Religious Faith and Divine Grace: Human and Divine Agency

Abstract

The main purpose of this chapter is to clarify Kierkegaard’s account of religious faith and divine grace by comparing it to Kant’s moral faith. I argue that the double movement of faith in Fear and Trembling explicates the formal structure of religious faith and provides a key to understanding what Kierkegaard means by religiousness and divine grace. I argue that later works (notably Postscript) make use of the account found in Fear and Trembling.1 Furthermore, I try to show why divine grace plays a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s theory and why the ethical stage (represented by Judge William) is problematical. Rather than belonging to the ethical stage (as claimed by Hare),2 Kant has a different account of religious faith and divine grace, an account which not only anticipated Kierkegaard’s account of faith but also represents an alternative to it. By saying this, my interpretation of the relation between Kant and Kierkegaard differs not only from that of Hare but also from the interpretations of Green and Knappe. Although Knappe presents Kant’s radical evil as analogous to Kierkegaard’s original sin, he maintains that with Kierkegaard’s Christian stage of existence ‘nearly all affinity with Kantian thinking stops.’3 Green, on the other hand, tries to show that when Kant introduces the doctrine of radical evil, his philosophy of religion runs into problems, problems which Kierkegaard can be seen as resolving by way of a reliance on divine grace and revelation.4