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Conference Report

AAR Book Exhibit

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is the single most important conference for Kierkegaard scholars. There are normally several sessions devoted exclusively to Kierkegaard, but this year there were an unprecedented five. The first was on Saturday  morning. It was co-sponsored by the Christian Systematic Theology Section and the Kierkegaard, Religion and Culture Group. The theme was Christology and Kierkegaard and the session was presided over by C. Stephen Evans of Baylor University. The second was later the same day. The theme of this second session was the work of Edward Mooney. This, for me, was a particularly interesting session because Mooney is as much a poet as a scholar and this was brought out well by the speakers. The third session was late in the afternoon on Saturday (yes, that’s right, there were three sessions devoted to Kierkegaard on Saturday). The theme of this session was esthetics and the speakers included Joakim Garff, the author of Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton, 2005) about which I’ve written.

I’m afraid I missed the session on Sunday morning that was devoted to Kierkegaard and Hermeneutics. I’d like to have gotten to that session, if only to see one of my favorite Kierkegaard scholars, Tim Polk of Hameline, who was the session chair. My own paper was scheduled for the same afternoon, however, as part of a session devoted to Kierkegaard’s epistemology, so I spent the morning making the final edits. I made an important discovery at this AAR. If you read your paper directly from your computer, you can keep making edits right up until that last minute!

My paper was well received, though there were few questions. My guess is that this was because it addressed two subjects with which most scholars are not heavily engaged: Kierkegaard’s epistemology and patristics. Mine was also the first paper and people kept streaming in as I was reading. This was distracting, I’m sure, to the people who were already seated and, of course, the people who came late would not have heard the entire paper (the upside of this was that there was standing room only at the beginning of the session).  I met several patristics scholars, including Nathan Jacobs of Trinity International University, who came up to me afterward and told me they had enjoyed the paper and that they felt that there was a very strong relation between Kierkegaard’s thought to that of the Church Fathers. My brief exposure to this area of research supports this view. I plan to do a lot more work on this issue in the future and am grateful for the contacts I made in San Francisco.

One of the highlights for the conference to me was the number of sessions devoted to sex. There were at least a dozen such sections, including a joint session of the Evangelical Theology Group and the Religion and Sexuality Group, the theme of which was “Contemporary Evangelical Sexualities.” This session included a paper that, to my mind, had the best title of any paper at the conference: Erin Default-Hunter’s “Porn Again: What Pornography Can Teach Christians about Good Sex.” I don’t want to give the impression that I’m obsessed with sex or anything. I just think its nice to have such a clear demonstration that religious conviction is not, as is so commonly believed, inversely proportional to a healthy interest in sex. Sex is a gift from God. So I say go for it, you randy religion scholars!


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Kierkegaard and the Ante-Nicene Fathers on the Knowledge that Comes from Faith

I actually started this blog at the suggestion of Baylor University Press. Baylor published my book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (2010) and they suggested that a blog might help to promote the book. I fear I haven’t written much here, however, on Kierkegaard’s epistemology, so I figured now was perhaps the time to say something about it. I don’t want simply to rehash what I’ve already said in the book, so I thought that instead, I’d give you a preview of the talk I’m scheduled to give at the American Academy of Religion conference in San Francisco next weekend. I’m going to speak, as the title of this post indicates, on Kierkegaard and the Ante-Nicene fathers on Christian epistemology.

I’m a philosopher by training, not a theologian, so I knew very little about the Ante-Nicene fathers before I picked up Hans Urs  von Balthasar’s English translation of Irenaeus’ Against the Heresies. I picked it up, actually, just for a little light reading. I’d become interested in early church history as a result of reading Bart Ehrman’s excellent Misquoting Jesus. Erhman’s written so many popular books on the early Christian church that you might be tempted to think he’s not really a serious scholar. Let me disabuse you of that notion. I had to make a trip over to the Advanced Judaic Studies Library recently in connection with the preparation of my upcoming talk and the librarian there, Joseph Gulka, put me on to Ehrman’s excellent The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament.

I got quite a few excellent books on the Ante-Nicene Fathers from Penn’s library, and let me tell you, the similarities between Kierkegaard’s views on the nature of Christian knowledge and the views of figures such as Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria is really striking. I’m surprised I hadn’t read about these similarities earlier. I fear too many Kierkegaard scholars are either philosophers who know nothing at all about theology, or theologians whose backgrounds are exclusively in later periods. I won’t go into all the similarities here but will point out only one I intend to emphasize in my talk.

I explain in Ways of Knowing that Kierkegaard believes it’s possible to know the truth, or to recognize Christ as the truth. God, he observes, did not take on human form “to ridicule human beings. His intention cannot thus be to go through the world in such a way that not a single person ever came to know [vide] it. He does indeed want something of himself to be understood [forstaae].”[1]

The claim that knowledge of God is possible through an encounter with Christ may seem heretical to those who view Christianity as a religion based on faith. This passage from Crumbs is strikingly similar, however, to Irenaeus’ claim in Against the Heresies that “the Lord did not say that the Father and the Son could not be known at all [μη γινωσκεσθαι], for in that case his coming would have been pointless” (45) (Forgive the absence of diacritical marks. I’m not a classicist, so I haven’t yet figured out how to do them on the computer).

