It is true that in Jesus Christ the mystery of the ground of the world burns out more brightly than anywhere else. But on the other hand, it is precisely in this light that for the first time and definitively we grasp the true incomprehensibility of God.
—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidation
When Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us that with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, “it is precisely in this light that for the first time and definitively we grasp the true incomprehensibility of God,”1 we see again that mystery hides even as it reveals. The apostle Paul writes that in God becoming a human being, “the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past” (Rom. 16:25), human and divine mystery coalesce. Jesus Christ pushes back the horizons of human mystery so that they open onto the divine mystery.2 In Jesus, we especially meet the nature of mystery, knowing how much we don’t know.
Theologian Paul Jewett wryly observes, “The more intimate the disciples became with Jesus, the less they understood him.”3 The first disciples are not one up on us for having seen Jesus in the flesh. Nor do we have an advantage over them by our perspective of two thousand years of history. Every person in every age confronts the same pivotal question. It is not, “Who do you say I am?” From Jesus’ disciples to us today, Christians are still grappling to compose a complete answer to this question. No, the pivotal question is, “Will you follow me?” Now we are ready for a trek into paradox and mystery with one of history’s more adventurous guides.
Three Kinds of Persons
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) elicits one of three responses: some people love him, some hate him, many do not understand him. Unfortunately, Francis Schaeffer criticized Kierkegaard as the first existentialist thinker who crossed Schaeffer’s famous “line of despair.” This was a rush to judgment. Existentialist themes certainly appear in Kierkegaard’s work, but his goal is different. Philosopher Diogenes Allen writes that Kierkegaard “was concerned to understand how to become and be a Christian, whereas existentialism is concerned with what it is to be a human being.”4 In fact, Kierkegaard championed evangelical themes, such as a personal relationship with Christ and understanding faith as a life of passionate commitment.
Mid-nineteenth-century Danish Lutheranism had turned Christianity into cool, detached intellectualism. Becoming a Christian came to mean being born into the state (Lutheran) church. Such a Christendom mindset that identifies Christian faith with a particular society, or culture within a society, has been part of our history since Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE. In Kierkegaard’s day, belief was depersonalized. It asked only mental assent that required no personal (existential!) commitment. In his book Either/Or, Kierkegaard exposes this refusal to commit, disguised as skeptical sophistication.
He begins with the aesthetic person, who is well versed in music, the arts, and a wide palette of sensual pleasures. At root, however, he or she is a mere spectator. We do not rush onto the stage in the middle of a play and shout, “Don’t drink that cup, it’s poisoned!” We are spectators. So is the aesthetic person. Aesthetes, Kierkegaard says, are like flat stones skipping across the surface of a pond; they must keep moving into ever more exotic or unusual experiences. If they lose momentum, they sink into nothingness. Kierkegaard especially opposes those spectators whose disdain of “fanatics” was an excuse to avoid real choices. The aesthete is ready to discuss the latest theory but never acts.
Kierkegaard next identifies the ethical person, who believes that Jesus’ purpose is to promote ethical ideals. By following a set of principles found in the Bible, the ethical person assumes, he or she can become all that God expects. But this person misses or ignores the radical nature of sin. There is an “infinite qualitative difference” (Kierkegaard’s well-known term) between humans and a “wholly other” God. Human reason or ethical effort can never bridge the gap between creature and Creator, the unholy and the Holy.
One of Kierkegaard’s many parables brings this truth uncomfortably close to home. He imagines a land populated by ducks. Every Sunday morning all the ducks get up, brush out their feathers, and waddle to church. The duck preacher stands behind the pulpit and opens the duck Bible to the place where it speaks of God’s greatest gift to ducks—wings! The duck preacher’s sermon is eloquent: “With wings, you ducks can fly! You can mount up like eagles and soar in the heavens. You can escape pens and fences. The euphoria of complete freedom is yours. Give thanks to God for so great a gift as wings!” All the ducks in the congregation nod agreement and shout, “Amen!” Then they all waddle home again.5
For the ethical person, Jesus is reduced to a purveyor of ethical ideals (“You have wings!”) that never transform anyone. Kierkegaard decries this state of affairs: “They have simply done away with Christ, cast him out and taken possession of his teaching, almost regarding him at last as one does an anonymous author—the doctrine is the principal thing, the whole thing.”6
To become religious (Kierkegaard’s third stage), people must admit the inadequacy of their efforts to live a worthy life in God’s sight. Kierkegaard brought Jesus Christ back to the center of Christian faith in such a way that people would forsake debate on this or that doctrine and give themselves unreservedly, with “fear and trembling,” into Christ’s hands.
“Something Queer Is Going On”
Anyone who has plowed through Kierkegaard’s dense prose has wished he could have addressed his task more succinctly! However, the broad outlines are clear. He focused on the paradox of the incarnation. How could Jesus of Nazareth be fully God and yet fully man?
