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Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on “Original Christianity”

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of George MacDonald. There were a number of conferences held to celebrate this auspicious event. I was fortunate to be able to attend two of them. I wrote earlier about the first conference that took place at Wheaton College last summer. This post is about a conference that took place at Yale University on the 13th and 14th of December. 

I discovered by accident that Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has the largest collection of MacDonal materials of any library in the world. That knowledge encouraged in me the hope that Yale might be willing to host a conference on MacDonald, so I “cold-called” several members of the faculty at Yale to see if there was any possibility that my hope might be realized. I didn’t have to wait long, David Mahan, of Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music responded almost immediately that the ISM could provide us with a venu. He couldn’t promise any financial support, however, so I turned to Drexel in the hope that they might be willing to provide the money we needed. They did! 

Drexel, or more specifically, David Brown, dean of Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, and former Drexel President John Fry, very generously agreed to cover all the costs associated with the conference. That promise was absolutely crucial in making the conference the success that it was because quite a few of the speakers could not count on institutional support to cover their costs. I will forever be indebted to Drexel for their generosity in what are hard times for pretty much every institution of higher education.

The conference was absolutely wonderful. We were treated to a tour of some of the MacDonald materials in the library, and encouraged to apply for the numerous fellowships the library has to support scholars doing research on their collections. There was a truly impressive list of presenters, as well, including Malcolm Guite and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, president and co-chair respectively of the George MacDonald Society, Julie Canlis, Kerry Magrudder, Trevor Hart, and many more. A full list of speakers can be found on the program. 

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, there are lots of similarities between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s thought. Mine was the only paper, however, comparing the two. There is talk of all the papers presented in celebration of MacDonald’s bicentenary being published, so I won’t give you the whole paper here. The paper, “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity,’” argues that “Kierkegaard and MacDonald share a reverence for the original Christian texts and a healthy skepticism for the official Christian tradition and its tendency to lapse into dogmatism and authoritarianism, that was unusual both for their own time and for ours and that this reverence and skepticism reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life.” Both Kierkegaard and MacDonald, I observe in the paper, had extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and used this knowledge to correct what they felt to be errors in the interpretation of the Christian message. Again, I’m not going to present my entire argument here. I will, however, give you a little taste of the nature of my argument. The paper begins…

“Ad fontes, or “to the sources,” was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. It appears in Psalm 41 of the Latin Vulgate (Psalm 42 in most other versions), which reads “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,(desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum) so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” 

The sources, or fonts, as we say in English, of Christian faith are first and foremost the earliest Christian writings, and to access these requires considerable knowledge of ancient Greek. It is not merely the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that were written in Greek, but also the works of the earliest of the Church Fathers.”

The paper gives a number of example where both Kierkegaard and MacDonald use their knowledge of ancient Greek to defend their own interpretations of the true message of Christianity. The paper, as a whole, is yet another argument in support of the view that Kierkegaard, like MacDonald, was a universalist, and while I didn’t have the space to develop the argument in the detail I would like, I think I made a fairly convincing case, drawing not merely on texts from the works of both thinkers but also on the impressive scholarship of Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, whose co-authored book Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts makes a very compelling argument that there are few if any references to eternal damnation anywhere in the New Testament. This fact has been obscured by church history which, from the period of at least Augustine onward, has arguably systematically misinterpreted the meanings of these terms. Scholars well-versed in ancient Greek, however, as both Kierkegaard and MacDonald were, would certainly have been aware of the paucity of references to eternal damnation in the New Testament as well as of the fact that the church appears to have labored mightily to obscure this. This fact could actually be one of the reasons that both thinkers exhibit such a healthy skepticism for the authority of various thinkers throughout church history. Interesting, eh?

The Yale MacDonald conference was such a success, that we are hoping to be able to make it a regular event every two, or perhaps three years. So there is time for you Kierkegaard scholars to familiarize yourself with MacDonald’s thought before the next conference!

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End-of-Year Bits and Pieces

The last few months have been packed with Kierkegaard-related activities. There were not the standard two Kierkegaard sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November, but actually five! You can find a list of the sessions as well as the presenters here.

The papers were of varying quality, but none stood out as particularly bad. I realize that that observation is sort of damning with faint praise. Sadly, however, faint praise is often all that is appropriate with respect to contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. The problem isn’t just that a decent command of Danish is all too rare among Kierkegaard scholars, it’s also that far too many are not familiar with the breadth of Kierkegaard’s writings. Many scholars continue, for example, to view Kierkegaard as sexist simply because they are unfamiliar with the material from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that I presented in my paper “Kierkegaard on the Paradox of Feminist Progress” as part of a session of the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit and that I have presented here on this blog. 

There are several difficulties here. First, Kierkegaard’s unpublished material collected first in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and then again in the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, while not complete is still very extensive, so it takes some time to get through it all.

Second is the fact that the short cut of searching for relevant material in the online edition of Kierkegaard’s works is unavailable for scholars who don’t have a very good knowledge of Danish. A little knowledge just isn’t enough because in many instances, there will be literally thousands of hits on a search for a particular term such as Evighed (i.e., “eternity”). There are 149 pages of hits for that term and each page has what appears to be a minimum of ten hits, but which can be greater because each hit will give a number of appearances of the term in question for a particular text. So that’s over a thousand hits for a single term, each of which must be read for its relevance to the topic being researched. One has to be able to scan these hits very quickly to see if they are indeed relevant, and most scholars simply can’t do that. 

Third, as I mentioned above, and have mentioned before, even the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (and the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, which is based on the Skrifter) while purporting to be complete, is not actually complete. Some very important material is missing. That material can be accessed only in the old Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Very few people have a set of the Papirer, though. I did a search just now for a set and couldn’t find a complete one, though I did find this set that has 19 volumes. The listing says that the complete set is actually 20 volumes. My own hard-cover set actually has 25 volumes, though. Three of those volumes are indexes, but that means that a complete set, sans the indexes would be 22 volumes and not 20. 

But enough of the problems with contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. There is other news, both good and bad, to report. The good news first: The Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College is doing its best to improve the quality of Kierkegaard studies. First, they offer courses in Danish during the summer for visiting scholars and will be offering one on translation as well in the summer of 2026. Second, they have launched a new journal dedicated to Kierkegaard scholarship.

Finally, the bad news. Robert Alastair Hannay passed away on the eighth of December. Hannay was an outstanding Kierkegaard scholar, though perhaps not always so sensitive to the depth and influence of Kierkegaard’s religious convictions on his thought more generally. He was rare among Kierkegaard scholars in having had a rigorous analytical training in philosophy and he put that training to good use in his scholarship. He was also an outstanding translator. His translations of Kierkegaard’s works for Penguin are unsurpassed in both their accuracy and readability. Hannay will be sorely missed. 

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Kierkegaard and Current Religious Discourse

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.