Soren Kierkegaard uses the occasion of Magister Adler’s claim to have had a revelation, along with Adler’s subsequent loss of conviction concerning his claim, to illustrate the rationalization that characterizes the present age and its relation to the essentially Christian. In so doing, Kierkegaard contrasts the genius with the apostle, demonstrating the authoritative superiority of the latter. Moreover, even while casting doubt on the evidential value of the miraculous, Kierkegaard nevertheless affirms that the apostle does have evidence to back his claims to authority, namely, that by having divine authority, the apostle is recognizable precisely by his unswerving demand to be heard as a divine emissary and not waiting for public approval to assume his God-given position.
At the same moment that I am writing this, I am also enjoying in the background the incredible musical ability, you might even say, musical genius, of the guitarist Joe Satriani. To me, Satriani seems to be able “say” with a guitar what I cannot even say with words. An exceptionally skilled musician, a musical genius, just seems to be able touch the human spirit in this unique sort of way. Obviously, the category of genius is not confined to the realm of the arts, nor is it typically even associated with it. Soren Kierkegaard writes of the genius in The Book on Adler,[1] but the genius to which he refers is of the intellectual type, the philosopher, even the Hegelian. The genius, in SK’s words, is one who by his very genius “can be a century ahead of his time and therefore stand as a paradox.”[2] But eventually, no matter how innovative the genius is, eventually “the human race will assimilate the one-time paradoxical in such a way that it is no longer paradoxical.”[3]
Though you may never have heard Joe Satriani play a guitar and thereby never have had the chance to appreciate his genius, I can assure you that what he does with a guitar far surpasses anything Chuck Berry, B. B. King, or Jimi Hendrix, geniuses from time gone by, ever thought of in their wildest imaginations. To illustrate what SK would call the quantitative difference between the genius of Satriani and, say, the genius of Hendrix, consider the scene from Back to the Future in which Marty McFly, in the 1950s at this point, is playing with the band at the sock hop dance and suddenly breaks out into a 1980s Eddie Van Halen-esque guitar solo that leaves the audience, not to mention the band, in total, stunned disbelief. When Marty finally comes to himself and recognizes the astonishment he has caused, he utters to the crowd words to which only he and Doc could have known the full import: “Oh. I guess you’re not ready for that yet.”
What Marty McFly in this scene of Back to the Future illustrates is precisely what Soren Kierkegaard means in Adler when he says that the genius might for a time appear on the scene as “a paradox,” someone that seems unsolvable, unapproachable, or unsurpassable. But, as is the nature of the category of genius, over the course of time, the rest of humanity will eventually catch up, and what previously seemed so unreachable, will someday seem normal, pedestrian, or even backwards. Surely, we might think back nostalgically to the day when Jimi Hendrix wowed the music world with his up-till-then-unheard of “ax handling.” But that is precisely the point. The genius is only recognized as a genius when one puts him in his proper historical context. The one-time genius is equally the potential relic, that is, he becomes quite normal once he is lifted out of his own age to a later time when humanity has finally caught up with him.
To press the point, imagine Copernicus arriving on the scene in the year 2006 and calling a press conference to announce that he had just recently discovered that the sun is the center of the solar system. One would surely be justified in thinking that he was not watching an actual news story, but rather a spoof from Saturday Night Live! or The Daily Show. Such an “announcement” would not be new, but old. At one time the genius known as Copernicus was a “paradox” compared to others, but now, the rest of humanity has “assimilate[d] the one-time paradoxical in such a way that it is no longer paradoxical.” Presumably, no one today marvels at the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus, and those like him, can only be considered to be geniuses when measured against the world of their time. In sum, the genius is bound by immediacy, by the esthetic, by nature, and by quantitative, temporal comparison with other men. Like parachute pants and hoola hoops, the genius is enslaved to the particular time that he happens to arrive on the world’s stage.
