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Kierkegaard, MacDonald, and Universalism at the 2025 AAR

As usual, this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of religion was rich with Kierkegaard sessions. I will say more about those sessions in a later post. The point of this post is to describe what were, for me, the highlights of the conference. 

I don’t know whether I mentioned this in any earlier posts, but I’m a member of an Anglo-Catholic church here in Philadelphia called S. Clement’s. It is a wonderful community of generally politically progressive, but liturgically conservative, Christians and it has the most beautiful services I’ve ever attended. Michael Glass, a Kierkegaard scholar who recently received his Ph.D. from Temple is also a member of S. Clement’s.

So anyway, my husband, Brian Foley decided we should try to attend the High Mass at an Anglo Catholic church while we were in Boston for the AAR meeting. I can’t remember whether I directed him to The Church of the Advent (which I had somehow learned the Kierkegaard scholar Jeff Hanson had been affiliated with at one time), or whether he found it on his own. Jeff was there, of course, that Sunday and we were able to chat briefly with him after the service. The highlight of the service, though, was a bell chorus and the flamboyant “Queen Anne’s” incense move shown in the video that accompanies this post. 

Wild, eh? 

The church was wonderful. The incense, unfortunately, set off the smoke alarm so everyone, congregation, choir, etc., etc. had to file out into the cold and conclude the services in the street. Everyone was very good natured about it, though, and when we received the all-clear, we headed downstairs for a sumptuous coffee hour and a trip to the little bookstore in the basement.

We’ll definitely be visiting The Church of the Advent again!

The second highlight of the conference for me was a special session on adoption of the Scriptural Reasoning Unit of the AAR. I presented a paper at that session entitled “The Dark Side of Adoption” that defended George MacDonald’s argument that Paul’s υίοθεσία (cf., e.g., Romans 8:15) should not be translated as “adoption.” I was surprised at how positive was the reception of my defense of MacDonald on this point. People often become very wedded to the precise wording of the writings they hold sacred, so I expected some pushback, but there was virtually none. I was also very fortunate to have MacDonald scholar Laurie Wilson present in the audience and she graciously helped me out with a couple of questions that stumped me. (I’ll say more about Wilson, who had earlier presented a paper at the joint session of the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Unit and the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit, in a later post.) 

MacDonald was a genius at, among other things, interpreting the Greek of the New Testament. He argued in a sermon entitled “Creation in Christ,” from Unspoken Sermons Series Three (published in 1889), that Biblical translators had mistranslated the beginning of the Gospel of John. As I mentioned, people often become very wedded to the precise wording of the writings they hold sacred, so it took a full one hundred years for MacDonald’s insight to be incorporated into any English translation of the Bible. It was finally incorporated, though, into the New Revised Standard Version (published in 1989) (I’m indebted to Ben White for pointing this out to me), so perhaps one day MacDonald’s point about the proper translation of υίοθεσία will be incorporated into an English translation of Romans.

The real highlight of the conference for me, though, was a special session that Lee Barrett, Robin Parry, and I organized on universalism. Parry, the author of the best-selling The Evangelical Universalist (published under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald), chaired the session, Barrett, of Moravian Seminary, and Tom Greggs, of The Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton, were the presenters, and I served as a respondent after Thomas Talbott was forced to withdraw as a speaker for family reasons. 

I had no idea what to expect in terms of attendance. The session was what is called an “Other Event” at the AAR, meaning that it was not sponsored by an existing AAR unit. It was listed in the conference program, and the Søren Kierkegaard Society had generously promoted it to its members, but I had no idea how many people would actually read the program that closely, or how many Kierkegaard people would be interested in universalism. We’d discussed ordering refreshments for the session, but had decided against it out of fear that there might not be enough people to justify spending the money.

How wrong we were! The venue, albeit small, was packed. There was literally standing room only. The papers were excellent and the discussion was exceptionally lively. There was a palpable energy among those present, even my husband, who showed up only as the session was concluding, remarked on it. Parry explained that the session organizers were in the process of establishing a new scholarly organization, the Society for the Study of Christian Universalism, and requested that anyone interested in joining the society should put their name and contact info on a sheet that would be passed around the audience. We got more than twenty names! (Several of the names and email addresses were undecipherable, though, and my guesses as to what they were were unsuccessful, so if you had put your name on the list, but have not yet heard from me, please email me at mgpiety@drexel.edu and tell me that you want to be added to the list. Or if you were not present at the AAR session but you are reading this post and would like to be added to the list, just let me know and I will add you.)

