Sources

Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints.

J. Collins, God in Modern Philosophy.

W. L. Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument.

R.    Flint. Agnosticism.

N. L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, chap. 1.

--, Christian Ethics.

--,Miracles and Modern Thought.

N. L. Geisler and W. Corduan, Philosophy of Religion, chaps. 7-9.

S.    Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism, part 1.

I. Kant, Critique of Judgment.

--, Critique of Practical Reason Alone.

--, Critique of Pure Reason.

--, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

--, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments.

C. S. Lewis, Miracles.

Kierkegaard, S0ren. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was born in Copenhagen, the son of Michael Pederson, who amassed a fortune selling drapes, then sold his business in 1786 to study theology. Kierkegaard said he was reared with severity and piety by a melancholy old man. His mother and five of his six brothers died when he was young, the result, it was said, of a curse on the family. He referred to the deaths in the title of his first book, From Papers of One Still Living. He was of high intellect but lazy, and he loved the theater, especially Mozart. Hans Christian Andersen portrayed the frequently drunken young Kierkegaard as a principal character in his novel Shoes of Fortune. Converted to Christianity and reconciled with his father in 1838, he studied from 1831 to 1841 before receiving a master’s degree in philosophy. He became engaged to Regina Olsen after graduation but decided not to marry.

Writings. Kierkegaard’s amazing literary output began when he was twenty-one years old in 1834 and continued to 1855.

Starting with From the Papers of One Still Living, the writer produced many aesthetic and philosophical essays and books. These works include the discourses “The Expectation of Faith,” “Every Good and Perfect Gift Is from Above,” “Love Shall Cover a Multitude of Sins,”

“Strengthened in the Inner Man,” “The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away,” “To Acquire One’s Soul in Patience,” “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience,” “Patience in Expectation,” “The Thorn in the Flesh,” “Against Cowardice,” “The Righteous Man Strives in Prayer with God and

Conquers—in That God Conquers,” “A Confessional Service,” “On the Occasion of a Wedding,” and “At the Side of a Grave.”

His books in aesthetics include Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, Philosophical Fragments, Prefaces, Repetition, Stages on Life’s Way, 77zc Concept of Dread, and 77zc Concept of Irony.

The explicitly religious writings of Kierkegaard include Armed Neutrality, Attack upon “Christendom, ” Judge for Yourselves, On Authority and Revelation: The Book of Adler, On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Reply to Theophilus Nicolaus (Faith and Paradox), The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethico-Religious Communication, The Gospel of Suffering, The High Priest—The Publican—The Woman that Was a Sinner, The Individual, The Lilies of the Field, The Point of View, The Present Age, The Sickness unto Death, The Unchangeable God, Training in Christianity, What Christ’s Judgment Is about Official Christianity, and Works of Love.

Other works that fit no single category include Meditations from Kierkegaard, Newspaper Articles, The Journals of Kierkegaard, and The Prayers of Kierkegaard.

Basic Beliefs. Theologically, Kierkegaard was orthodox. He wrote that he was not out to change the doctrines taught in the church but to insist that something be done with them (Journals and Papers, 6:362). He believed in the inspiration of Scripture (see Bible, Evidence for), the *virgin birth of Christ, miracles, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the final judgment (see Hell). In “Thoughts Which Wound from Behind,” he is aghast that Christendom has replaced the resurrection with Platonic immortality.

Three Life Stages, One Eternal. Kierkegaard’s overall beliefs are expressed in his three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. His entire purpose is to get one from the aesthetic life of pleasure to the religious life of commitment by way of the moral life of duty. In My Point of View for My Work as an Author, he wrote, “I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my work as an author is related to Christianity, to the problem of becoming a Christian, with a direct or indirect polemic against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort” (ibid., 5-6).