Not so with the apostle. While a genius is “born,” and “there can occur the change of development into being what he is, of coming into conscious possession of himself,”[4] the apostle is not born (as an apostle), and could never have become an apostle by cultivating his natural assets. Rather, the apostle is divinely called – he never would have “come into his own” as a result of his own life-development. As a result, while the genius is paradoxical for only as long as it takes for the rest of humanity to catch up to him, the world never “catches up” to the apostle. Indeed, the apostolic calling stands as “a paradoxical fact that in the first and the last moment of his life stands paradoxically outside his personal identity as the specific person he is.”[5] Moreover: “By this paradoxical fact the apostle is for all eternity made paradoxically different from all other human beings. . . . However long it is proclaimed in the world, it remains essentially just as new, just as paradoxical; no immanence can assimilate it. The apostle did not act as the person distinguished by natural gifts who was ahead of his contemporaries.”[6] And for this very reason the apostle has authority and the genius does not, leading SK to infer: “I am not to listen to Paul because he is brilliant or matchlessly brilliant, but I am to submit to Paul because he has divine authority.”[7] The genius is what he is by his own immanent teleology; the apostle is what he is by the essentially paradoxical, absolute teleology of the divine calling. Thus, irrespective of the elements of time or skill, the apostle has authority; his relation is not to time or skill, but to eternity and calling.
While the Copernican revolution raises no eyebrows in our age, the Christian revolution, rather revelation, is eternally relevant, authoritative, and paradoxical. SK’s evident irritation with his own age can be located at this very point: his was an age whose very spirituality had been domesticated by the System. The Christian revelation raised only a few more eyebrows in his day than would a present day announcement that (surprise!) we live in a helio-centric solar system, a lament that clearly animates much of his philosophy. But one should take care not to think that the Christian revelation is an “eyebrow raiser” simply because Paul the Apostle was such a brilliant, insightful writer who artfully used grammar, logic, and word pictures to advance his arguments. May it never be! Quite the contrary: “[Paul] must not become involved in a purely esthetic or philosophic discussion of the content of the doctrine, since in that case he is absentminded. No, he must appeal to his divine authority and precisely through it.”[8] It may very well be the case that the Apostle Paul was indeed quite the wordsmith. No matter. His timeless authority comes from the fact that he is anapostle, and no other trait or feature can either add to or subtract from the force of that reality. Paul does not stand in a quantitative relationship to the rest of humanity, to be compared favorable or unfavorably in his intellect and literary skill to Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, or whomever. As an apostle, he stands qualitatively distinct from the non-apostle.
To hearken back to the music illustration, it is entirely possible that I might listen to a six-string genius and consequently aspire to someday be quantitatively compared to him. I can work hard and thereby cultivate my natural assets, should I have any, in such a say that in the course of my life-development I can draw upon my own potential to the end that I too might “come into conscious possession of myself” as a genius.[9] While such a case cannot a priori be ruled out, in contradistinction, no one can aspire to be an apostle. That is a priori the case. No one can work at being an apostle. No one has the possibility within himself to be an apostle. An apostle is not born, but called. An apostle does not stand quantitatively comparable to the rest of humanity, but qua apostle, is qualitatively distinct. And therefore, and for that reason alone, the apostle has timeless authority that no genius can likewise claim.
As Howard and Edna Hong note in the historical introduction, The Book on Adler while “ostensibly about Adolph Peter Adler; essentially it is about the concept of authority.”[10] Along the way, Kierkegaard often speaks of the genius with genuine admiration. Under the pseudonym Petrus Minor, SK even remarks that “a brilliant author is not something unheard of in Denmark,” an apparent oblique stab at self-aggrandizement.[11] But while the genius may be admired, fashionable, and even looked up to, it is at the same time unacceptable to SK “that I should show him religious submission, that I should imprison my judgment in obedience under his divine authority – no, that I do not do, and neither does any genius require it of me.”[12] To be sure the category of genius does not even admit of the possibility of religious authority, for “all thinking draws its breath in immanence,” and “in the sphere of immanence, authority is utterly unthinkable, or it can be thought only as transitory.”[13] Conversely, “the paradox and faith constitute a separate qualitative sphere.”[14] Religious submission, hence, is reservedly given only to him with divine authority – the apostle.
