Kierkegaard’s Two Last Words

On November 12th we will commemorate Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) as we have every year since 1980. He was a Danish Lutheran writer known for his deep commitment to Christian discipleship.

Melting Frosty the Snowman

and Overturning the Calamity of Christmas by

Preaching Søren Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death (1849)

By Pastor Marshall

October 2017

WITH ALL THE GOOD CHEER going around at Christmas time, it’s hard to believe that God gets into “hot water” this time of year (118)? But that’s exactly what happens. And so I suppose that no good deed goes unpunished (Oscar Wilde)—even when it’s God’s. For Christmas is grace, mercy and blessing (John 1:17)—but in our hands it becomes a curse. For God’s largess is “repaid with ingratitude” (118) (Hosea 13:6). So God gets into trouble because of us (Isaiah 55:8, Romans 1:25).

       But how so? Well, when God tightly links himself to his only son, Jesus Christ, in the holy incarnation in the barn at Bethlehem, it boomerangs on him. That’s because we take the miracle for ourselves, rather than celebrating Jesus as we should. By so doing peanut brittle wins out over the bread of life (John 6:35). Then the “likeness between God and man” revealed at Christmas, degenerates into “flippant or brazen forwardness” (121) (Hebrews 10:31). Our over-heated theological misappropriations melt ol’ Frosty the Snowman, if you will—one of the cultural icons for Christmas. We take advantage of God’s incarnation and use it for our own self-aggrandizement (2 Corinthians 6:1)—thinking that if God becomes man in Jesus at Christmas, then all humans everywhere are hot shots. By so doing, we turn Christmas into our exaltation or “apotheosis” (73)—rather than preserving it properly, as the very glorification of Christ, the miraculous savior (Matthew 1:21), the only divine and human mediator (1 Timothy 1:5). In the name of Christianity, we then are “absorbed in all sorts of secular matters” (33). We take Saint Athanasius’ famous dictum from the 4th century that God became man so that we might become God (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1999, §460) and twist it all around—turning Christianity into pantheism (117). We become “brazen” (118) in exalting ourselves and using Christmas to defend ourselves and to explain our first rate promotion (John 3:30). Then the likeness between God and man at Christmas “merges into one” (117)—turning likeness into identity.

       In this way we use Christmas “as an ingredient in human importance, in becoming self-important directly before God…. Everything that in the old days was regarded with horror as the expression of ungodly insubordination is now regarded as genius, the sign of a deep nature.” Now “the Christian conceptions float free unchristianly in the air, they have been used for the most aggravated rudeness.” Now “God’s name is the word that most frequently appears in daily speech and is clearly the word that is given the least thought and used most carelessly, because the poor, revealed God (who instead of keeping himself hidden, as the upper class usually does, was careless and injudicious enough to become revealed) has become a personage far too familiar to the whole population” (115–16). Now subordination to God has given way to some sort of contrived, holy, insubordination (Isaiah 5:20). Now the command to obey God has given way to an invitation to imagine new worldviews. This is the calamity of Christmas! Obedience to God is lost in the “vagueness [of] high-powered psychological investigations to the nth degree” (78–79). That’s because rational analysis “snips off a little bit from both sides and thereby gets along more easily” (100). And so we have a jumbled mess—the “prostitution of Christianity” (102).

Using Christmas in this illegitimate, rational way, leads to an “overestimation of the things of this world to the extent that the eternal can be no consolation” (70). Bereft of the eternal, we have “no power over” ourselves (68) (John 6:68). We have become “an imaginatively constructed god.” “In so far as the self … works itself into the very opposite, it really becomes no self.” Now the self is “its own master, absolutely its own master,” and in this is “its pleasure and delight” (69).

But this pleasure is “fleeting” (Hebrews 11:25). Its “proficiency in imaginative constructing does not stretch that far, even though its proficiency in abstracting does; in a Promethean way, the infinite, negative self feels itself nailed to this servitude” (70). These pleasures are only “glittering vices” (46). For when “the illness is most critical,” the sick person feels well, and “considers himself to be in excellent health” (45).

Is there, then, any way to save Frosty from melting—so to speak? Can we get God out of the hot water and stand the snowman upright again? Yes, but one must give up on being one of the superficial, nominal “cultured Christians” for that to happen (56). More diligence is needed. All “sinful watering down” has to be thrown out (95). A “most rapturous love” for God has to take over (103). But moving away from the natural, animal way of life never comes simply as “a matter of course” (58). No, the self “must be broken” first (65)—so it can “dare to believe” (113). “Lost in possibility” and the heights of imagination, with “ever greater ingenuity” (98), we have to turn around and regain “the power to obey” the Lord God Almighty (36). We have to eschew our “selfishness and pride” (112). This will take “humble courage” (85) to move beyond the “natural man [with its] merely human self” (81). That’s because our problem is “self-willfulness against God, a disobedience that defies his commandments” (81). So we need to “hear and understand” and be willing “to follow every least hint from God as to his will” for us (82). But alas, “most men probably live…. either in a certain endearing childish naiveté or in shallow triviality” (107). Against this we must become obsessed with God—made mad by his presence and anything but well-balanced and moderate (34, 38, 56, 57, 72, 84, 86). All “flabby and spineless” Christianity has to be done away with (96). We must kill our “selfish self” (81) and take up a new “theological self” (79).

