ-centered, Gospel sharing goal. Before summarizing how Kierkegaardian thought has specifically helped to effect the change in contemporary Christian educa­ tion, along with suggestions regarding his future signifi­ cance, let us review the major findings of this study in regard to Kierkegaard's interest in and approach to Christian education. 238 We have documented the position that Kierkegaard was not only interested in but had a real passion for a more authentic Christian education for the people of his day.

His entire mature life was dedicated to the task of educat­ ing the individual, of communicating with individual readers, of convincing them through indirection that they were not

Christians. Not only was he concerned to convict them of their lack of genuine faith (following the Socratic approach), he was also dedicated to lifting high the Absolute

Paradox, Christ, as the hope of man. He discerned pro­ foundly that men found themselves making decisions concerning their ultimate loyalties subjectively, because objective knowledge of ultimate truth is beyond human capacities. His penetrating analysis of the "existence spheres" in which men spent their days provided a rationale and framework for his educational approach, starting where most men live (on the aesthetic level) and helping them to become aware inwardly of their need to despair or repent and take the "leap of faith" to the religious life as known in Christ.

It has been an aim of this study to draw a more balanced picture of Kierkegaard and his approach to the human scene. His tendency to exaggerate in order to be "a corrective" or an "alarm" has left the impression with many of our beat scholars that he was too interested in the individual "alone before God" and not sensitive to human relationships. Even more disturbing has been the stereotype 260 that Kierkegaard saw no way for God to work in and through human relationships. In this study evidence has been pre­ sented to establish the following dimensions to Kierke­ gaard 1s thought:

1. He recognized the need for the individual to come to selfhood within a loving family setting; and that the

Images the child appropriates regarding his relationship to his parents are images that become foundational for his relationship with God as absolute love. He was sensitive to the dire results to personality when these early family relationships are not healthy. He understood the need for a religious atmosphere of immanence in the family, a per­ spective, however, which would have to "grow up" into an awareness of the transcendence of God and the need for the leap of faith.

2. Kierkegaard believed in divine immanence as well as transcendence. He understood God to be active in human affairs through his Governance. The fact of Governance, however, was always discovered "backwards," as the person looked back at the decisions and choices of his life. God enters human affairs through man’s choices in faith. God is already, through His love, the foundation of each per­ son's life. This love may be discovered in interpersonal ^ relationship^ but not necessarily at the time of the encounter. 3. Kierkegaard believed that the individual could be

brought up by his parents into an awareness of the truth,

but that it was certain that the individual would carry

around with him considerable Illusion as a result of his

early influences. During adolescence and young adulthood,

the person must be brought to a conscious encounter with

God in Christ, to measure his life identifications before

God in order to discover both the truth and the illusion in his early religious and psychological conditioning. This is

quite a different position from that which is often held regarding Kierkegaard's interpretation of human relation­

ships.

4. Kierkegaard believed that genuine and decisive

Christian education was inappropriate for children, because they have no real "consciousness of sin," no awareness of the existential predicament of the human being. A religious education, called religiousness A by Kierkegaard, which emphasizes divine immanence is correct for children.

Increasingly, however, as they become more and more responsi­ ble for themselves, they should be brought into encounter with the contemporaneous Christ. This is a responsibility of parents and the church. During middle and late adoles­ cence, when the youth begins to experience the sense of split-ness In life, the decisively Christian categories of sin and salvation should be shared through an encounter with the Christ of the Gospels. This decisively Christian 262

education was termed Religiousness B by Kierkegaard. The youth or young adult should be led, through the use of

dialectical thinking, to see the impossibility of proving

the truth of Christ's revelation; and, he should be led to

see the necessity for a "leap of faith" beyond the paradox

to the truly religious life which is centered in the God of

Love as known in Christ. The individual should be brought

to the inner state of being where he will surrender himself

to the only true Teacher, God through Christ. God, then, becomes The Teacher of Christianity. The learner is thus

enabled to become a first hand disiciple. His response to divine truth can be genuine and passionate rather than

second hand and detached.

A major thesis of this study has been that Kierkegaard, precursor of many of the contemporary theologians and philos­

ophers of note, is directly influential among Protestant theologians and Indirectly influential in the thought of the major contemporary philosophers of Christian education.

There is sufficient evidence to confirm this thesis. As a result of the study we have discovered the following to be true:

1. Kierkegaard's existential interpretation of man in his separation and predicament has been of pivotal impor­ tance. His existential stance has been developed, especially by Paul Tillich, and has been adapted to 263

contemporary Christian education by Lewis Sherrill, in his

existential analysis of the human predicaments to which the

answers of the Christian faith correspond; and also by

Sherrill's former assistant, Charles H. Johnson, and by

Howard Grimes and others.