But therein lies the problem with his own age, at least as Kierkegaard sees it: the conflating of the either/or categories of genius and apostle, immanent and transcendent, quantitative and qualitative. The “eighteen hundred years,” as SK satirizes Hegelianism’s presumptuous subsuming of the Christian revelation, provide the occasion to conflate these categories. Paul is no longer the apostle, but a genius “relative to his time,” though he is still quite interesting to this day. He no longer stands qualitatively paradoxical to every age, but is now looked upon, patronizingly, as a rather bright fellow. SK characterizes this Hegelian view of the Apostle Paul with biting sarcasm:
At one moment it was a hysterical woman who had a revelation, then a sedentary artist, then a professor who became so profound that he could almost be said to have a revelation, then a peering genius who peered so deeply that he almost, nearly, as good as – stood to be called by a revelation, and in this sense Paul also had a revelation, except that he also had an uncommonly good head on his shoulders.[15]
To the Hegelian, then, Paul did not have a revelation in the sense of a qualitatively unique and trans-historically authoritative word from the divine. Rather, he was really, really smart for the age in which he lived – so smart that he could almost be said to have heard from God. And more so, he said it so well! In other words, Paul was very much like a Hegelian. Here Kierkegaard’s critique is reminiscent of the modern-day concession from some American secularists that the Bible is still worthy of being taught in the public schools because, after all, it is exceptionally good literature.
For SK, this Hegelian re-reading of Paul seems to occupy his less than affirmative characterization of those who were the “defenders of the faith” in his day. In Adler, that negative view strongly influences his valuation of the evidential worth of the miraculous. Key to understanding how SK views the apologetic value of miracles is his characterization of “the eighteen hundred years,” a reference, of course, to the time that has elapsed between his own age and the age in which the Christian revelation was first given. For instance, consider the following:
Christianity is the paradoxical truth; it is the paradox that the eternal once came into existence in time. This paradoxical fact . . . does not, because it is eighteen hundred years later, become more true than it was the day it occurred. That the eternal once came into existence in time is not a truth that must stand up to the test of time, is not something that must be tested by human beings but is the paradox by which human beings must be tested.[16]
Clearly it is not with the epistemic objectivity of the Christian revelation with which SK here takes issue, but rather the seemingly arrogant idea that, owing to “the eighteen hundred years” (i.e., the gracious assistance of Hegelian philosophy), somehow Christian truth has become “more true.” No, it is not to man that Christian truth is accountable, but precisely the other way around. Rather than acknowledging Christianity to be contemporaneous, and therefore relevant, to every age, “orthodoxy has taken another road – with the help of the eighteen hundred years. If one were to describe this entire orthodox apologetic endeavor in a single sentence, yet also categorically, one would have to say: Its aim is to make Christianity probable.”[17] But to make Christianity merely probable has a net effect equivalent to what the infidel seeks: it falsifies the faith.[18] Moreover, the essentially Christian is not to be found in the historical, “because the essentially Christian is this paradox, that God once came into existence in time. This is the offense, but also the point of departure; whether it is eighteen hundred years ago or yesterday, one can equally be contemporary with it. Just as the North Star never changes its position and therefore has no history, so this paradox stands unmoved and unaltered.”[19] The essentially Christian, then, is God the eternal coming into existence in time. That paradox necessarily makes Christianity contemporaneous with every age. It also makes the essentially Christian an offense. But rather than admit the offense, orthodoxy seeks refuge in the eighteen hundred years: “Furthermore, when someone attacks Christianity and places himself on the outside, orthodoxy defends it by means of the eighteen hundred years; it speaks in lofty tones about the extraordinary acts of God in the past, that is, eighteen hundred years ago. As for the extraordinary and the extraordinary acts of God, it must be said that people lap it up the more easily the longer ago it was.”[20]
Thus, orthodoxy is able to explain away the offense, including the intelligence-insulting idea of the miraculous, by transforming Paul from the transcendent, authoritative apostle to the literary genius forever bound by immanence, thus perpetrating unbelief:
If one only says that one can understand that those men eighteen hundred years ago believed that it was a miracle, then one can just as well say straight out that one does not believe it oneself. Yet people prefer to avail themselves of deceptive locutions such as this one, which appears to be so believing and yet precisely denies the miracle, since it says of those men that they believed it, namely, that they were serious about it, namely, that one does not believe it oneself. . . . Anyone who has the remotest idea of dialectics in his head must perceive that the person who believes it if it happened eighteen hundred years ago can just as well believe it if it happens today – unless he believes it because it was eighteen hundred years ago, which is not to believe at all. If he believes this and that occurred eighteen hundred years ago, then precisely in faith he is paradoxically contemporary with it as if it occurred today.[21]
When I consider the foregoing words, I think of as a possible analogy the contemporary debate within evangelicalism concerning the cessation of miraculous gifts, and the gratuitous lengths to which the cessationist will sometimes go to distance himself from the charismatic. Whereas theologically I am more sympathetic on this point to the cessationist than the charismatic, some of the arguments the cessationist puts forth often seem like an attempt to prevent Christianity from being looked upon by the unbelieving world as fantastic, and Christians therefore as credulous.[22] In other words, at times it seems that the cessationist, while forced to rely on the past-miraculous to make a case for the truth of the Christian faith, prefers to quarantine the miraculous to the first century in order to prevent the testimony of his present faith from being wholly unacceptable to the modern mind. While in no way equating the cessationist with the Bultmannian, the effort of the former does at times seem akin to a program of “demythologizing,” an excessive concern with removing the offense of the miraculous in his defense of the Christian faith.
