When a person undergoes a transformative experience, she finds herself existing in a way that she could not possibly have anticipated in advance of undergoing that experience. With transformation comes a new orientation to the world and, indeed, a new self-understanding. This raises a difficult question. How can a person prepare for the kind of existence that will result from a transformative experience? To address this question, we first need to think about the particular nature of the transformative experience that faces a person. Different transformative experiences raise their own distinctive challenges when it comes to addressing this question.Footnote 1 The particular transformative experience that I shall be focusing on is Christian conversion. More specifically, I am going to think about how Søren Kierkegaard would respond to the question of whether a person can prepare to become a Christian.
As I seek to show, Kierkegaard does not think that conversion takes place by way of a specific, clear-cut experience.Footnote 2 For Kierkegaard, ‘[c]onversion goes slowly’ (JP 1, 420/SKS 27, 207). It is comparable to the transformation that a husband and wife experience in a marriage. Like marriage, the Christian life requires a person to commit her life to another person, to Jesus Christ; it requires her to commit herself prayerfully, imaginatively, and passionately to following Jesus Christ. By so doing, a person commits her life to another, without knowing all that this will entail, and without knowing what kind of person she will become within the covenant of this relationship. It is in the context of a committed relationship with Jesus Christ that a person begins to discover what it is like to participate in a life of faith. And when this happens in truth (in a way that corresponds to the divine truth that Jesus Christ mediates to the world), it involves what Laurie Paul refers to as ‘an extended transformative experience’ (Paul (Reference Paul2014), 97).Footnote 3 Over an extended period, a person will be delivered into a new life that she could not possibly have anticipated in advance of becoming a Christian.
What is more, for Kierkegaard the essential condition of this transformative experience is encountering the active presence of God in her life. To become a Christian, a person needs to be reborn from above, according to the witness of the Spirit (John 3:3-8). ‘Christian rebirth’ involves ‘a relationship not between man and man but between God and man’; it involves a relationship, which he refers to as ‘a new creation’ (JP 1, 649:19/SKS 27, 396). The idea that Christian transformation requires God to be graciously at work in a person's life raises a whole new set of challenges when it comes to addressing the question, ‘can a person prepare to become a Christian?’. This article will explore some of the ways in which Kierkegaard negotiates these challenges.
By addressing this issue, this article will also respond to Ingolf Dalferth's recent criticism of Kierkegaard, in which he claims that, for Kierkegaard, we ‘have to prepare ourselves for, or at least become prepared for the workings of grace or we shall miss it’ (Dalferth (Reference Dalferth, Cappelørn and Deuser2005), 279).Footnote 4 While I recognize that there is a deep ambiguity in Kierkegaard's argument that can invite such a claim, I also think that such ambiguity is to be expected when reflecting on the mysterious ways in which God relates to human beings in time. That said, I do not think that this ambiguity invites Dalferth's conclusion. As I reflect on whether Kierkegaard believes that a person can prepare to become a Christian, I shall defend Kierkegaard against Dalferth's reading of him. Additionally, I shall also challenge the misperception that Kierkegaard views Christian conversion as an existential process of self-transformation,Footnote 5 rather than a process of transformation that takes place in a reciprocal relationship with God.
On being ready for the unexpected
Before turning to Kierkegaard, I want to turn briefly to consider Donald MacKinnon's reflections on the French Post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. The reason for doing so is that MacKinnon's discussion of Cézanne offers a distinctive example of someone undergoing a transformation in a way that reflects certain aspects of Kierkegaard's account of Christian conversion. In particular, it gives us some insight into what it might mean for a person to prepare for the unexpected.
In his reflection of Cézanne, MacKinnon points out that it would have been impossible for Cézanne to experience and perceive the world in the way that he did had he not ‘been the painter that in fact he was’ (Mackinnon (Reference MacKinnon1974), 107). It was in and through devoting himself to achieving the post-impressionist vision of art, which he was to embody, that Cézanne's ‘perceptual experience achieved [a] complexity and subtlety’ that distinguished him from the ‘less disciplined and less creative spirits’ (ibid., 107).