Kierkegaard distinguished between a provisional and an absolute paradox.7 In a provisional paradox, reason is employed to finally reconcile the opposite sides of the paradox. (Using this distinction, we saw that many of Jesus’ paradoxical sayings are provisional.) With an absolute paradox such as Jesus Christ, however, reason is stymied. Reason is not prohibited or useless, although Kierkegaard has been falsely charged as an irrationalist. No, reason simply reaches a point beyond which it cannot proceed. Hence Kierkegaard’s dictum that “reasons can be given to explain why no reasons can be given.”8
Why is reason stymied? Because the incarnation proposes that a God outside of history has stepped into history and revealed himself. If God’s self-revelation were completely amenable to historical categories—with evidence that could be used by reason to prove or disprove, in the manner of scientific method—then obviously we would not be dealing with a supernatural God. God is absolutely other, the great Unknown (God exists beyond history). Yet God is not absolutely other, because God became a human being (God entered our history).
Kierkegaard finds this paradox to be characteristic of the whole biblical account. This is not because he is so enraptured with paradox that he sees it behind every burning bush, or because he thinks God’s nature is self-contradictory, or because he believes God delights in playing paradoxical games with us. No, paradox arises because God cannot communicate all of who he is through the medium of history, just as I could not communicate everything about myself to my five-year-old daughter. Roger Hazelton neatly summarizes: “The best God can do, then—although this course is dictated by our limitations and not his—is to create within history a disturbance which calls attention to the fact that something queer is going on. However, because the evidence itself can be nothing other than historical—which is all that we are capable of perceiving—the matter is most paradoxical.”9
Kierkegaard lifts up God’s problem and the resultant incarnation through his parable of a king who loves a peasant maiden.10 How is the king to win the maiden’s love? The easiest course would be simply to arrive on her humble doorstep in his regal splendor and announce his love for her. But this will not do. She will be so overwhelmed and dazzled by his presence that she cannot relate to the man behind the regalia. The king might whisk her away from her squalid life and elevate her to his side. But he wisely realizes that she will never be able to overcome her self-perception as a lowly maiden, even if clothed in queenly garments. What is the king to do? Suddenly he has it! He will wear peasants’ clothes and visit the maiden as a lowly traveler, poor and hungry. In Kierkegaard’s often-used term for the incarnation, the king will arrive “incognito.” Alan Richardson offers an evocative description of this mystery of the incognito, whereby the revelation in Jesus Christ can be missed altogether: “He who is the Word Incarnate, speaks our language so perfectly, that no trace of a foreign accent is discernible, and he can readily be mistaken for one of ourselves, a native.”11
Arriving incognito changes nothing, of course; he is still the king. But now, if he wins the maiden’s love (and this is by no means guaranteed), it will be genuine love. It will be on her terms, not his. In like manner, Christ descended from his heavenly throne and “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:7). He is easily mistaken for a native. Thus, when we look at Jesus Christ, two options are always open: we can understand him as God-in-the-flesh, or we can understand him as a native—a great moral or ethical teacher, perhaps, but just another human being.
The Absurd
Kierkegaard called the absolute paradox that is Jesus Christ “the Absurd.” Speaking into a culture of easy-believism, Kierkegaard chose a title that keeps challenging us, like a sesame seed caught between tooth and gum. He is not saying that Jesus himself is absurd or that we must believe absurdities. Rather, we reach a point where Jesus Christ is Absurd to human reason. Kierkegaard explains how: “The function of the understanding is to recognize the Absurd as such—and then leave it up to each and every man whether or not he will believe it. . . . The Absurd, the Paradox, is constructed so that the reason is by no means able of itself to resolve it into nonsense and show that it is nonsense.”12 Honest human reason reaches a point regarding the paradox of Jesus where it knows it cannot reach a conclusion: “No, it is a sign, an enigma, a composite enigma, of which the reason must say, ‘I cannot solve it, it is not for me to understand it,’ but from this it does not follow that it is nonsense.”13
As we saw in our introduction to mystery, a conundrum or blank wall is not mysterious. Reason is perfectly capable of telling us, “It’s just a blank wall,” or, “It’s just nonsense.” Mystery is encountered when reason can tell us some things, but not every thing. In fact, the more reason can argue the case on either side of a paradox, the deeper the mystery. The car headlights dispel the fog, but as we follow their radiance farther into the fog, they reveal even more fog than we first realized was there.
What, then, can we do when reason ultimately fails before the mystery of God? This has been Kierkegaard’s destination all along, pushing us out of our cozy nest of reason onto a limb where we are confronted (existentially!) with the truth that Christianity involves a choice, a leap of faith. Contrary to Kierkegaard’s detractors, his famous leap of faith is not a blind leap in the dark.14 Reason has resolved that in Jesus Christ we are facing a paradox that cannot be solved by reason alone. But during the process, reflection has uncovered solid evidence for choosing Jesus as God-in-the-flesh (for example: Jesus’ actions and character as they shine through the Scriptures; the reactions of others to him; and so on). While the incarnation cannot be proven with historical evidence (the way Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo might be proven), neither is faith in Jesus as God-in-the-flesh a blind leap. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is beyond reason, but it is not against reason.15 Diogenes Allen summarizes Kierkegaard’s contribution: “Each person must venture in faith, which from the standpoint of ‘objective thinking’ is acting without sufficient reason. But actually a person who has faith has reasons for acting. Kierkegaard describes what motivates or moves a person to . . . respond with faith to the Christian gospel.”16
Kierkegaard shows us not all biblical paradoxes are reserved for ivory tower contemplation. Jesus Christ as God-in-the-flesh forces us to make a real-life choice, the greatest and most far-reaching decision of our lives. All other personal decisions—whom we marry, what career we pursue, where we live—pale in comparison. Kierkegaard forces us to face head-on the Absurd paradox of Jesus Christ as the undeniable core of Christian faith.
