Kierkegaard on the limits of Christian epistemology

Abstract

"The difficulty with Socrates," says Kierkegaard at one point in his journal, "is not to understand his teaching but to understand Socrates himself: how much more so with regard to Christ. By this a period is put to all speculation, for its secret is to turn the whole thing around."2 If there is a difficulty with Christianity then it is not primarily a problem of explaining how a person might come to believe or know a peculiar set of claims, teachings, or propositions about a human being who, once upon a time, claimed to be "the God" (Guderi). Christianity, as Kierkegaard reminds us, is not a doctrine, but a way of life that depends on a person's willingness to understand Christ. But understanding Christ, for Kierkegaard, is not primarily a cognitive or intellectual matter. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus might derive a good deal of intellectual exercise from the dialectical acrobatics we find in books such as the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. At the end of the day though the conditions for the possibility of understanding Christ cannot be given by an epistemological