Now, amongst these ‘less disciplined and less creative spirits’, we would have to include the younger Cézanne: that is, we would have to include Cézanne prior to his becoming the insightful post-impressionist painter that he later became. Cézanne was not born with a complex and subtle perceptiveness. Rather, he cultivated it through an extended period of discernment, which took his perception beyond its more pedestrian form. By drawing on the example of Cézanne, MacKinnon concludes that we must not become too comfortable with our standard perception of reality. We must learn ‘to be ready for the unexpected’, and this means developing an attitude that is ‘uncongenial’ to those who are set in their ways.Footnote 6 We must become open to discerning more than that which is immediately apparent. By so doing, we allow ourselves to become transformed in and through our engagement with the surrounding world.
Cézanne's readiness for the unexpected required a perceptiveness that kept him from becoming bound to immediacy, from getting caught up in the regularities of earthly life, from synchronizing with the pulse of the crowd. And it involved an enchantedness with which he came to interpret reality as having a brilliance that is not immediately apparent, on the surface. This discernment is what stopped Cézanne from settling into the uniformity of the natural world.
What makes Cézanne's discernment comparable to Christian discernment is that they are both characterized by a readiness for the unexpected, and an awareness of the transcendent, which resists the pull to become a cog in the machinations of the world – to become a mere feature of nature. The difference, however, is that, for Kierkegaard, Christian discernment is contingent upon the transcendent and unexpected one (God) establishing kinship with a person in time. By so doing, God enables a relationship with the transcendent that would have been beyond the reach of Cézanne's own imagination. What is more, while the Christian might not be content with settling into the ways of the world, she can find contentment by settling into a relationship with God. The restless imagination of Cézanne (qua painter) can never find such contentment. This is because the sense of transcendence that shaped Cézanne's artistry never relates him to the transcendent in the way that faith relates the Christian to the God who makes himself known. In Cézanne's search, the transcendent is always beyond the horizon of what he comes to know. Consequently, he can never find the sense of fulfilment (in his life as an artist) that the Christian enjoys in covenant relationship with God.Footnote 7
For the purposes of this article, I want to introduce an important qualification here. Being ready for the unexpected does not mean being mentally prepared for the unexpected. It cannot mean this. If one were able to prepare oneself mentally for the unexpected, there would need to be a sense in which the unexpected was not the unexpected. One can only mentally prepare for something if one has some awareness of that something prior to experiencing it – that is, if one has some idea of what to expect.
So, for example, on the one hand, there would seem to be plenty of things that a person can do to prepare to become a mother (there is even a well-known book entitled What to Expect When You're Expecting). On the other hand, a person cannot prepare for those things that are to be unexpected, such as those existential qualities that result from the transformative experiences of actually becoming a mother (assuming that becoming a mother is, in some way, a transformative experience – and most mothers will tell you that it is).
To be ready for the unexpected is to be continually open, not only to discovering new features of reality, but also to having the very nature of one's perception transformed; it is to be ready and open to being taken beyond one's immediate perception. Again, as we shall now see, there is an extent to which Kierkegaard recognizes that a similar attitude is conducive to becoming a Christian in a way that a closed-mindedness is not. That said, as I contend, it is unhelpful to view such an attitude as preparatory for becoming a Christian.
Does Kierkegaard think that a person can prepare to become a Christian?
For Kierkegaard, there is a sense in which becoming a Christian requires a readiness for the unexpected. He believes that there are certain things that a person can do that may ready a person to become a Christian: for example, praying, reading the Bible, listening to the witness of a believing Christian.Footnote 8 He also recognizes that the particular dynamics of subjective human existence can have a pivotal role to play in readying a person to become a Christian. For example, he suggests that a person's passionate disposition – ‘the thoughts of the heart’ – have a decisive role in determining whether or not a person will come to faith (PC, 96/SKS 12, 105).Footnote 9 And there are some features of this disposition that resemble Cézanne's readiness for the unexpected.
Yet, on the other hand, he also understands that neither a person's practices nor her particular subjective existence can, in and of themselves, prepare a person for being transformed into a life of faith and the perception this will generate. Any readiness that a person might achieve will not be characterized by a knowledge of what to expect upon becoming a Christian. So, while there may be certain things that a person can do to increase the likelihood of becoming a Christian, these things will not prepare her for the entirely new quality of life that she will experience upon being transformed by the presence of God in time.