Furthermore when Christmas is degraded and stripped of its offensiveness by allowing for “man’s coming too close” to God (125), then all hope for a life with God is gone. We can’t “humble” ourselves and believe (78). And so a “sickness of the self” settles in (21). Here there is no “consciousness of the eternal” that causes a break through, so that the “battle” of faith may begin in us (60)—and faith may indeed be “found on earth” (129n). Then one opposes going the way of “thousands upon thousands [who confirm] that one can have faith in Christ without having noticed the slightest possibility of offense” (128n). And what is that offense which is so essential yet missing among so many would-be believers? Just what is it that frosts us and pulls us away from faith?

The offense is that God is not “the fond father who indulges his child’s every wish for too much” (78). And that divine unwillingness, which has to do with our sinful longings (87), is “diametrically contrary to” the escape speculation wishes for (120). Sin indeed is what blocks the easy and “tiny little transition from understanding to doing” (93)—and so also faith. Here “the lower nature’s power lies in stretching things out,” dodging the “decisions and conclusions” it doesn’t much care for, and expanding “esthetic and metaphysical comprehension, which ethically is a diversion” (94). The offense in this is that our reasoning—incapacitated by sin—fails when it comes to God (Matthew 11:25). That’s because our Savior Jesus “must be believed” (95)—with not “one more word; there is nothing more to add” (122). It can’t be rationally apprehended. For “to believe is… to lose the understanding in order to gain God” (38). God in Christ must be miraculously revealed and believed in (John 3:16). We must not first wait around for some theological “champion” to defend and explain Christianity to us, which we would otherwise imagine to be a “poor, miserable” Christianity (87). No, we must believe without anyone helping us first (Philippians 2:12). We must leap into the waiting arms of God—showing “courage to lose” our lives in order to win them back—redeemed in the eyes of God (67). For it is “insolence… to want to comprehend that which does not want to be comprehended” (98). In this way—underscoring this offense—we keep watch “so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained” (99)—precisely what Christmas threatens to take away. Admitting to a severe account of sin is what keeps this gulf more radical “than ever before” (121). And those who go this way aren’t marked by “popularity” but “insignificance” alone (128)—and faith.

       Now why did God take such a risk knowing that we would surely be “reaping the harvest” of degradation through it (119)? Well, it was all for Christ and our salvation in him by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). God dared the incarnation for that alone—so we could “come to him… in Christ” (125). Our kinship with him through the incarnation of Christmas was never to extend beyond that point of contact and for that purpose (1 John 4:10). For without this connection there could never be any “reconciliation” with God (120n) and faith. Only through the death of Jesus on the cross “for the sake of us” all (113)—can the punishment of sin be clearly ended, as if it were finally “drowned in the sea” (100).

       And just as God “protects” the incarnation with the offense of sin (117, 125), so we must also do the same through faithful preachers—those who make their lives and ministries “concerned and accountable in fear and trembling,” and thereby become “a nuisance to others” (123). We need pastors like this because most people “never advance beyond what they were in their childhood and youth: immediacy with the admixture of a little dash of reflection,” since to become spirit “seems to be a waste of time” (57). We need pastors, then, to push us beyond where we want to go—by splitting up those merged categories (2 Timothy 4:3).

       But alas, pastors have been “deserted by every elevating conception,” reducing their office to “a way of making a living, devoid of the slightest mystery.” And so they’re “no different at all from being a merchant, lawyer, bookbinder, veterinarian, etc. on weekdays” (102). They are without faith and “rapturous” love for God in Christ. That’s why they don’t care to speak about Christ “all day long and all night, too” (103). They would rather give reasons for belief, with distant, intellectual acuity—through a phony form of “preaching” (104, 130). But a lover, in his right mind, would never “think of conducting a defense of his being in love.” That’s because by so doing he’s saying that his love is “not the absolute, unconditionally the absolute” (103). Therefore defending love fails because the lover is “more than all reasons and any defense: he is in love. [And anyone who defends love] is not in love; he merely pretends to be, and… he is so stupid that he… informs against himself as not being in love” when he tries to defend his love (104).

       Such pastors don’t care about diligence (Matthew 22:37). All they ask for is that you go to church “every once in a while,” and then, on behalf of God, get thanked “for the honor of the visit” and favored “with the title of pious” (116). They don’t push the people on to confession and forgiveness of sins, but let them go on “happily in pagan peace of mind” (117). These dull, inoffensive pastors are happy if everyone in church simply becomes a “copy” of each other (52, 101) (2 Corinthians 3:17). For it is “dangerous to venture” out individually—and so “not to venture is prudent” (34). That’s because the world thinks Christianity is “too high, because its goal is not man’s goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought” of salvation (83). And so they drop all “earnestness of existence” (130) and “reassure” everyone of their salvation (57). By so doing these cowardly pastors avoid “every gust of unfavorable wind” (91). And so they come across like they “really do not know what they are talking about” (64).

       By way of all of these negative examples and admonitions against them, we know what good pastors are. May God have mercy and send us such pastors (Philippians 1:6), so that “the infinite, chasmal, qualitative abyss between” God and his people is “confirmed” by their ministries (129), and that God’s no longer in “hot water” (118), and our differences with him are firmly set (99)—and Frosty’s left standing. Amen.

(References to the Hong & Hong edition of SUD, Princeton University Press, 1980.)