Perhaps this illustration captures some of SK’s grievance with the Hegelians of his day. It is one thing to believe that the miracles recorded in the New Testament happened in the first century; it is quite another to believe them because they occurred so very long ago. To believe them solely because they happened eighteen hundred years ago permits one the comfort of assigning belief in miracles to that particular age. That is, if miracles are a sign by which God confirms that a particular messenger is indeed His messenger, and if the miracles associated with Paul can be philosophically imprisoned within his particular age, then Paul himself can, in a sense, be philosophically imprisoned within his particular age. In such a case, Paul would no longer be a trans-historical, authoritative apostle, but a mere genius confined within the immanence of the first century. It seems to be in this context that SK rejects the apologetic value of the miraculous:
If God stops a person on his way, calls him by a revelation, and sends him out equipped with divine authority to the other people, they then say to him, “From whom do you come?” He answers, “From God.” But see, God cannot help his emissary in such a physical way as a king can, who gives him an escort of soldiers or police, or his ring, or his signature that all recognize – in short, God cannot be of service to human beings by providing them with physical certainty that an apostle is an apostle – indeed, that would be nonsense. Even the miracle, if the apostle has this gift, provides no physical certainty, because the miracle is an object of faith. Moreover, it is nonsense to obtain physical certainty that an apostle is an apostle . . . just as it is nonsense to obtain physical certainty that God exists, since God is spirit.[23]
I am reminded at this point of what Saint Augustine taught about authority and miracles. Philosopher William Lane Craig observes that Augustine sometimes “gives the impression of being a strict authoritarian; that is to say, he held that the ground for faith was sheer, unquestionable, divine authority.”[24] Indeed, Augustine argued that “authority demands faith and prepares man for reason.” But Augustine’s authoritarianism presupposes that credible authority can be discovered through reason. Hence, his “authoritarianism” is not blind trust prior to or apart from investigation but total submission only after reason has made its inquiry. And one of the evidences of the authority of the Christian revelation to which reason may point are miracles. It seems fair to critique Kierkegaard, at least from the textual evidence of Adler, in that he gives such short shrift to the evidential value of the miraculous that he falls prey to the same charge of strict authoritarianism sometimes laid at the feet of Augustine. I wonder, however, if this criticism, while certainly valid to a point, can be moderated somewhat by an examination of Kierkegaard’s disapproval of Magister Adler’s failure to stand by his initial claim to having been given a revelation-fact.