Some helpful illustrations of this point are provided by Laurie Paul. She notes, in one of her examples, that undergoing surgery to receive cochlear implants, and being in possession of the necessary medical conditions to receive the surgery, may provide the circumstances that will enable a person to be able to hear for the first time. However, they will certainly not, in and of themselves, prepare a person for the first-personal experience of hearing for the first time.
But there is also a critical difference here. It is likely that the person who is going to receive cochlear implants will be able to know, in advance, that she is ready to go through the process that will enable her to hear for the first time. However, for Kierkegaard, a person cannot know, in advance, that she is ready to become a Christian. A person can only know retrospectively that she was ready to become a Christian because she has become a Christian. Upon becoming a Christian, a person rejoices in the fact that she has been transformed by encountering the grace of God in her life; she rejoices in the fact that her life, in all its irreducible subjectivity, has been drawn into relationship with God.
This, however, is a simplification of Kierkegaard's position. So, now, I want to take some time to think more deeply about his understanding of Christian conversion. The limited focus of this article will not allow for a close analysis of the detailed and careful way in which Kierkegaard responds to the question of how a person becomes a Christian. However, I shall offer an account of what I think are the essential elements in his discussion of conversion.
First, for Kierkegaard, a person cannot straightforwardly think herself into a qualitatively different sphere of existence, nor can she directly transition [Overgang] into it through sheer willpower because, in advance of her existing in it, there will be a sense in which it will be totally alien to her.Footnote 10 To transition into such a sphere, for Kierkegaard, a person needs to set out on a pathos-filled venture into the unknown.Footnote 11 And, to make a complete transition, or conversion, she must take a leap [Spring] – a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος (shifting from one genus to another). This leap requires her to risk allowing herself to become transformed into a new way of existing.Footnote 12
How, then, might a person involve herself in a process of conversion? To make this leap, a person will need to have some idea of where she is venturing. To become a Christian, a person needs to have some awareness of Christianity in advance of having any clarity as to what it actually means to be a Christian. However, while a prior awareness of Christianity is required, such awareness does not provide a person with any direct access to the essential truth of Christianity. This is because, for Kierkegaard, a person can only truly relate to the truth of Christianity, to God, in and through a life of faith. A person cannot know what Christianity is, in truth, until she becomes a Christian.Footnote 13 And, for this to happen, a person needs to be transformed by encountering the grace of God in her life. Therefore, studying Scripture and Christian doctrine will not directly bring a person into a personal relationship with the reality of God.Footnote 14 It is the God who assumes human nature who is the all-transforming and irreducibly personal focus of the Christian faith. Therefore, a prior awareness of Christianity can only serve as the occasion for God to encounter that person and reconcile her into a life of faith. (See PF, 11/SKS 4, 220.)
Johannes Climacus on becoming a Christian
At this point, it can become quite difficult to work out how Kierkegaard thinks that a person can relate herself to the truth of Christianity. Indeed, Kierkegaard does not offer a precise answer to this question. His deep respect for the uncertainty of God's activity holds him back from providing an overly systematic account of how a person relates herself to the truth of Christianity. However, his non-Christian pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, is willing to offer a more systematic engagement with this question.
Climacus is described as an ‘outsider’ to the Christian faith, but an outsider who is preoccupied by the question ‘How can I, Johannes Climacus, become a Christian?’.Footnote 15 As a non-Christian trying to think about this question, Climacus does not show the same kind of caution that we see in Kierkegaard. He comes across as being more speculative and methodical in his thinking than Kierkegaard. Yet, as we shall see, he is also clear that becoming a Christian depends upon the power and presence of God in time – and, according to Christianity, God is not someone who can be incorporated into any world-historical system of understanding.
