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Soren Kierkegaard & the Leap of Faith
by
Kenneth Shouler, Ph.D.
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- Kierkegaard said man only exists in faith
- Kierkegaard said make a leap of faith for God
- Kierkegaard often took on the Christian church
At the religious stage, you attempt to attain a personal relationship with God. “Man only begins to exist in faith,” Kierkegaard thought. So both the aesthetic and ethical stages of life are inadequate. To know God you follow Kierkegaard’s famous phrase: you make “a leap of faith.”
Kierkegaard brings up the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God commands Abraham to kill his son Isaac. In choosing to obey God’s command, Abraham is in the position of not being able to understand the command, much less justify it.
What difference does it make for Abraham if the action is objectively right? He must choose and therein defines his values. The only way the action can be justified is that it’s the surrender to God’s will.
So Abraham must make a “leap of faith.” This leap involves willing and belief more than reason and knowledge. It involves what Kierkegaard calls “the suspension of the ethical.”
There would be no need for this leap of faith if God’s existence were simply a matter of commonsense or rational reflection.
Kierkegaard’s later works frequently attack the institutions of the Christian Church. He believed that going through the motions of a Christian life—like attending church, reciting prayers, following commanded ethical precepts, reading Scripture and so on—is the very antithesis of a Christian life.
The importance of the “leap of faith” is that one should have a personal and direct confrontation with the divine. Yet he found solace in a deeply religious life. But he found organized religion tepid, not deeply felt, and unfulfilling.
…from The Everything Guide to Understanding Philosophy.
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