Some contrasts are helpful to summarize these three levels:

The Aesthetic	The Ethical	The Religious
Feeling	Deciding	Existing
Self-centered	Law-centered	God-centered
Routines of Life	Rules for Life	Revelation to Life
Centered in Present	Centered in Life/Time	Centered in Eternity
Individual Is Spectator	Individual Is Participant
Live by Personal Whims	Live by Universal Norms
Life of Deliberation	Life of Decision
Life of Intellect	Life of Will
Immediate Interests	Ultimate Concerns
	Respect of Moral Law	Response to Moral Law Giver
	The Universal	The Individual
	Propositions about God	Person of God
	Objective Truth	Subjective Truth
	Essential Realm	Existential Realm

Kierkegaard describes the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical sphere in his work Either/Or (1843), an attack on the dialectical thinking of G. W. F. *Hegel (1770-1831). Kierkegaard believed that passion is the culmination of existence. There is no real value in either the objective storing of knowledge or the blissful, mystical intuition of it. Life is not found in neutral facts nor blissful insights but in responsible choices.

Kierkegaard hoped his aesthetic writings would provoke people to want to choose the religious as a way of finding eternal meaning. He wrote several “edifying discourses” to provide the answer to the despair of the aesthetic and ethical stages. Unfortunately, he found that people preferred entertainment to edification. In “Expectation of Faith,” a response to the aesthetic stage, he affirmed that solace is found only in the eternal. It is a guiding star to a sailor faced with the monotonous repetition of the waves. The tedium of the temporal is overcome only by the tranquillity of the transcendent. Faith is a passion for, and response to, the eternal. Even doubt can be an instrument that helps awaken the eternal God.

In “Every Good and Perfect Gift,” a response to the life of ethical duty, Kierkegaard shows how God uses the moral gloom for our good. Even denied prayer is not unjust. The one praying is changed for better, even if the answer is for worse. Even tragedies can be triumphs if received with thanksgiving. Every personal tragedy is somehow redeemed by God’s sovereignty. Suffering is beneficial in destroying self-will.

The Religious versus the Ethical. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard reveals how the ethical is transcended by the religious. Abraham is devoted to God’s law, which forbids killing. Nevertheless, God tells him to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Unable to explain or justify his action, Abraham suspended the ethical and made a “leap of faith” to the religious. In so doing, he dethroned the ethical without destroying it.

Kierkegaard believed religious faith to be personal, something we are. We must live it, not just know it. Spiritual truth cannot be merely acknowledged; it should be appropriated by commitment.

In Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, a further distinction is made within the religious stage. Religion A is natural religion, while religion B is supernatural. The first is religiosity; the second is Christianity. Religion A is rational, but religion B is paradoxical. The first focuses only on a general need; the latter is prompted by a special need for Christ.

In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard relates faith and reason. The book is philosophical and objective. Christianity is surveyed as to its content (what), as opposed to Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, which stresses Christianity as an existential way of life (how). This attack on human-centered philosophy profoundly influenced Karl *Barth. Human beings see God as a perplexing Unknown. God must initiate communication. Two questions are raised: First, is it possible to base eternal happiness on historical knowledge? This harkens back to Gotthold *Lessing (1729-81) and his “ditch.” Second, how can the transcendent God communicate with us?

Kierkegaard uses the parable of a king who becomes a beggar to win the love of a lowly maiden to argue that one cannot get the eternal out of the purely historical, nor the spiritual out of the rational. Original sin is the elemental human fact (see Concept of Dread). Humanity can neither know nor find the truth unless God puts them in it through revelation. This revelation, a miraculous self-authenticating disclosure, is not part of a rational system.