SK’s fundamental critique of Adler is that he neither revokes his self-alleged apostolic calling, nor does he live up to it. Rather, he is a terribly confused person who, sadly enough, provides an object lesson for the age itself. Adler’s rationalization concerning his own revelation provides a startling parallel to the present age’s use of the eighteen hundred years to rationalize away the offense of the Christian revelation. Because Adler (presumably) had a revelation, that necessarily made him an apostle. As an apostle called by divine authority, he was therefore responsible to that revelation, to the authority thus granted to him by God. Adler, consequently, could have given evidence of his apostolicity precisely by acting on his God-given authority. In so doing, Adler would have been acting akin to what Kierkegaard terms an essential-author. An essential-author, in contrast to a premise-author, is among other things one who never raises more doubt than he can answer, never draws upon the uncertain, and never becomes, like a welfare recipient, a burden to society.[25] An essential-author is one who writes with a life-view and as one who “knows who he is [and] what he wants, from first to last he takes care to understand himself in this life view.”[26] Keeping Adler within rhetorical sight, SK mocks the premise-author, whose modus operandi is quite unlike that of the essential-author:
A man shockingly steps forward and says, “I am called by God.” Thereupon he says softly in an aside, “Basically, I am not entirely sure; I will now see what impression this makes on the age; if it declares for it, then it is certain, then I am called by God, and then I let matters take their course.”[27]
Adler’s major failing was very simply that he presumed to “foist on the public a revelation-fact and then himself not know finally what is what, what he himself means by it, [which] is to characterize himself as a premise-author, because it is thundering in the most terribly loud tones and then basically expecting that the surrounding world will come to his aid with the explanation as to whether he has actually had a revelation or not.”[28] To be called by God as an apostle is to be elevated above kings and all who are in authority: “It is to him that all the rest of us must look up, and he must with divine authority demand it of us, that is, he must be recognizable precisely by his appealing to his authority.”[29] In other words, the evidence that one has been given divine authority is one’s consistent and appropriate exercise of that very authority. With Adler’s testimony that he had a revelation Kierkegaard does not take issue. But he excoriates Adler for not living as though he had been appeared to by Jesus. To put it another way, he made a claim concerning his authority, and then failed to back up that claim with the evidence commensurate with that type of authority.
That is how Adler made a fool of himself, and that is how the present age makes a mockery of the Christian revelation. In effect, the Hegelian-infested preaching of the day does little more than offer up the Christian revelation to a public referendum to judge its veracity. Being unsure themselves of its authority, the preachers look instead for a mandate from the public. But because the present age is one in which miracles have become unacceptable, then the miracles must be held in bondage to the age in which they allegedly occurred, and the only age in which they can be believed. Thus, the preachers of the present age forfeit the authority of the Christian revelation, exchanging it instead for their own ingenuous rationalization. The present age rejects the qualitative distinctives of the Christian revelation, that “paradoxical-religious relation [which] appears when God appoints a specific human being to have divine authority.”[30] Even the best preachers of the day do little more than “dabble a bit in what could be called unconscious or well-intentioned rebellion as they defend and uphold Christianity with all their might – in the wrong categories.”[31] That is, the tireless effort to make the essentially Christian palatable to the modern mind is what seems to be the primary target of Kierkegaard’s attack on apologetics in The Book on Adler. As the steward of a revelation, “an apostle primarily has only to be faithful in his duty, which is to carry out his mission.”[32] Both Adler and the preachers of the present age have failed in that regard because they have exchanged the apostolic for the ingenuous, the authoritative for the innovative, the qualitative for the quantitative, and divinely-inspired assurance for the confusion engendered by the spirit of the eighteen hundred years.
[1] Soren Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[2] Ibid., 176.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 175.
[5] Ibid., 176.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 177.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 175-76.
[10] Ibid., vii.
[11] Ibid., 20.
[12] Ibid., 26.
[13] Ibid., 175, 180.
[14] Ibid., 175.
[15] Ibid., 34.
[16] Ibid., 37-38.
[17] Ibid., 39.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid., 40.
[20] Ibid., 46.
[21] Ibid., 47-48.
[22] I am not here speaking of the many sound biblical arguments offered to defend cessationism, but the strained logic used by some, as well as the seeming intentional exclusion or rationalization of certain texts that may support the charismatic viewpoint. If the cessationist viewpoint is truly correct, no rationalization is necessary in order to support it. This is perhaps why it strikes me as a good parallel to SK’s criticism of the rationalization of his age.
[23] Ibid., 178.
[24] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 17-18.
[25] Ibid., 7-17.
[26] Ibid., 13.
[27] Ibid., 24.
[28] Ibid., 22-23.
[29] Ibid., 25.
[30] Ibid., 181.
[31] Ibid., 183.
[32] Ibid., 186-87.