Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 10

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Søren Kierkegaard

Lesson Transcript

So this indeed is what we now want to look at. And Søren Kierkegaard’s dates are 1813–1855 and we’re going to discuss his prayer life along with that of Karl Barth. They belong to two different ages, of course, but they both were facing national crises and they certainly were facing crises in their own inner lives. And, as often happens, it’s when we go through periods of intense challenge that we get clarification about how we can pray and how we can have a new efficacy of relationship with our Lord.

The best summary of Kierkegaard’s teaching on prayer is to read his collection of prayers that have been edited by Perry LeFevre, The Prayers of Kierkegaard, and reading his prayers will deeply inspire you because they’re interspersed among all his treatises. So whenever he’s writing something very serious then he’ll stop and pray, which is a very appropriate way for us to enter into our own prayer life that thinking and relating to others as well as to God is so enriching of our life of prayer. But before we enter into our discourse with him, I think a hymn that might be appropriate to sing is not a hymn, of course, that Kierkegaard or in his generation compiled, but it is a hymn that gives comfort to the restlessness of the soul that Kierkegaard so expresses. So let us sing:

Jesus, lover of my soul,

Let me to thy bosom fly,

While the nearer waters roll,

While the tempest still is high.

Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,

Till the storm of life is past;

Safe into the haven guide;

O receive my soul at last.

There are so many other wonderful verses of the hymn that you can consider. And, of course, in the last stanza ‘make and keep me pure within’ is a great theme, that seeking to have purity of heart and transparency of life before God was so vital in the ministry of his writing.

[00:03:03]

Profound theologians of the 20th century, such as Karl Barth and the Catholic Cardinal Guardini were greatly influenced by Kierkegaard and that’s why I want to collate these two together: Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. But both of them were finding in reaction that Kierkegaard is excessively individualistic, in contrast to their strong corporate sense of the Church, whether the Lutheran Church or the Roman Catholic Church, as expressive of the body of Christ. And so they have questioned whether Kierkegaard really understood the nature of Christian community enough—that would be the essence of their disagreement. But Kierkegaard was too much of a genius to ever be judged so lightly, for his focus was on the basic issues of what it really means to be a Christian in his own generation. And that’s what we’re constantly finding, that we’re constantly to have mobility of understanding of our identity and the context of that for our prayer life in whatever culture we’re living in.

What Kierkegaard was facing was the corruption of the Danish Church in the 19th century as a corruption of stability that needed cultural transformation. Radically, he condemned the Lutheran Danish Church as being corrupt Christendom. He’s fighting against all the great philosophers too of his time, Kant and Hegel, Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, which we don’t have time to discuss here as we focus on himself as the individual that stands alone before God. But serious study of Kierkegaard must include his own struggles in overcoming the mindset of their moral idealism.

One of the things that marks us in our Christian life is that the more you pursue godliness and intimacy with God, the more sometimes you feel alone because the God who created you as unique is really the only one who understands our uniqueness. And so socially we crave for attentiveness. We crave for social understanding. We crave for others to know our feelings. We crave for love because the nature of love is being attentive to the uniqueness of the other. And so, of course, the more you pursue that individuated self that is shaped to receive God’s presence, shaped by His love in our heart and his convictions in our life, the more those who are near and dear to us may not understand. And so it’s one of the things that is one of the hazards, which is ironic, about having more intimacy with God that even our family and friends may not understand us.

[00:06:44]

Kierkegaard grew up in a very troubled home. His father had been from a family of sheep farmers in Jutland, the flat peninsula that was a completely different world from Copenhagen. One was of peasant stock. Copenhagen was associated with the Danish aristocracy as a capital city. And so they were worlds apart. And yet he had to live in both world so, environmentally, much of the tension of his life was his background was so different from what he then faced when he went to university as a young man and became an extremely clever scholar and could critique all the philosophers of his generation.

The other thing that we should bear in mind of his heritage was that his father had a dark secret because he himself, having lost his wife early in his life, already before her death he was seeking comfort from one of the maids in the household and he had an illegitimate child, so that when she was five months pregnant he married her in his second marriage. This was a dark secret that was kept with such foreboding by Søren himself that when it came to his own engagement to his own beloved fiancée, he then realised he could never share that life with her. And so, to her shock and to the family’s shock, he broke off the engagement and fled to Berlin to recuperate with dark forebodings about his life and his future. So there was a strong dysfunctionally in his upbringing that profoundly marked and scarred him for the rest of his life.