Reason and Revelation. Kierkegaard compared Socrates and Christ to get at the difference between revelation and reason:

Socrates’s Wisdom

Christ’s Revelation

Backward recollection	Forward expectation
Truth aroused within	Truth given from without
Truth immanent	Truth transcendent
Truth rational	Truth paradoxical
Truth comes from wise man	Truth comes from God-Man

Christian truths are neither analytic (self-evident) nor synthetic, because even if factually correct, human knowledge lacks the certainty held in Christian claims. Christian claims are paradoxical and can be accepted only by a leap of faith. There is a real transcendent God, who can only be chosen in his self-revelation. This God is meaningful and real, but paradoxical. He is the unknown limit to knowing, and he magnetically draws reason and causes passionate collision with humanity within the paradox. Reason cannot penetrate God, nor can it avoid him The very zeal of the positivists to eliminate God shows their preoccupation with him The supreme paradox of all thought is its attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.

Proofs and Pointers. God is unknown to us, even in Christ. God indicates his presence only by “signs” (pointers). The paradoxical revelation of the unknown is not knowable by reason. Human response must be a leap of faith, which is given by God but not forced on us; we can accept faith or choose to live rationally (see Fideism). Faith in God cannot be either rationally or empirically grounded. Rationally, we cannot even imagine how God is like or unlike himself. The most we can do is to project familiar qualities in the direction of the transcendent that never reach him We cannot argue from the works of nature to God, for these either assume God or lead to doubt.

Those who ask for proofs for God ignore God (see God, Evidence for). For one already possesses what he wonders about (see “On the Occasion of a Confessional Service” in Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life). Even if we could prove God’s being (in himself) it would be irrelevant to us. It is God’s existence or relatedness to us that is of religious significance. The gospel is presented only as an existential choice, not for rational reflection (Postscripts, 485; Works of Love, 74). God is not irrational. God is suprarational, which transcends finite rationality. The real absurdity in the human situation is that people must act as though certain, even though they have no reason for certainty.

Faith and the Lrrational. Concluding Unscientific Postscripts adds that objective reason can never find existential truth. Proofs can neither establish nor overthrow Christianity. To try to prove God is as shameless an insult as to ignore him To reduce Christianity to objective probability would be to make it a treasure one could carelessly possess, like money in the bank.

Faith in religious facts, such as the incarnation or the authority of Scripture, is not true faith. True faith is the gift of God and unattainable by effort. The incarnation (see Christ, Deity of) and Bible are objective points of reference, but they are not reasons. True faith is a leap to God’s revelation that does not rest on objectively rational or empirical evidence. Reason, however, plays the negative role of helping us distinguish nonsense from paradox. The Christian is prevented by reason from believing sheer nonsense (Postscripts, 504). He tells the parable of an insane man who wants to prove that he is sane. He bounces a ball, saying, “Bang, the earth is round.” He points out that what the man said was true, but he nevertheless fails to prove he is sane. How he says it shows that he is not rightly related to the truth (ibid., 174).

Volitional and Rational Knowledge of God. Sin, not our mental inability, makes God seem an absolute paradox. This absolute paradox becomes absurd in the cross, the offense offered by the gospel. The human task, therefore, is not to intellectually comprehend God but to existentially submit to him in sacrificial love. The paradox is not theoretical but volitional. It is not metaphysical but axiological. God is folly to our mind and an offense to our heart. The objective paradox of God in Christ is to be answered by a paradoxical response of faith and love.

Scripture. Kierkegaard believed the Bible to be the inspired Word of God (see Revelation, Special). He wrote, “To be alone with the Holy Scriptures! I dare not! When I turn up a passage in it, whatever comes to hand—it catches me instantly, it questions me (indeed it is as if it were God Himself that questioned me, ‘Hast thou done what thou readest there?’).” He even calls it “God’s Word,” adding, “My hearer, how highly dost thou esteem God^,s WorcF (Self-Examination, 51). Kierkegaard even believed the canon to be closed and that God is giving no new revelation. He severely criticized someone who claimed they had received new revelation.

On the other hand, Kierkegaard did not believe it necessary or important to defend the inerrancy of Scripture. This is evident in his views on the eternal and temporal, as well as his comments on biblical criticism (see Bible Criticism).

