Taking Kierkegaard Personally: First Person Responses ed. by Jamie Lorentzen and Gordon Marino

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taking Kierkegaard Personally: First Person Responses ed. by Jamie Lorentzen and Gordon Marino Ronald F. Marshall Taking Kierkegaard Personally: First Person Responses. Edited by Jamie Lorentzen and Gordon Marino. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2020. xviii + 350 pp. This unique book has thirty-five short accounts from scholars "about the life lessons that they have absorbed from their long walks with Kierkegaard" (xvii). They "speak more from the heart than from the head" (4). They were selected from an international Kierkegaard conference held at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in 2018. Essays by well-known scholars, David Cain and Edward Mooney, are included, as are some from the new scholars, for example, Casey Spinks and Austin Williams. This book is a good introduction for the general reader. But if you have been put off by Kierkegaard's "service through literature," by which he "set forth the decisive qualifications of the whole existential arena with a dialectical acuteness and primitivity not to be found in any other literature" (Kierkegaard, Journals, ed. Hongs, §5:5914), then this more straightforward fare is also for you. What are the lessons gleaned? Some say take more time for "dish-washing [and] more reading to my kids" (34, 209, 219). Against this, another says that Kierkegaard would "contest" any linking of "family values with the Christian message" (277). Some say "will one thing" (208, 129, 134, 306, 311, 318) and simplify your life. Against this, others say "savor and fear my multiplicity" (337, 149, 161, 165, 228). But this collection is not a cacophony. Many contributors learned from Kierkegaard the importance of humility (37, 44, 151–53, 159, 172), passion (57, 134, 165, 234), and struggling (53, 79, 94, 124, 148–49, 228, 237, 255, 265, 276, 278, 281, 297, 327–28). This collection, however, never asks Kierkegaard what lessons he was providing. He said he was battling "to present the ideal of a Christian." This mattered because "the medium for being a Christian" had shifted from "existence and the ethical to the intellectual, the metaphysical, the imaginational; a more or less theatrical relationship … between thinking Christianity and being a Christian," which "abolished being a Christian" (Kierkegaard, The Point of View, ed. Hongs, pp. 139, 130). That ideal was the New Testament (Kierkegaard, The Moment, ed. Hongs, pp. 39, 214, 315, 321) where we learn: [End Page 82] What is exalted in the world is an abomination to God; Count others as better than yourselves; Set not your minds on things on earth; Faith apart from works is dead; Nothing good is in us; There is no salvation outside of belief in Jesus; And God is not revealed to the wise and understanding (Luke 16:15, Philippians 2:3, Colossians 3:2, James 2:26, Romans 7:18; John 3:16, Matthew 11:25). When verses like these are taken to heart, Kierkegaard knew they made life a most "intensifying misery" (Journals §2:1896). That is because you now seek first the kingdom of God which collides with the world (Journals §§2:1784, 6:6957). Kierkegaard, knowing why these ideals were rejected, erupted, "Blast the ideals! If we have to take them along, no one can feel like living" (Judge for Yourself! ed. Hongs, p. 200). Contrary to Kierkegaard (68, 122), this collection trades in much of this same diminishment of ideals. Nevertheless a few essays uphold Christian ideals. Jonas Ross states that "becoming a Christian implies the imitation of Christ, that is, in becoming the truth in the likeness of Christ, [we live] in temporality with an eternal criterion" (224). Will Williams writes that "only through the eternal can we conquer the future, and we have to conquer the future before [we can] live in the present" (248). Carson Webb encourages us to develop "a repertoire of techniques not only to survive but to thrive, and with enough practice we can enervate the cacophonous thoughts of self-destruction and learn to hear through them life's tender beckoning" (258). Marcia Robinson hopes that "the listing ship of selfhood, sinking under the excessive ballast of the temporal, … might be righted by the influence of the eternal" (265). Kierkegaard would rejoice over these testimonies...