Mythology is a pervasive reality in the human experience. This is no different in the Christian experience. Christians, obviously, are just people living ensconced in a socio-cultural milieu, just as any other person. Of course, the Christian, de jure, is also someone who has been redeemed, in the redemption of God’s life for them in Christ, such that they ought to be able to discern the profane from the holy. The profane would entail anything that ends up being mythological at its core. It is a society that lives in a buffered world wherein it thinks its being starts in the self, and only potentially coming to have a concept of godness from the self’s ostensible capacity to imagine such heights. God in Christ, in the ‘divine incognito’, has come to contradict all such imaginaries; and He has done so from within the very would-be contradictory element within humanity that would seek to assert itself over against Him—that is, He has clothed Himself with our humanity with the result that His humanity for us could say No to “our humanity,” and bring humanity proper into the telos it has always already been intended for: to be in full communion with the triune God (who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

The above has played itself out ever since the fall of humanity. Sinful humanity, even in its redeemed status, has been prone to wander; it, in its simul justus et peccator dialectic, always wants to add more, add its own take on what it best for them. Christendom has been rife with these types of developments. These days some, like Christian Smith, have identified that as moralistic therapeutic deism. Two and three centuries ago, in Daneland, Soren Kierkegaard, was confronting this type of development in his own unique and Danish setting. A Hegelian shaping of Christianity had taken hold in the Danish churches, which as a result reduced said churches into thinking God and Jesus in domesticated, even natural ways. Ways that led the people in these churches to think that God had so immanentized Himself in Jesus that they, as the church, could be in a buddy-buddy relationship with the Christ; such that these church people, and its theologians, began to think Jesus, and the triune God, from a point within themselves, rather than from an antecedent point without themselves in the person of Jesus Christ. Here father and son duo, Alan and Andrew Torrance, described how the above looked in the Kierkegaardian Danish context:

Why did Kierkegaard emphasize that Jesus Christ is offensive to the eyes of the world? For those committed to spreading the gospel, this may seem like a strange move. He was prompted to do this because Christ had become inoffensive to Danish society for the wrong reasons; he had been turned into an altogether different reality from who he is in truth. Denmark was not embracing Christ because it had been transformed by the grace of God to see the Truth of Jesus Christ; it was embracing Christ because he had become part of Danish culture and thereby transformed into “something different from what he is.” Consequently, his message had been distorted into one that would appeal to the Danish people. In short, the former scenario is a goal of Christ’s revelation as it is presented in the New Testament, according to which God’s kingdom comes to be on earth as it is in heaven. By contrast, the latter scenario is a goal of mediation in Hegelian theology, whereby the relationship with God unfolds in the cultural and intellectual progress of society. In the Hegelian theology of Denmark, “Jesus Christ” was being “remodeled” into an image that played into the intellectual and cultural games of Danish theology. The offensiveness of Christ was neutered, and “Christ” was tailored to fit the procrustean bed of Danish society. For Kierkegaard, this amounted to blasphemy, that is,

blasphemy, contained in the non-sensical-undialectical climax of clerical roaring: to such a degree was Christ God that one could immediately and directly perceive it, instead of: he was true God, and therefore to such a degree God that he was unrecognizable—thus it was not flesh and blood but the opposite of flesh and blood that inspired Peter to recognize him.

This is a complex passage that is worth unpacking, especially since Barth would draw attention to the first half of it in the second edition of his commentary on Romans. By assuming that we can know Jesus Christ directly as the God-human, Danish theology was operating on the “non-sensical-undialectical” assumption that God had assumed a form that made God directly knowable according to the (distorting) limits of immanent human reason. Danish theologians were under the impression that we can reason our way to God, degree by degree, by way of our own “flesh and blood”—that is, our own immanent cognitive faculties. Such a perception, for Kierkegaard, got things the wrong way around and thereby allowed God to be treated as an object which effectively belonged to the furniture of the world. For Kierkegaard, it is the spiritual reality of God—“the opposite of flesh and blood”—that gives us the capacity to see the God-human for who he is, thereby delivering us from our inability to do so.[1]

The Danish dilemma of Kierkegaard’s day is the very same dilemma North American, and Western churches in general, are currently and continuously being confronted with. We have squashed the Lord’s voice out of our lives by conflating our voices as His. We have become too comfortable with the Gospel, as if we possess it, when in fact the opposite is true; the Gospel possesses us; the Gospel has bought and paid for us with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. We have imagined a Jesus who fits in better with the god of the ancient tree of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the triune God who has always already eternally been in the plenitude of His triune life and otherness within Himself.

As an aside: as the Torrances, respectively, have developed for us the way that Kierkegaard was attempting to confront the immanent frame in his day and age, what has also been addressed is that fatal analogia entis (analogy of being). The analogia has had many iterations starting medievally with Thomas Aquinas, and given modern Catholic invention in the thought of Przywara. Kierkegaard, according to the Torrances, would reject every iteration of the analogia, one and all. There is no immanent frame to think the Christian God from; it is only as He freely chooses to make contact and encounter with us that we come to have the capaciousness to finally think the true and genuine God of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is a miracle, and so is the knowledge of God that has come with it.

[1] Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance, Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 76–7.