by MDPI has two open-access journals that are worth a look. John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans recently edited a special edition of the journal Religions entitled “Kierkegaard, Virtues and Vices,” and, Lee Barrett, formerly of Lancaster Theological Seminary and now of Moravian Seminary, and Dr. Andrzej Slowikowski, of Uniwersytet Warminsk-Mazurski w Olsztynie, Poland, have just come out with a special edition of Philosophies on “Kierkegaard’s Religious Thought in Relation to Current Religious Discourse.”
My “Was Kierkegaard a Universalist” is the first one you’ll see when you go to the webpage for the special edition. There’s been a lot of discussion among theologian in the last few years about universal salvation. Universalism, as its known, is increasingly popular among these thinkers, hence it seemed relevant to address Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this issue. The paper examines evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there is reason to believe that he may have been a universalist.
After my paper comes a paper by René Rosfort, of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. Rosfort argues in “The Humanity of Faith: Secularization of Christianity,” that “Kierkegaard’s famous existential approach to Christianity amounts to a secularization of Christianity and as such can be seen as a critical development of and not a rejection of the Enlightenment critique of religion.”
After Rosfort there’s a paper by David J. Gouwens of Brite Divinity School, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Descriptive Philosophy of Religion: The Imagination Poised Between Possibility and Actuality.” Gouwens argues that Kierkegaard “imaginatively deploys conceptual and rhetorical strategies maieutically to both describe and elicit self-reflection aimed at transformation, thus expanding the imagination’s uses for his readers.”
Next comes Joseph Westfall, of the University of Houston, with a paper entitled “Abraham’s Faith: Both the Aesthetic and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling.” Westfall examines Johannes de Silentio’s presentation of the faith of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, and argues that a new way of conceiving Kierkegaard’s “notion of faith as a paradoxical co-inhabiting of both the aesthetic and the ethical stages, rather than as a rejection, synthesis, or overcoming of them” can be derived from this presentation.
After Westfall’s paper there is a paper by the aforementioned Andrzej Slowikowski, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Theories of the Stages of Existence and Subjective Truth as a Model for Further Research into the Phenomenology of Religious Attitudes.” Slowikowski uses Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages of existence as a kind of template for sorting out ”the complex world of human religiousness” by reducing that world “to a few very basic existential attitudes.”
Next comes Heiko Schulz, of Goethe-Universität, in Frankfurt a.M, with “Thankfulness: Kierkegaard’s First-Person Approach to the Problem of Evil.” Schulz argues that Kierkegaard offers promising resources for address the problem of evil. Schultz argues that “in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery.” I’m inclined to think that Schulz is right here, though I confess I haven’t read the paper yet.
The last piece in the special edition is by Curtis L. Thompson of Thiel College in Greenville, PA. That piece is entitled “Dancing in God in an Accelerating Secular World: Resonating with Kierkegaard’s Critical Philosophical Theology.” The intent of his paper, explains Thompson, “is to demonstrate how [Kierkegaard’s] religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world.”
I haven’t read any of these papers yet, alas, because I am hard at work on a paper I’m scheduled to present at a conference in the UK in early September. The conference is entitled “The Existential Dimension of Doubt,” the launch conference of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism and Conspiracy Theory.” Once I’m back from this conference, however, I’ll check out each of these papers and let you know what I think of them.
Piety on Kierkegaard 
Hi Dr. Piety,
Thanks for the post, since I’ve discovered this page I have been grateful to see a lot of honest scholarship that is sometimes lacking and your assessment of Kierkegaard feels very modest compared to many fantastical representations out there.
Apropos of your essay on universalism on Kierkegaard, I have a couple of thoughts that I would be curious to run by you. (1) It seems like the majority of the evidence is non-universalist, and as I have been going through the Christian discourses, I find it especially clear (at least for 1848). In light of this I find it hard to hermeneutically justify reading a plethora of evidence that extends far over his lifetime as subservient to a handful of journal entries. (2) A thought that did cross my mind in the assessment of the evidence is the referent of the “others” with whom he references the corresponding reward or punishment. Is it possible that this is moreso oriented toward Christian Denmark than the world at large? Perhaps this would make sense in view of his (strangely) optimistic statements on his deathbed to Boesen while also providing a through line with the early SK.
In brief I think these guide me to entertain a couple of potential conclusions besides SK either being a crypto-universalist or a universalist by the end of his life. (1) He could have subscribed to a hopeful universalism like expressed by von Balthasar and Robert Barron, while recognizing the potency or likely actuality of some sort of infernalism. (2) If my second thought above has any merit, then he may just subscribe to the typical dominant view of eternal blessedness and perdition, but have a more optimistic outlook toward the salvation of those in Christendom, not the whole world, but I could also see why this is dubious.