The eternal and the temporal. How can eternal salvation depend on historical (and thereby uncertain) documents? How can the historical give nonhistorical knowledge? (see Christ of Faith vs. Jesus of History). Kierkegaard’s answer is that, insofar as the Bible gives empirical data, it is an insufficient ground for religious belief. Only Spirit-inspired faith finds the eternal God in the temporal Christ (see Holy Spirit, Role in Apologetics). The biblical writers do not primarily certify the historicity of Christ’s deity (see Christ, Deity of); rather, they testify to the deity of Christ in history. Hence, biblical criticism is irrelevant. The important thing is not the historicity of Christ but his contemporaneity as a person who confronts people today by faith in the offense of the gospel. The Jesus of history is a necessary presupposition, but history does not prove his messiahship. The only proof of his messiahship is our discipleship.

Historicity and contemporaneity. If the eternal comes as an event in history, how is it equally available to all generations? The answer is that faith does not depend on happenstance, or being in the street when Jesus walked by. This would be mere physical contemporaneity. Faith is centered in a historical event, but it is not based on it. No superficial contemporaneity can occasion faith; only spiritual contemporaneity can. For “if the contemporary generation had left nothing behind them but these words: ‘We have believed that in such and such a year the God appeared among us in the humble form of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,’ it would be more than enough” (ibid., 130). So time is immaterial to faith. There is no secondhand discipleship.

Biblical criticism. To the Bible’s apologist, Kierkegaard exhorts, “Whoever defends the Bible in the interest of faith must have made it clear to himself whether, if he succeeds beyond expectations, there could from all his labor ensure anything at all with respect to faith.” To the critic he warns, “Whoever attacks the Bible must also have sought a clear understanding of whether, if the attack succeeds beyond all measure, anything else would follow than the philological result.” If Bible defenders achieve their wildest dreams in proving what books belong to the canon, their authenticity, trustworthiness, and inspiration, so what? Has anyone who previously did not have faith been brought a step closer? Faith does not result simply from a scientific inquiry; it does not come directly at all. On the contrary, “in this objectivity one tends to lose that infinite personal interestedness in passion which is the condition of faith” (Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, 29-30). But what if the Bible’s opponents have proven all they allege about the Bible, does that abolish Christianity? By no means. If the believer “had assumed it by virtue of any proof, he would have been on the verge of giving us his faith.” Faith does not need the proof, he said. Faith, in fact, regards proof as its enemy (ibid., 31).

Elsewhere Kierkegaard affirms that, in order to make room for faith, men and women must be freed from the shackles of historical necessity. History is not an unfolding necessity, as Hegel said, but a free response to challenge and confrontation Freedom escapes the net of scientific explanation

Natural Theology Rejected. Natural religion is good, but it is not Christian, because it lacks transcendent disclosure. It supplements Christianity but is pathetic without Christianity to fulfill it. It arises by a collision of reason with the unknown (a concept developed in Rudolph Otto’s Numinous), but it never goes beyond the collision. A human being is a god-maker who deifies whatever is overwhelming. But deep in the heart of natural piety lurks a caprice that knows it has produced the deity and that the deity is a fantasy. Hence, natural religion veers either to *polytheism, which collects all its fantasies, or to *pantheism, which is an incongruous merger of them So Kierkegaard concludes that the nearest reason that brings God is still the farthest from us he ever is.

Kierkegaard adds an interesting observation on comparative religion. Buddhism, he says, seeks eternal outside of time—by meditation. Socrates sought eternal before time—by recollection. But Christianity seeks eternal in time—by revelation.

Evaluation. Although Kierkegaard can be taken to be a mild evidentialist with respect to objective, historical truths, when it comes to religious truth he is almost a classic example of a fideist. He, and Karl *Barth following him, are fountain heads of the Christian attack on a rational and evidential approach to Christianity in the modern world. Nonetheless, there are many values in Kierkegaardian thought, even for Christian apologetics.