Irenaeus is specifically concerned here to reject the claim of the gnostic Valentinus that the message of the incarnation was God’s inaccessibility to human knowledge. “What the Lord really taught,” asserts Irenaeus, “is this: no one can know God unless God teaches him; in other words, without God, God cannot be known [ανευ Θεου μη γινωσκεσθαι τον Θεον]. What is more,” continues Irenaeus, “it is the Father’s will that God be known [αυτο δε το γινωσκεσθαι αυτον θλημα ειναι του Πατρος]” (45).

Interesting, eh? It should be interesting, anyway, to anyone who has read my book. But enough on my book. I’d like to take this opportunity to promote someone else’s book. I found a particularly interesting book as I was doing the research for this paper. It’s called Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford, 2006). I was so entranced with it that I went right to abebooks.com to see if I could get a copy. Unfortunately, the cheapest copy was $75. I then did a google search in the hope that I might find one for less than $75 and discovered that Amazon had a Kindle edition for $8.80! I LOVE Kindle! If you’re interested in Kierkegaard’s epistemology, then I recommend you check it out!

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, tran. M.G. Piety (Oxford, 2009), p. 126.

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Once Upon a Time in Denmark

I was going through my email a couple of days ago, trying to file some of it to keep it from crashing, when I found an announcement of an event over at Haverford. Hubert Dreyfus is giving a talk there on October 29th entitled “Rationality and Embodied Coping.”

I’m going to have to go to that one even though there’s another important philosophy event, The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium Public Issues Forum on Philosophy for Children, that same day. The GPPC event starts at 1:00 though and Dreyfus’s talk isn’t until 4:00, so maybe I can catch both. I want to go to Dreyfus’s talk because not only do I like him, but because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him and I want to see if he remembers me.

I met Dreyfus years ago when I was living in Denmark. He and his brother Stuart came to Denmark to lead a seminar on their book Mind Over Machine. The seminar took place on a property owned by Aarhus University and extended over a period of several days. The conditions at our camp were so Spartan that one of the other participants joked that it was a “skjult overlevelseskursus” (thinly veiled survival course). I don’t remember what all the problems were, but I think among them was the fact that we didn’t have hot water.

It was a fun course though and since we all lived in close quarters and took all our meals together for several days we got to know one another pretty well. I was sad when it ended, but happy when about a year later, I learned that Dreyfus was coming back to Denmark to give a talk at the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Copenhagen. I wrote to Dreyfus to arrange to have dinner with him. He told me he thought the Philosophy Faculty was arranging a dinner for him, but that I should contact them to make sure. I wrote to them and they confirmed that they were indeed planning a dinner for him on the Friday of his lecture, but that there was nothing planned for the following evening. I’d hoped they would invite me to the Friday dinner, but they didn’t so I made arrangements to have dinner with Dreyfus the following evening.

The talk that Friday was great. I went up to talk to Dreyfus at the break and he greeted me warmly. “We’re going to dinner this evening,” he said, “you should come along.” I explained that I hadn’t been invited, by Dreyfus ignored my protestations and escorted me over to the woman whom he said was making the arrangements. I knew they didn’t really want me along that evening, but I didn’t want to be rude to Dreyfus, who seemed convinced that the extension of an invitation to me simply hadn’t occurred to them. Dreyfus introduced me and explained that he thought I should come to dinner with them. The woman looked at me skeptically and then responded. “Well,” she said slowly, “the arrangements have already been made. It would be difficult to add another person at this point. You would have to pay for yourself,” she added with an air of finality. The Danes are nothing if not polite. I knew they could not come right out and tell me that they didn’t want me along and I was suddenly annoyed that I’d been excluded and decided that I’d exploit what I had learned about the Danish character and use it to my advantage.

“Oh that’s all right,” I responded cheerfully, “I don’t mind doing that. I don’t mind at all!” and then I slipped quickly back into the reception crowd before she had time to think of a retort.

There was wine and cheese at the reception so it went on for a while. I’d brought my boyfriend and I began to feel guilty about the fact that I was going to go off to dinner without him. I didn’t really relish returning to my stunned hostess and asking if I could bring a guest, but I felt like I had no choice.

“Can my boyfriend come to dinner too?” I asked when I finally found her again. The look of horror on her face was quickly replaced by thinly concealed rage.

“I thought,” she said slowly through clenched teeth, “that you weren’t coming because you had to pay for yourself.” I’m sure she assumed that I’d get the hint that time, even if I hadn’t before.

“Oh no,” I replied smiling, “I don’t mind paying.”

There were actually some advantages, I realized, to hailing from a country so uncivilized as the U.S. I could pretend I didn’t understand that she was trying make it clear to me that they didn’t want me coming along to dinner and she would have to accept that I was incorrigibly uncultured and hence incapable of taking a hint. She, on the other hand, as a good, upper-class Dane, could not allow any chink in her own breeding to show, she would just have to accept my presence and the presence of my equally backward boyfriend at their exclusive soirée.

The evening took an unexpected turn, however, when we found our wine was corked (for readers who are unfamiliar with this term, it means the wine has taken on a mildewed flavor and nose from a bad cork). My boyfriend, who knew something about wine, discovered this at once and insisted we be brought new wine. The company could not have been more impressed and entreated him to pick a new wine himself. I don’t remember what he picked, but he picked well and charmed everyone with both his choice of the wine and his excellent command of Danish. It was a lovely evening. He was the star. I think they may even have liked me by the end.

I’m hoping that’s the how Dreyfus remembers it, anyway, as I have no dinner plans for the 29th!