You know, sometimes we bear family curses and those family curses cripple us for the rest of our life. And emotionally, Kierkegaard remained an emotional cripple all through his life. And yet in the midst of all the angst and deep suffering that that brought about, he was able to escape into an academic world of philosophical thinking, which is often the kind of comfort that somebody who’s precious and highly intelligent is then able to use for the benefit of the Church afterwards. And certainly, Kierkegaard has a brilliant mind, the most outstanding mind, perhaps, of the whole of the 18th century and since then. But he was unknown until the late 1950s in the West.

I remember going to the Ashmolean theatre in Oxford in 1958 because it was announced that we were going to hear about a Danish philosopher. Well, nobody at Oxford knew at that time about a Danish philosopher and it turned out that it was the introduction that was being made to us of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. And of course, there’s been a huge industry of scholarship ever since the ’60s and the publication of all his works into English and many other languages and the number of scholars from all different countries, including even an excellent scholarly work on Kierkegaard in Japanese, indicate how universal the appeal of his thinking has been to this current generation. Certainly, as we’ve said, he had a profound influence on some of the great churchmen of the 20th century, as we shall see in Karl Barth’s reaction to him, as well as that of the founders of the Vatican II movement that was stimulated also as a result of his thinking.

[00:11:55]

What really Kierkegaard represents is his profound disillusionment with modern Protestant liberalism. There had been, as we’ve seen, this whole theme that we have to be sincere and have integrity or authenticity and yet Kierkegaard was to demonstrate how shallow and how elusive or deceptive that whole Romantic thrust is for a society to be sincere. It just doesn’t work. And so the creativity of his thinking is his disillusion with the moralism of Immanuel Kant or the spiritualism of Hegel or the psychological mindset of Schleiermacher or the outright atheism of Feuerbach. He was facing a generation when deists where on the slippery road to becoming atheists.

And as one of my former colleagues Klaus Bockmuehl has written about on tracing this track that when you’re a deist, you really are already an atheist. So he had to face this. And at the same time, he lived in a conventional society that was saying nobody is different from anybody else. It’s part of the environment of Denmark that you live on a flat heath. And if you’ve ever visited this landscape that’s as flat as a pancake, the only silhouettes are the windmills that may dominate the skyline today. But we think of Kierkegaard in his generation as symbolically being like a solitary fir tree, standing up against the horizontality of the culture. For there was an 11th commandment that dominated this Danish mentality and it’s this: thou shalt not be different from anybody else. It was called the Law of Jante. And Kierkegaard is saying I don’t obey that law. Kierkegaard is saying by God’s grace, I’m completely different from other people. And one of the things that all of us need as Christians sometimes is to be like Martin Luther, to say, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ Sometimes all of us have to be like that solitary fir tree against the conventionalism and the nominalism of religious life around us. We have to say no.

[00:15:20]

And so what we want to explore are the many ways in which he tried to develop this. One is to start by saying that we have to accept the category of the individual. That is to say, that in our prayer life we stand alone before God. One of the things that should mark us in our Christian life is that the more you pursue godliness and intimacy with God, the more you are alone before God, who created you to be unique, who only understands your uniqueness as you crave for the attention of others. And so the more you pursue this individuated self that’s shaped by God’s presence, shaped by His love in your heart and shaped by His convictions in your life, the more even those who are near and dear may not understand. Perhaps later as we talk about Karl Barth, this was something that he himself did not fully understand. This is where I think he has a deeper relationship than Karl Barth was able to have in his own prayer life. And so Søren Kierkegaard, in this age of individualism, is so much closer to ourselves to help us more deeply to escape from our individualism.

[00:17:05]

The way he does this is to help us to recognise that we may have to peel away differing levels of consciousness to be much more Christ conscious. In fact, he’s really the first of the Christian thinkers that we’ve explored, other than Augustine, to really explore the inner consciousness of the Christian. In my own little book The Mentored Life I make a short summary of three levels of consciousness that Kierkegaard talks about. He talks about the aesthetic consciousness, which is the consciousness that is related to our body. It’s sensual. It’s bodily. It’s about our feelings. It’s about our excitements and our desire for pleasure, our desire for seeking a happy life. Sometimes, it’s a desire to be heroic, to exhibit ourselves before others, as so often today there’s so much emphasis on the heroic self in the field of sports, whether it’s football or rugby or indeed baseball. It’s also the thrill of being James Bond in the film industry. So there’s the aesthetic consciousness that we all are besieged by as we live in the life of the world. It’s the life also that a woman has of wanting to be beautiful, to look good, to be attractive. It’s the whole cosmetic world of the industry that we have of femininity today. Kierkegaard is very realistic about all this.