Positive Contributions. Kierkegaard can be commended for his belief in the fundamentals of Christian faith. He stressed a personal encounter with authentic Christianity, the importance of individual free will versus behavioral determinism, and a return to New Testament faith. He emphasized God’s unchangeability, transcendence, and grace and human depravity. He offered creative insights into many Bible passages.

A corrective to rationalism. Some rationalists, such as Rene *Descartes, Gottfried *Leibniz, and Christian Wolfe, stressed an extreme rational approach to God. They underemphasized the role of faith and personal encounter in a genuine relationship with God. They overstated their arguments for God’s existence (see God, Evidence for), claiming they were mathematically certain. Kierkegaard’s attack on rationalism and stress on a personal encounter with the living God are helpful correctives to sterile rationalism

The classic distinction between reason and the truths of faith (see Faith and Reason) is sometimes forgotten in modern rational apologetics. There are truths that, while not going against reason, go beyond reason (see Mystery). Kierkegaard saw this clearly.

The real basis for belief. Some classical apologists (see Classical Apologetics) and evidential apologists (see Apologetics, Types of) tend to forget that faith is not based in evidence or reason about God but in God himself. Our belief is supported by evidence. Kierkegaard emphasized this point to a fault.

Helpful preevangelism. Few have described the despair of the aesthetic life so clearly as did Kierkegaard. Either/Or gives an unparalleled view of the futility of life apart from God. This can be cast into an implied argument from religious need (see God, Evidence for).

The historical and the eternal. Kierkegaard is correct in observing that there is more to a miracle than the mere historical dimensions, and the historical is insufficient to bring one into contact with the living God (see Miracles, Myth and). Overemphasis by historical apologists can be misconstrued to imply that one can reach God via the historical evidence alone. Pointed reminders of the gulf between the historical and the eternal are well made. He is correct in noting that, even if one had

perfect historical records, that information would not in itself bring one into contact with God.

Difficulties. Fideism. As other fideists, Kierkegaard offers self-defeating reasons for fideism, which claims that one cannot offer reasons for matters of faith. More on this point is discussed in the article Fideism.

Separating fact and value. Following Immanuel Kant, Kierkegaard radically separates fact and value, is and ought. This gave impetus to the separation of the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith {see Christ of Faith vs. Jesus of History; Jesus Seminar; Miracles, Myth and). While the historical as such does not bring one into contact with the eternal, neither can the eternal be divorced from real history. While Kierkegaard does not deny the historical reality of miracles, he downplays the importance of that dimension. Miracles may be more than historical, but they are not less. By denying the importance of the historical, he undermines the authenticity of the New Testament and, with it, New Testament Christianity. The shift in emphasis from fact to value leads to the denial of fact and its support for faith.

Evidential support for faith. While Kierkegaard is correct that faith is based not in fact but in God, he is wrong in assuming that there is no rational and evidential support for faith. Of course, God is the basis of faith in God, but this does not mean we have no accompanying rational or evidential support for belief. Kierkegaard goes too far when he claims, “The miracle can prove nothing; for if you do not believe that he is what he says he is, you deny the miracle. A miracle can make one attentive” {Training in Christianity, 99).

Belief in and belief that. There is no evidence for belief in God. This is strictly a matter of faith. Nonetheless, there is evidence for believing that there is a God. Kierkegaard fails to stress the importance of having evidence that God exists. No rational person would place faith in an elevator to go to the ninth floor without evidence that the elevator could do this. Likewise, no rational person should trust in God unless it is reasonable to believe that there is a God who is trustworthy.

The role of theistic arguments. Kierkegaard offers no disproofs of arguments for God as did Kant {see God, Objections to Proofs for). He offers only a kind of existential complaint against theistic arguments, that they are an offense to God. But why should the God of reason be offended when we use reason? Reason is part of the very thing that makes us like him (Gen. 1:27).