I was also able to become more closely acquainted with Kierkegaard scholar Casey Spinks who was in the audience and whom I spoke with briefly after the end of the session. I learned in that conversation that Spinks (whose Kierkegaard’s Ontology is forthcoming from Bloomsbury) had also been at The Church of the Advent that morning. There appears to be something in Anglo-Catholicism that is particularly appealing to Kierkegaard scholars. Perhaps it is the combination of deep spirituality of the Roman Catholic tradition and the anti-authoritarianism of the English Reformation. I’d be interested to hear from readers whether they are aware of any other Anglo-Catholic Kierkegaard scholars. 

I began this post with the objective of giving you a little smags prøve (or taste) of Barrett’s paper from the universalism session because that paper looked at universalism in the thought of Schleiermacher, Hegel, and, of course, Kierkegaard. I particularly liked the section on Kierkegaard because Barrett makes a very convincing case that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist, without ever actually referring to the explicitly universalist passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. That is, Barrett argues that universalism can actually be inferred from various passages in Works of Love. I’ve decided, however, that that issue deserves a post of its own, so stay tuned. I should have it up in a few more days.

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

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Kierkegaard on “Reasoning”

I don’t go looking for problems in translations. I find them, usually by accident. My research generally begins with word searches on the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Though it is increasingly clear that SKS is not complete, it’s the most complete searchable version of Kierkeaard’s works and hence is enormously helpful. There are links in the hits on word searches that will take me directly to the text in question from which I can then cut and paste into a document of my own the text I want to use. This text is, of course, always in Danish. I could translate it myself into English, but as I’ve written before, I was taught that doing one’s own translation is acceptable only in instances where the text in question does not exist in a translation that has been accepted by scholars. So the next step, after I’ve found the passage I want in the original Danish, is to find it in one of the newer translations of Kierkegaard. I go to the Hongs’ translations first because these are the ones that are generally used by scholars.  Most of the time, the Hongs’ translations are fine. They aren’t always fine, though, as I have documented in earlier posts. Sometimes the problems are relatively minor and sometimes they’re quite significant. I ran across a passage with some problems of the latter sort recently. Not only is the translation problematic, but the problem in question illustrates the danger of over-translation that sometimes happens when translators take themselves, or their responsibility to properly represent the thought of the original author, too seriously. 

The passage in question appears in Two Ages. “What does it mean,” asks Kierkegaard there,

to be loquacious [at raisonere]? It is the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. As abstract thought, loquacity [Raisonnement] is not sufficiently profound dialectically; as conception [Mening] and conviction, it lacks full-blooded individuality. But in extensity loquacity [Raisonnerende] has the apparent advantage: a thinker can comprehend his branch of knowledge, a person can have a concept [Mening] of what is related to a particular subject, can have a conviction based on a specific view of life, but the loquacious man [den Raisonnerende] chatters [raisonnerer] about anything and everything (TA, 103.)

The Danish text reads:

Hvad er det at raisonere? Det er den ophævede lidenskabelige Disjunktion mellem Subjektivitet og Objektivitet. Som abstrakt Tænkning er Raisonnementet ikke dialektisk dybt nok, som Mening og Overbeviisning er det uden Individualitets Fuldblodighed. Men extensivt gaaer den Raisonnerende af med Skin-Fordelen; thi en Tænker kan omfatte sin Videnskab, en Mand kan have en Mening om hvad der hører til et bestemt Fag, kan have en Overbeviisning i Kraft af en bestemt Livs-Anskuelse, men den Raisonnerende raisonnerer om alt Muligt.

There are several problems here. The first, and to me, entirely inexplicable one, is that the Hongs have translated Mening as “conception” and “concept” rather than “opinion.” Danish has a term for “concept,” it’s Begreb, a cognate of the German Begriff and Kierkegaard makes frequent us of it. Mening, on the other hand, means opinion, as any Danish-English dictionary makes clear.

“[A]nulled” should also, arguably be “sublated,” since the Danish term in the original is ophævede, which is a cognate of the German aufgehoben, which scholars will immediately recognize as a Hegelian term. This term generally appears in English translations of Hegel as “sublated,” hence ophævede, when it appears in Kierkegaard’s works is probably also best translated that way. 

