Christendom: An Unthinking Faith?

Abstract

Søren Kierkegaard's and John D. Caputo's criticisms of “Christendom” and “the church” raise the spectre of the organised church being incapable of nurturing faith. The following evaluates these arguments by examining Christendom and the church against the background of a model of faith developed at the intersection of three theological perspectives — the scholasticism of St Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard's critique of the official Danish church of the mid-nineteenth century, and Caputo's deconstruction of the contemporary church. Drawing on Kierkegaard's concept of “Christendom”, the article argues that we must look outside the church to see such a faith modeled, such as to the genesis of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which proposes a faith-like picture of the universe, in contrast to the “scientific” understanding of God proscribed by the church. The article concludes by examining several aspects of the church's dysfunction that are exposed by its inability to foster faith.