A wholly other God. The concept of God as “wholly Other” is a form of *agnosticism. Like Kant’s noumenal realm (the thing-in-itself), God can never be known. We can know only that he is, but not what he is. But it is impossible to know pure “thatness.” We must know something about what something is or we cannot know that it is. Even a strange gadget we have never seen before is not “wholly other.” We may not know its purpose, but we can know its size, shape, and color. The very affirmation that we know nothing about God is a claim to know something about him; hence, it is self-defeating. Purely negative knowledge about something is impossible. The claim that God is not “this” implies that we know the “this.” So the view of religious language as mere pointers to God that do not really describe him leaves us in total self-defeating ignorance.

Suspension of the ethical. In his suspension of the ethical for the religious, Kierkegaard paved the way for situation ethics. Even though he believed strongly in God’s moral laws, on the highest level of duty—his relation to God—there is no way to distinguish right from wrong. The existential encounter with God places one beyond rational and ethical realms. Regardless of the rational and ethical context in which one begins, the suspension of the ethical for the religious leaves one without any real guide on the highest level for right and wrong.

Subjectivity of truth. Kierkegaard did not claim that truth is subjective. He said, “Truth is subjectivity.” And while he did not deny objective truth {see Truth, Nature of) in science or

history, he did deny that religious truth is objective or testable. Not only does this leave us with a mere subjective test for religious truth, but it confuses the objective nature of religious truth with the subjective condition of receiving it. Certainly one should apply truths of Christianity to life subjectively, but this does not mean truths should be defined as subjectivity. All truth objectively corresponds to the state of affairs being described.

Minimizing the historically necessarily. When Kierkegaard spoke of the mere belief in a man named Jesus, in whom people believed God dwelt as the minimal historical facts necessary for the Christian faith, he invited the radical demythologizing of Bultmann. It flies in the face of the New Testament claim that the fact of the bodily resurrection is absolutely necessary to Christianity. As the apostle Paul declared, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins”

(1 Cor. 15:17; cf. Rom 10:9).

Personal and propositional revelation. Though he believed in the inspiration of Scripture, Kierkegaard’s stress on the personal nature of religious truth and the need for an existential encounter with God tilted the axiological scales against propositional revelation. It was not only downplayed but also separated from what is really important, personal revelation. This led to the neo-orthodoxy of Karl *Barth and Emil Brunner, which denied the historic, orthodox view that revelation is propositional.

There is no need for such a disjunction. Propositional revelation can be very personal, as anyone who has ever written a love letter knows. God’s love letter, the Bible, is written in propositions, but it conveys a very personal message. Those who read it and respond enter into a very personal relation to God.

The terms leap, absurd, and paradox. Kierkegaard was not an irrationalist, as some have claimed, but his use of terms make him sound like one. Absurd and paradox have generally been reserved, from Zeno through Kant, to mean a logical contradiction (see First Principles; Logic and God). They are, at best, an unfortunate choice of terms and are generally misleading. Kierkegaard has been widely misunderstood, partly because he used them Likewise, to speak of a “leap” of faith sounds irrational, as even Kierkegaard seemed later to recognize (see Journals, 581). Such extreme words to describe the mystery of what does not go against reason, but merely beyond it, only invite misunderstanding.

Sources

G. E. Arbaugh and G. B. Arbaugh, Kierkegaard's Authorship.

F. Carmicat 'The Unknown and Unread Soren Kierkegaard.”

E. J. Camell, The Burden of Soren Kierkegaard.

J. Collins, The Existentialists.

C. S. Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self.

--, Passionate Reason.

--, Subjectivity and Religious Belief.

P. S. Minear et at, Kierkegaard and the Bible.

E. H. Nygren, "Existentialism: Kierkegaard.”

See also the numerous Kierkegaard works cited above.

Krishna. See Hinduism, Vedanta; Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions; World Religions and Christianity.

