He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. I John 5:12-13

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. John 17:3

I share the above passages to illustrate the type of posture the Christian ought to have before God. It is a more sure word of confidence; a boldness that invites us to the banqueting table of God’s throne room of grace. Many other passages could have been adduced, but the above should suffice for our purposes.

Isn’t it interesting that the supposed dominant mode for doing theology (I’m referring now to theological methodology), the so-called classical way (via antiqua), would have us speculate about God, rather than boldly know and proclaim Him; to ourselves, as the Church, and the world, that He is King and Savior? As Moses, by the Holy Spirit has written (my paraphrase): “the secret things belong to God, the things revealed belong to us.” And yet the classical way of doing theology would tell us that there is a deep dark cloud of apophaticism surrounding God; a cloud that would apparently suggest to us that we are to speculate about the whatness of God, even before the whoness. But God introduces us to Himself as the Son of the Father, in the deep bond of affectionate Holy Spirit fellowship. Indeed, there is the mysterium Trinitatis, and the reality of the Godman, the mystery of the incarnation and hypostatic union is indeed just that. But that mystery comes as a person, not as a what-thing to describe before we know His dearly beloved name.

You see, I am not the only one who thinks this way. Our Danish brother, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, shares very similar thoughts. Here is how father and son, Alan and Andrew Torrance describe those thoughts in the Dane’s thought:

In his theology, Kierkegaard primarily uses the language of paradox functionally to maintain that God’s relationship to creation not only transcends but also challenges what we can comprehend with our limited minds. This is not to imply that his use of paradox was merely functional; it was also theological—grounded in an understanding of who God is and who we are before God. Nevertheless, as we shall consider in this section, he did deploy his paradoxical Christology to address some key problems that he associated with Danish cultural Christianity.

What problems did he set out to address? One problem Kierkegaard sought to challenge was the kind of abstract speculating about Jesus Christ that distracted persons from lives of discipleship. For him, this was not only problem in his immediate context, but one that hindered much of the history of Christological reflection, right from the very beginning when Jesus’s contemporaries—including the disciples—struggled to understand his true identity and vocation due to their predetermined theological commitments. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, this penchant for abstraction is especially evident in theologians who act as though the heart of Christianity is to be found in doctrinal statements. Not only did this move tend to take Christianity out of the hands of less-educated members of society, but it turned Christianity against them—it changed Christianity into an intellectual luxury that was barely within their means. He writes:

Theory and doctrine are a fig leaf, and by means of this fig leaf a professor or clergyman looks so portentous that it is terrifying. And just as it is said of the Pharisees that they not only do not enter into the kingdom of heaven themselves but even prevent others from entering, so also the professor prevents the unlearned man by giving him the idea that it depends on doctrine and that consequently he must try to follow along in a small way. This, of course, is to the professor’s interest, for the more important the doctrine becomes, the more important the professor becomes as well, and the more splendid his occupation as the greater his reputation. Generally speaking the professor’s and pastor’s spiritual counselling is a hoax, for it is calculated to prevent people from entering the kingdom of heaven.

For Kierkegaard, there is a tendency in Christian scholarship to become so preoccupied with transposing Christian truths “into the sphere of the intellectual” that Christian ignores the Truth who stands right in front of them, calling them to leave their nets and follow him. For him, this tendency distracted persons from understanding the essence of Christianity. As he saw it, where there is no Christian living, there is no Christian understanding: “When the truth is the way, being the truth is a life—and this is indeed how Christ speaks of himself: I am the Truth and the Way and the Life.” If a particular kind of theological discourse becomes detrimental to the liveliness of a person’s discipleship, then something has gone very wrong.

At various points in his writings, Kierkegaard became so caught up in his critique of the intellectualization of Christianity that he ended up being critical of any amount of reflection on Christian doctrine. Indeed, in one journal entry, he goes so far as to write “I do not have a stitch of doctrine—and doctrine is what people want. Because doctrine is the indolence of aping and mimicking for the learner, and doctrine is the way to sensate power for the teacher, for doctrine collects men.” From what we have seen, he clearly had more than a stitch of doctrine, and he did not want to advance a theology that fell out of line with Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, he believed that the intellectual emphasis on theological digging and probing was a misplace priority. In Kierkegaard’s perception, there was no immediate need for so much attention to be given to progressing theological understanding. In many respects, he seemed to think that he would be fine with nothing more than what Richard Baxter referred to as “mere” Christianity. Indeed, in his view, the ongoing speculative pursuit of theological progress was leading to regression.[1]

It isn’t that doctrine is bad for Kierkegaard, as the Torrances rightly inform us; it is that finding life in the development of doctrine as an end in itself becomes a bad (an idol).

As I read this what this suggests to me, because I think Kierkegaard’s thinking is right, is that the Gospel never presents us with a request to speculate about it/Him. The Gospel always already confronts, contradicts, alleviates, and ascends us into the presence of the living and triune God. The Gospel doesn’t present us with a blackhole when peering towards God, but instead, to the sunshine of healing in His wings in the face (prosopon) of His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This is who I see when I look towards God. I don’t see a space between me and the heavens, such that I am asked to become a chain-builder, linking together this piece and that piece, that I might finally arrive at the first cause of “beatific vision.” Why would a Christian theologian ever think this is the way to approach God? As if we are in some sort of two-storied reality wherein the ladder to the next story comes through demi-urgic like thoughts conceived of by the most genius people on planet earth.

[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), 87-8.