2. Kierkegaard's understanding of the spiritual

dimensions of the self has been most fundamental to the

thought of many of the most able theologians and Christian

educators. Kierkegaard's interpretation of the dynamic

nature of the choosing self (in its freedom, in its need

for an absolute unity in God in order to conquer the anxiety

which results from the dimensions of the finite and the

infinite) has been developed by Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard

Niebuhr, Bnil Brunner and other theologians. Along with

Kierkegaard these men have interpreted the self as both

object and subject to itself. They have seen the need of

the self for subjective relationships with God and man. To make God or man into an object is to pervert the relation­

ship. It is essential to relate to God as a Subject, in a

Person-to-person relationship just as it is important to

relate to other selves as subjects and not objects. This approach to the self has been very influential in the thought of Lewis Sherrill, with his "existing and potential"

self interpretation; also, it has a place in the thought of

Reuel Howe and his "language of relationships" approach; and in the thought of many Christian educators who have 264 followed Martin Buber's development and correction of

Kierkegaard's concept. These educators Include Ross

Snyder, Randolph Crump Miller, and others.

3. Recognition must be given to Kierkegaard for his contributions to the present day interpretation of the nature of sin, and for the fact that the concept of sin is solidly re-established in modern Christian education, after having been viewed as unscientific and out-moded for several decades by religious educators. Christian educators have relied upon the theological clarifications of Kierkegaard's psychological interpretation of the self in a position of sin which have been made primarily by Reinhold Niebuhr in

America and by Karl Barth and Bnil Brunner and others in

Europe. The goal of bringing the person to an awareness of his condition of unfaith, separation from God (or Sin) has been returned to Christian education by such leaders as

H. Shelton Smith, Randolph Cramp Miller, Reuel Howe,

Campbell wyckoff, and others.

4. Kierkegaard understood that the self in its anxiety would seek a unity outside of itself, either in a true God relationship or else in a relationship to some false center of power. Therefore, he called the individual to face his inability to come to anything but paradox through the use of reason, and to take "the leap of faith" to a God relationship through Christ. This position, under­ scoring the importance of a faith relationship with a God 2 65

as revealed through Christ, has been most influential In

contemporary theology and Christian education. Such an

emphasis can be found in the theology of most of the

theologians studied and previously referred to, and in the

work of Christian educators from Wilfred Powell in 193^

through the writings of most of the contemporary Christian

educators. Christian education without a confessional,

faith relationship with God through Christ is viewed as

unauthentic and lacking in power to unite the existing self

to its true Ground of Being.

Kierkegaard's significance for the methods of con­

temporary Christian education has not been properly under­

stood. This is largely caused by his individualistic

approach to teaching and his lack of interest in construc­

tive approaches for institutional settings and group situa­

tions. Nevertheless, his basic existential methodology has

already been influential and can become more so. While he

recognized the importance of teaching about religion (of mediating, comparing and synthesizing religious ideas and

materials), he addressed himself primarily to the methods

to be used by the teacher of Christianity, which leads to

decision to follow Christ, the God-man, as the true Teacher.

His insights include these:

1. Start where the learner is existentially. The

teacher should be able to identify the learner's state of 266 being, on the aesthetic or ethical levels, and through indirection help him to move toward the religious level.

2. The teacher best teaches as he witnesses to the truth through "existential communication," following the principle of Reduplication, where teacher is part of and vitally important to his teaching. What he lives exlsten- tially communicates deeply what his loyalties are. The con­ cept of the teacher as a witness is returning to Christian education, only with new dimensions which are confessional, non-judgmental, non-literalistic, and in line with the witnessing community from the New Testament community until today.

3. The teacher prepares the way for an encounter through faith with Christ and a decision to follow or not to follow, to allow God through Christ to be the Teacher or to reject divine teaching in favor of human wisdom.

This approach can be found in much of the Christian educa­ tion literature, particularly in Lewis Sherrill, Campbell

Wyckoff, and Charles H. Johnson.

4. The use of the dialectical method, is retained, in order to bring the learner to the end of human wisdom, the Paradox, which Christ is in his humanity and divinity, and thereby invite a decision. Iris Cully emphasixed this factor. 267

5. Teaching should be indirect because direct

teaching becomes mediating and lacking, in all honesty, the

contradictions that frank study reveals. Indirect teaching

is more imaginative, uses fiction and myth to arouse the

learner's interest and help him to identify himself in

relation to the truth. It also helps the teacher Identify

where the learner is existentially.

6 . The lecture method is tne poorest method. Learn­

ing by rote is ineffective, non-existential and deadening*

7. Teachers should use the approach of wonder rather

than of doubt. Wonder leads to as many questions as doubt

but does not undermine the basic possibility of a faith

relationship.

8 . The teacher, following Christ, must conceal the

decisively Christian categories, from children and youth

until they are ready to absorb them developmentally and

existentially.

9. Individual and private reading and reflection is

a very important method to employ. Kierkegaard recommends

reading aloud to oneself religious and biblical materials.

