The chapter started with the author--a non-practicing Catholic--recalling one accidental visit to a church one late afternoon when his original intent was to a bar, and could not work up a single candle at the chapel to light up for his long deceased father. As he left the church, feeling silly with such non-serendipitous event, a question nevertheless popped up in his head: Do we lose our faith or we push it away?
It's easy for a modern man to revolt against a faith whose truths are based on the "indisputable facts" of virgin birth and bodily resurrection. The argument that "God is beyond human understanding" sounds hollow and apologetic. Religion as a category could well be written off as an antiquated invention by humans for humans, their needs for assurance and protection at basic, and meaning and purpose at higher up psycho-emotional-spiritual levels.
For existentialists such as Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. His prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.
Kierkegaard disagrees. In his book "Fear and Trembling" he writes:
"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"
"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.
For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:
A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.
An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.
The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.
Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.
In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.
"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"
"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.
For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:
A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.
An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.
The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.
Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.
In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.
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