In many ways he shares much with Origen who also has a perplexing view of apokatastasis, so I would not be surprised if one of the total four options above is fitting, but I figured it might be worth it to express these thoughts while they are fresh. I wholeheartedly welcome any criticism, as I greatly lack your grasp of the primary sources, but hope that these thoughts are edifying whether helpful or not.
~ Nathaniel
Thank you so much for this. Yes, you are right that there are plenty of references to eternal damnation in Kierkegaard’s works, though actually far fewer than one would expect given how much he wrote that is explicitly Christian. There are a couple of reasons I lean toward the view that he may well have been a universalist all his adult life. The first and most compelling are the two unequivocal references to his belief in universal salvation. There is nothing in these references themselves, or anywhere else in the authorship, to indicate that this was a view Kierkegaard came to at a certain point in his engagement with Christianity and Christian thought. And, in fact, as I point out in my essay on Kierkegaard and universalism that the nature of the reference to the “old bishop” makes clear that Kierkegaard is indicating that the old bishop (which would have been Mynster) was wrong AT THE TIME he accused Kierkegaard of thinking that everyone else was going to hell. That is, it is clear from the wording of that journal entry that Kierkegaard is indicating that he had been a universalist back when the “old bishop” had made that remark, and again, there is no suggestion that this was a view Kierkegaard had come to at a certain point.
Another thing that makes me think Kierkegaard may well have been a universalist despite the multiple references in his writings to “eternal damnation” as part of Christianity, even as being essential to Christianity, is that Kierkegaard is often very critical of the Christian tradition, so when he says “eternal damnation is essential to Christianity,” he may well mean to the official Christian tradition rather than the TRUE Christian world view. That is, I’m increasingly inclined to consider that very often, when Kierkegaard says “Christianity,” it really ought to be in quotation marks, that he is referring to the Christian tradition of which, again, he is often very critical.
I don’t mean here to conflate “Christianity” (or “Christendom” in Danish), and “Christendom” (or “Christenhed” in Danish). “Christendom,” for Kierkegaard, is a profoundly hypocritical instantiation of what its proponents purport is Christianity. Kierkegaard’s contempt for Christendom doesn’t mean, though, that he thought those Christians who were not hypocritical were always right in their interpretation of the Christian message. He clearly does not think that. He not only criticizes Luther (whom he does not appear to think was a hypocrite), he goes so far as to say that the apostles went wrong when they started baptizing people by the thousands because he claims that simply isn’t how people come to faith, that they come as individuals, one by one, as a result of their individual encounters with God in the person of Christ.
That is, Kierkegaard recognizes a legitimate Christian tradition that is distinguished from Christendom, but of which he is still often very critical. So my guess is that when he says something is essential to “Christianity,” he means that it is essential to that tradition. As a Protestant, though, and a Protestant from a pietist background, there is going to be a lot in that tradition that he thinks is wrong. There was a universalist strain among Herrnhutter and the Herrnhutter met weekly in Kierkegaard’s home when he was growing up, so he may well have been exposed to a universalist view of the Christian message from childhood. He would have been exposed to it as well in his readings of the early Church Fathers such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, whom we know he read, among others. In fact, many scholars argue that universalism was the dominant position in the earliest period of Christianity and that could partly account for Kierkegaard’s oft-expressed bias in favor of what he refers to as “original Christianity.”
There are also suggestions throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship that he may have been a universalist. For example, when he says in Philosophical Crumbs that if you don’t meet the teacher in this life, well, you will have another chance in another life. Even his remark that if you did receive the condition for understanding the truth in this life and would hence be responsible for accounting for your possession of it a way that might bring some form of punishment with it if you did not conform your existence properly to it, even that does not entail that whatever punishment you might receive would be eternal in nature.
Finally, I don’t think Kierkegaard meant that everyone in what he called “Christendom” would be saved, but that people in other parts of the world might experience eternal damnation. That just doesn’t sound like Kierkegaard at all. When he talks about human beings and their relation to God, its clear he’s talking about human beings in general, not Danes, or even people more generally in the “Christian” parts of the world
This is all speculative, though, of course. I think there is good support for it, but further work needs to be done here. You may be right in thinking that this was simply a hope of Kierkegaard’s, and yet his comment about the “old bishop” makes him sound absolutely convinced of it. I’m inclined to that view myself because as Keith DeRose so persuasively argues in a piece on universalism on his website, the view that God is love and that God made human beings in his own image simply cannot be made to cohere with the notion of eternal damnation, some kind of punishment, okay, but an omnipotent, all-loving, creator God who would damn any part of his creation to eternal punishment is, I believe, simply incoherent and Kierkegaard was too smart to miss that.
I really appreciate your well-thought out comments, though. I think I’m going to take my response here and turn it into a blog post because these are very important considerations. Thank you!