[00:19:02]

He talks about a second level of consciousness, which is the consciousness of the moral self. It’s an echo in Kierkegaard of the Kantian consciousness of being dutiful. And Kant has had such a spell on the German psyche to be dutiful, to be obedient. It was that spell of obedience that, in fact, made the German people blind to the dicta of Hitler. They were just simply being dutiful Germans. And so we’re all prone, as we saw with our reflection on Nietzsche, that Nietzsche is an example of the good little boy of that moralism, that a child may have to escape from the authoritarianism around him by just having that escape. All of this is very well understood by Kierkegaard.

And then the third, the compound of all of these, is the level of consciousness that he calls the religious consciousness. It’s the religious consciousness of what the moralists of his generation like Kant, or indeed like Schleiermacher, were all talking about. For a religious person is somebody who’s doing a lot of talk about God. It’s God talk. It may be that if a culture is religious, that it’s conventional to talk about God. And perhaps one of the purgative elements of our life today as we face the secular world is we no longer can have that religious God talk. It doesn’t wash with those who are not part of the community of the Church. And so as we have our own programmes in Church life, without knowing it, we’re like the situation that Teresa of Avila realised—that you’re still living in the third mansions of consciousness, that you’re still living simply a religious life. And the leap into the fourth is what Kierkegaard calls not religion A, but religious consciousness B. And now you’re talking about a very different kind of consciousness. You’re talking about the consciousness of the living God, of being conscious of the love of God, of being conscious of attentiveness in your life, of recognising that our prayer life is with a friend that’s conversational and personal. It’s a very different continuum. It’s the great leap that Kierkegaard calls the leap of faith.

The dilemma that we’re facing today in the life of the Church is that there are an awful lot of Christian leadership who don’t understand consciousness B, or religious consciousness in the true sense of the word. They don’t have this living relationship with God. It’s all spelt out by their MDivs and their PhDs and all the rest of it. And it’s this that makes Kierkegaard such a voice for our generation because he’s not saying this naively. He’s saying this through his remarkable sophistication of faith. He’s really challenging us, as Jesus challenged the rich young ruler, one thing you lack. And the one thing that we lack when we enter in our prayerlessness in seeking God is we lack intimacy, intimacy with God, and exercising intimacy with Him.

[00:23:34]

But there are two dangers, argues Kierkegaard, that we have to face. One is to get discouraged, to give up and forget that really the premise by which we have openness to God is through honesty of our own self-understanding. Here again, we have the echo of Augustine: self-knowledge that we require for a deeper prayer life. And we recognise there has to be trust, that we can only trust when we give up self-will, that there has to be a complete surrender to Himself, that we’re saying I must decrease, like John the Baptist said, that He might increase. And so Kierkegaard reminds us that prayer is God’s work. We’ve been reminded about the Opus Dei already, but this God’s work is actually not our doing. It’s everything that God is doing and doing for His sake. Now prayer becomes a centre of our reality. Now prayer is recognising the unchangeable goodness of His love.

So really the great passion of Kierkegaard is saying stop making observations about the Christian life and its ministry. For goodness sake, act on what you know: actualise it. So when we think of Kierkegaard as the first existentialist, he’s certainly a different kind of existentialist from Jean-Paul Sartre and the French secularists. It’s having the existence of a Christian and not simply a philosophy. It’s not going to be something to inspire these later secular existentialists. The very nature that they have is the denial of who Kierkegaard is in Christ. So it’s the irony of existentialism as a movement that it has become so effective for atheism; whereas, it should have been effective for Christ in the first voice with which Kierkegaard is expressing it. It’s all because at the core of one’s life we realise that Christ is the one that we’re called to relate to and to serve.

[00:26:18]

And so, as we think about Kierkegaard in his prayer life, we may close with the following prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, whether we’re far away or nearby, far away in the confused human throng and in our worldly business and earthly cares or temporal joys, or in purely human loftiness or far away from all this in solitude, in forsakenness, in unappreciation and in lowliness, draw us closer to you. Draw us wholly to yourself.

Well, there’s so much more that we could say. This is only just touching the very beginning of the significance of this remarkable man. But now we have to look at what Karl Barth would tell us.