The biggest problem with the Hongs’ translation of this passage, however, is with the translation of Raisonnement as “loquacity.” The Hongs acknowledge themselves in a note that such a translation at least appears problematic in that Raisonnement is a cognate of “reasoning” and, in fact, was translated as “reasoning” in a translation that appeared from Oxford in 1940. “[A]t raisonere,” the note continues

does mean to reason. But it also means the dissipation of reason in verbosity, loquacity, garrulity, and therefore in Danish Raisonneur means “one who uses his mouth” (Ludvig Meyer, Fremmedordbog, 1844; ASKB 1034). On p. 97, at raisonere was changed in the final draft to at snakke. In the draft of p. 97 at snakke and at raisonere are used as synonyms” (TA, 173).

At snakke and at raisonere are not used as synonyms, however, in the final version of the book and this suggests that while Kierkegaard considered them related, he did not consider them to be synonyms.

Raisonneur, or “one who uses his mouth,” does not appear in the passage in question. What the Hongs translate as “the loquacious man” is not den Raisonneur, but den Raisonnerende, which suggests he does not mean to refer to a loquacious man as such, but to someone who is overly fond of reasoning. Ferrall-Repp lists the meaning of Raisonnere as “to reason, argue” and Raisonnement as “reasoning” (the foreign words are at the back of the book). It’s thus likely by den Raisonnerende, Kierkegaard has in mind someone who is overly fond of argument, or publicly debating with others. This, in any case, appears to be the sense in which Kant used räsonniert in What is Enlightenment. Kierkegaard was well aware of Kant’s use of räsonniert because he comments on it in his journals (see NB16:50). That is, den Raisonnerende is not someone who is simply fond of the sound of his own voice, but someone who is fond of rational disputation. The qualification “rational” is important, because otherwise Kierkegaard’s qualification of at raisonere as “abstract thought” does’t make much sense. 

I have an ebook version of the Hongs’ Two Ages, so after I discovered this problem with at raisonere, I did a word search on “loquacious” to see if it occurred elsewhere in the translation, and discovered that the only other place it appears is on page 22 (or thereabouts, ebook pagination is not always exact) where there is a reference to “every loquacious barber.” When I checked the original Danish, though, I discovered that the term there is snaksom, not raisonnerende. 

Snaksom ought properly to be translated as “talkative,” or “chatty,” rather than “loquacious” because the use of “loquacious” is an affectation and affectation was something Kierkegaard abhorred. That’s less important, however, than the fact that using a single English term, “loquacious” to translate what are clearly two quite distinct concepts in the context of the work in question conflates these two concepts for the reader. There’s a big difference between a barber who blathers on mindlessly about “anything and everything,” and someone who endlessly disputes about anything and everything. 

Finally, The Hongs have also inexplicably translated en Mand as “a person.” We might all wish that Kierkegaard had written et Menneske, i.e., “a person,” but he didn’t. He wrote “a man.”. In fact, its not impossible that Kierkegaard thought the problem of excessive cerebration, or the tendency to rationally dispute about anything and everything, was specifically masculine. 

I believe, and will argue in a paper I’m giving in a conference at Princeton next week, that what Kierkegaard says in this passage about what it means to raisonere gives us an important insight into his view of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. That is, Kierkegaard claims here that reasoning, in the sense in which Kant uses it, brings the two together. It simply does this in a way that for Kierkegaard is imperfect in that it lacks “full-blooded individuality.” There are times, however, such as when one is engaged in the study of nature or history, when “full-blooded individually” is arguably inappropriate. What the scholar and scientist want is objective truth, and that is entirely appropriate for them as scholars and scientists. It’s only when the “reasoning” in question is about what Kierkegaard identifies as as “subjective truth” that reasoning’s lack of “full-blooded individuality” would appear to be problematic. 

I know I am occasionally hard on the Hongs. It’s the job of scholars, however, to be meticulous in their treatment of their sources. That I’m often critical of the Hongs does not mean that I’m unaware that I owe them an enormous debt, as does everyone who works on Kierkegaard in English. They were the first people to do an extensive translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and I have to say that I prefer the language of that translation to the language of the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I still depend on that translation to correct the wording of passages in the latter when it seems to me to have gone terribly wrong. 

The Hongs’ contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship is not restricted, however, to their translations of Kierkegaard. They founded the Kierkegaard library at St. Olaf College and that library, and the fellowships it offers, has done incalculable good for scholars over the years. I had one of those fellowships myself, back when Howard was still alive and a constant presence there. He had a little of the vanity that I think nearly every scholar has, but he had a generous heart as well and helped me many times in my stay there at the library. I remember him, and Edna, very fondly. 

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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!