Someone might reply, “But I’m not an intellectual. I’d never be caught dead reading Kierkegaard! What good is all this talk about ‘the Absurd’ to me?”
For years, I led what I called seeker groups in my home, inviting people who wondered whether the Christian faith was viable for them. Every person sitting in my living room might have been either an aesthetic person (wondering whether this Jesus offered a novel spiritual experience or would cramp their lifestyle) or an ethical person (assuming they were doing an adequate job of living however they defined a “good life,” and wondering why they needed anything else, especially a Savior).
All knew a little about Jesus, but to move their hands to the very ends of these opposing handles—a man 100 percent human just like them, yet also the God who created them—indeed often sounded absurd. In Roger Hazelton’s fine phrase, quoted earlier, the incarnation is “a disturbance which calls attention to the fact that something queer is going on.” If they hung around the group long enough, then pondering this disturbance eventually led them beyond the safely speculative, “Who do people say I am?” to the personal choice, “Come, follow me.” Not all answered that call, but they better understood what was at stake.
Even after we become followers of Jesus, however, the paradoxical push and pull of his divine and human natures is part of our ordinary, even daily, experience. We sing songs praising Jesus as our intimate friend, then minutes later listen to a sermon describing him as the sovereign King of Kings. We cry out to Jesus for help as we take an exam, believing he understands all our human needs, and then marvel at his creative majesty as we walk home along tree-lined streets in a kaleidoscope of fall colors. We are one minute supremely comforted that Jesus, sharing our humanity, “has been tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb. 4:15), and the next minute embarrassed as we remember that he sees into our deepest personal darkness and that nothing is hidden from him (John 3:19–21).
The great Dane’s fight against the Christendom of his day has parallels with our own. Whether we speak of a cultural religion of the Left (politically correct social action) or the Right (American exceptionalism blessed by God), in C. Stephen Evans’s words, “Christendom tones down the radical character of God’s demands on a person’s life.”17 Kierkegaard will not have it. It is exactly this god-of-my-tribe that Kierkegaard has in his crosshairs. Jesus remains the Absurd—absurd to the Left that he would hold people to high standards of personal morality (Matt. 5–7), and absurd to the Right that he encouraged people to pay taxes (Matt. 22:19–21). As American Christianity increasingly splinters into polarized enclaves, Jesus Christ, the Absurd, explodes all our efforts to make him into the spiritual mascot for our particular cause.
We encounter again Chesterton’s fear that the black and white of orthodoxy will meld into a dirty gray. Jesus Christ is human enough to care about our causes, yet God enough to transcend them and stand in judgment of them. He is domestic but never domesticated. “Godhead and manhood came together in a mysterious and incomprehensible union without confusion or change.”18 All of the major heresies of Christian history have whittled away at either Jesus’ humanity or his divinity, often with cultural or even political motives.
Finally, Kierkegaard reminds us that God is far larger than human reason. In Kierkegaard’s day, Christendom was a comfortable cul-de-sac where people thought they had God all figured out. Tony Campolo calls out this danger for us with a directness some may find troubling:
Middle-class religion is uncomfortable with Kierkegaard’s method for truth. The middle class likes things under control. Its people are rational and want a religion that makes life easier and happier. They buy religious books that reduce Christianity to a reasonable plan for successful living. They seek churches that promise a healthy, optimistic suffering.
His truth is discovered through despair. His form of Christianity is out of sync with the culture. Middle-class religion explains what a person is supposed to think, but it fails to make people into Christians. It invites a person to accept reasoned-out, propositional statements about God but leaves him/her unconverted. It deludes people into believing that they are Christians if they give intellectual assent to theological statements.19
If there is a creator God, and if this God arrived incognito, entering our earthly existence as a human being, and if this God paradoxically retained 100 percent of his divinity even as he became 100 percent human, then this is a God worthy of our serious exploration, even though confronting the Absurd paradox in Jesus Christ eventually requires us to make a choice.
Reflection Questions
1. Does Kierkegaard’s description of three types of persons—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—square with your observations of people around you? If you are a Christian, which best describes you before you became a Christian?
2. How do you react to Jesus Christ, “the Absurd”? What is your response to how this played out in the author’s seeker groups?
3. Is the issue of Christendom a live issue for you (or your church, if you have one) as it was for Kierkegaard? In what ways do you see it so?
4. Is the final quotation from Tony Campolo an overstatement, or a prophetic description of the dangers of middle-class religion today?