Kushner, Harold. Harold Kushner is a late-twentieth-century American Jewish rabbi whose popular version of *finite godism is expressed in his best-selling books, When Bad Things Happen to Good People and When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn ^,t Enough. Kushner challenges Christianity at several major points, particularly in his rejection of miracles and arguments for a finite God (see Miracles, Arguments Against).

A Limited God. According to Kushner, there is one God who is limited in power and perfection. But “when we speak of one God, are we doing something more than taking a census of how many divine beings there are? Are we perhaps saying that God ‘has it all together’ ?” {When All You’ve Ever Wanted', 133). Further, “because He is One, He is all alone unless and until there are other people to love Him” (ibid., 56). This God “cannot monopolize all the Power and leave none for us” (ibid.). Not only is God limited because of us, but he is limited because of his nature. As Kushner put it, “I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by the laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom” {When Bad Things Happen, 134). We must realize “that even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (ibid., 43).

Kushner views God’s finitude as an asset to our lives rather than a liability. For “if we can bring ourselves to acknowledge that there are some things God does not control, many good things become possible” (ibid., 45). In fact, “God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help” (ibid., 141). God cannot control the world and human beings, but he “is the divine power urging them to grow, to reach, to dare” (ibid., 132).

Forgiving God for Evil. Evil is real {When All You ^,ve Ever Wanted, 89). “To be alive is to feel pain, and to hide from pain is to make yourself less alive” (ibid.). The world is unjust, and we must adjust to it. Rather than blame God, we need to forgive God. In a poignant passage, the rabbi asks:

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you leam to love and forgive Him despite His limitations ... as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? (When Bad Things Happen, 148)

The solution to the problem of evil {see Evil, Problem of) is “to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all” (ibid., 147).

Evaluation. Positive Contributions. Even though his finite godism is false, his articulation of the view contains truths.

Acknowledgment of the problem of evil. Kushner has centered his thought in a crucial area—the problem of evil. In this regard, he acknowledges the reality of evil instead of opting for a *pantheism that denies it. He is right that tornadoes have no conscience; they strike both good and bad people. They hit churches and houses of prostitution. Any adequate solution to the problem of natural evil must deal with this reality {see Evil, Problem of). Kushner attempts to find this solution. He doesn’t relegate it to the realm of the ultimately inexplicable. Although theists do not agree with the solution (see below), nonetheless, we commend his attempt to find a solution.

Insights into the problem of suffering. Having experienced physical suffering, Kushner is not a detached observer; he is sensitive to the existential impact of suffering. His perspective is the difference between C. S. *Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain, when he was not experiencing it personally, and his later reflections in A Grief Observed, after his wife died from cancer.

Recognition of the problem in divine intervention. He also points to a problem some theists tend to overlook. Given the reality of the human condition, God cannot do everything. There are operational limits on divine intervention God cannot violate the human freedom he gave to beings in his image. So performing a miracle contrary to moral freedom is operationally impossible for God. Continually intervening would upset the very laws of nature that make both physical and moral life possible.

Weaknesses and Objections. Most of the objectionable aspects of Kushner’s thought are critiqued in other articles. They will be noted here with references.

First, finite godism is without foundation (see Finite Godism).

Second, Kushner’s concept of evil is inadequate (see Evil, Problem of).

Third, Kushner’s denial of the supernatural is unfounded (see Miracle).

Fourth, his denial of immortality is contrary to the evidence (see Immortality). Without this denial his case crumbles, since it depends on the premise that wrongs of this life will not be rectified in the next life (see Geisler, Roots of Evil, app. 3).

In spite of its popularity, Kushner’s form of finite godism, especially as it relates to evil, does not stand up to scrutiny. It has more emotional appeal than rational justification.

Sources

N. L. Geisler, The Roots of Evil.

---,If God, Why Evil!

---, Televised debate with H. Kushner, The John Ankerberg Show.

H. Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough.

---, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.