10. The teacher must be patient, and be willing to go slowly. The approach should be to teach in a one-to-one

relationship, so that teacher and learner may influence

each other to reflect upon truth, to double reflect (apply truth subjectively to the self) and to infinitely reflect

(view the truth from God's perspective). 268

The existential method of learning in action; within

the faith relationship, Kierkegaard referred to as "the

reconstruction of existence in action." This approach has

been implied in the methodology of Iris Cully, Lewis

Sherrill, Howard Grimes and Randolph Crump Miller— all of

whom seek to go deeper than the pragmatic approach of learn­

ing through the reconstruction of experience in action.

This approach is the first of the emphases that I believe

will be highly influential in the future of Protestant

Christian education. Other Kierkegaardian approaches which

hold great promise are:

1. Kierkegaard's Interpretation of the subjectivity

of the learner's response and the central importance of the

choosing self to bring inner changes and unifying commit­ ments. Decisions to embrace Christ should be related

integrally to the nurture of children and youth in the

church, and interpreted existentially.

2. The emphasis upon individualized methods holds

promise in view of the fact that the present use of group

procedures and settings is so strong that individuals who

elect not to relate to the group are considered to be "not

interested." This assumption should be tested. Individual­ ized methods should be considered along with and in relation to group methods. 3. There is significant potential in Kierkegaard's understanding of religious education and its relationship to

Christian education. His interpretation of the necessity for education in religiousness A as a foundation for religiousness B, Christianity, has meaning for the relation­ ship between the religious dimensions of general education and decisively Christian education. Educators such as James

Smart and Randolph Crump Miller have opened the door to the development of this thinking. A framework for cooperative, general religious and ethical education is provided without substitution of such education for Christian nurture and decision within the faith community. Kierkegaard's approach also has real promise for providing a framework for the dif­ ferences in the religious education of children and the more decisive Christian education of youth and adults.

4. Kierkegaard's perceptive assessment of the human tendency to make relative truths unto absolute truths is of deep significance for Christian educators. There is need to orient teachers and parents to the Kierkegaardian approach: to comport oneself relatively to relative ends and absolutely to the absolute end (Telos), which is God. This corrective would save many learners from a misplaced faith in the les­ ser elements in Christianity and direct them constantly to the ultimately significant and meaningful relationship to

God in Christ. 270

5. Kierkegaard's centering of his approach in the

New Testament and in the sense of contemporaneousness with

Christ has already been influential, but the sharpness of

this frankly confessional approach has real power for the

future. It can bring a particularistic, deeply personal

response without eliminating the universal and cooperative

dimensions of learning in the wider community.

It is readily acknowledged that Kierkegaard's thought

is difficult to evaluate because of its exaggerated and

extreme forms. Kierkegaard sought to be a corrective.

This fact should never tempt us to take too literally some

of his seemingly negative positions. Daniel Day Williams,

prominent theologian at Union Theological Seminary in New

York City, believes that Kierkegaard was too extreme and

that his "corrective" must be corrected, as many have

already sought to do.-1- He believes, however, that "if a reconstruction in theology which is neither liberal nor neo­

orthodox is to emerge it will have to define itself against

Kierkegaard even as Kierkegaard defined himself against

Hegel. And it will, I believe, learn much from Kierkegaard 2 as he learned much from the great idealist."

^-This desire for a corrective in regard to the con­ temporary emphasis upon a too transcendent view of theology is also made by a prominent Christian educator, Frank W. Herriott in an article, "Some Concerns of a Christian Educa­ tor," Union Seminary Quarterly Review. March, I960, p. 198. 2 Daniel Day Williams, God's Grace and Man's Hone. p. 121. Similarly it is true that a study of Soren Kierke­ gaard can be most helpful in reconstructing the process of

Christian nurture within the Christian community. It is hoped that the attempt just concluded will be a contribu­ tion in this direction. There is no desire to make Kierke­ gaard more important than he is. There is no desire to make his thought a norm for Christian education within

Protestantism. This would be falling into the trap of making a corrective into a norm. Kierkegaard himself cautioned against such a practice when he said concerning the Lutheran attempt to be a corrective, "a corrective made into a norm is eo ioso confusing."3 it is sincerely hoped that this study of Kierkegaard's contributions to

Protestant Christian education will be clarifying rather than confusing.

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______. The Task of Christian Education. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I, Robert I^rnn Browning, was born in Gallatin,

Missouri, June 19, 1924. I received my elementary and secondary education In tha public schools of Trenton,

Missouri. My Bachelor of Arts degree was granted from

M'Ssouri Valley College In 1945. My Bachelor of Divinity degree was received in 1948 from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I served as Minister of Christian Educa­ tion at Old Stone Methodist Church in Meadville, Pennsylvania, until 1951 at which time I returned to pursue graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University, and at Union

Seminary. I also served as Minister of Christian Education at the Community Church in Mount Vernon, New York, during this period of dtudy which was concluded in 1953. While serving North Broadway Methodist Church in Columbus, Ohio,

I was admitted to the Graduate School at Ohio State Univer­ sity to continue my studies for the degree Doctor of

Philosophy, with a major in Philosophy of Education.

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