Climacus supposes that, to become a Christian,Footnote 16 a person must approach the idea of God, or the idea of Christianity, with an existential pathos. She must approach this idea passionately, as someone who believes that she has nothing to offer except her need of God. (See CUP, 556–557, 581–582/SKS 7, 505–506, 529). Going through these motions will not itself bring a person any closer to God. However, such motions can provide the ‘impetus’ for God then, in response (or in ‘second place’ [secundo loco]), to deliver that person from her sinful life into a life of faith – from a life in untruth to a life in truth (CUP, 559–560/SKS 7, 508–509; see also JFY, 191/SKS 16, 237–238). Climacus writes: ‘the god [Guden] rescues from delusion the person who in quiet inwardness and honest before God is concerned for himself; even though he is ever so simple, the god leads him in the suffering of inwardness to the truth’ (CUP, 615/SKS 7, 559).Footnote 17 In this passage we can see that, even when Climacus is stressing the subjective side of Christianity, he remains adamant that it is God who draws a person into relationship with the truth. When God is present in a person's life, in a way that brings about transformation, Climacus notes that there occurs a ‘break with immanence’ (CUP, 571/SKS 7, 519).
This break with immanence, as M. Jamie Ferreira makes so clear, does not cause a person to lose continuity with herself, in every sense (Ferreira (Reference Ferreira and Furtak2010), 6–24). In conversion, a person's humanity is not displaced; rather, it is transformed, heightened, and deepened (ibid., 19–21). Nevertheless, according to his understanding of Christianity, Climacus does not think that a person can transform herself into a life of faith. For Climacus, there is nothing inherent to a person's worldly existence that can enable her to deliver herself into the Christian faith. He understands that the Christian life is grounded in an encounter with ‘God in time as an individual human being’, who exists as ‘something outside himself’ (CUP, 561n., 556/SKS 7, 510n., 506).Footnote 18 The grace of God breaks into a person's life, as a spiritual activity that comes to her from beyond her own immanence – thereby causing a break in the natural course of her existence (CUP, 610/SKS 7, 553). For Climacus, it is a particular historical relation to God in time that inspires a new Christian pathos (‘a pathos of separation’) with which God upbuilds a person in her faith (CUP, 582, 556–559/SKS 7, 530, 505–508): a pathos that, given its absolutely different source of inspiration, must be recognized as qualitatively different from the universally accessible pathos that can be discovered by the inner workings of the human mind.Footnote 19 The point of departure for becoming a Christian is thus a living relationship with God in history (CUP, 579, 583–584/SKS 7, 526, 530–531). And this depends wholly upon a decisive ‘moment’ in which God encounters and reveals himself to a person in a way that transforms that person to relate to God in truth (PF, 13/SKS 4, 222).
The ‘moment’ is key to understanding Climacus's understanding of Christianity. The limited scope of this article will not allow for a comprehensive treatment of this issue (as it is considered, for example, in Philosophical Fragments). However, what I will say is that Climacus's emphasis on the role of the ‘moment’ is closely connected with Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelianism. The moment, for him, is a point in time in which the eternal God encounters a historical person from beyond time. With this paradoxical understanding, Climacus ensures that he does not collapse the eternal God into the world-historical process. For Climacus, God (and, therefore, a relationship that includes God) cannot be contained within the natural order. The God of Christianity remains free, unconstrained by the limits of the natural order. As such, every moment in which a person encounters God in time is made possible because God freely decides to encounter that person in time. While Kierkegaard's understanding of time warrants its own discussion and evaluation, it is helpful to note that Kierkegaard does not think that God exists within the contingent order. To put it in non-Kierkegaardian terms, he believes that God is lord over creation history rather than subject to it. As such, each and every moment of God's engagement with history, and with everything in history, is always freely determined by the eternal God.Footnote 20
In short, when God transforms a person within history, from beyond history, an event occurs that is beyond what is possible for a person on her own, in her own immanent history. By the grace of God, a person is given to participate in a new history of relationship with God. In this event, as Climacus puts it strongly, ‘every remnant of original immanence is annihilated, and all connection cut away’ (CUP, 572, 576/SKS 7, 520, 523). God confronts a person miraculously in a way that causes that person, in this respect, to ‘lose continuity with himself’ and become ‘a new creation’ (CUP, 576/SKS 7, 524).
In what sense, then, does a person both lose and maintain continuity with himself? In and through the process of conversion, for Climacus, a person continues to exist as the historical subject he has always been. However, when God reconciles him into a life of faith, his subjective history no longer remains closed to God. To put it in Climacus's terms, a person's original existence – in which he sinfully closes himself off to God – ‘is annihilated’ (CUP, 572, 576/SKS 7, 520, 523).Footnote 21 In faith, a person finds that God has opened him up to participate in a reciprocal relationship with God, and thus opened him up to the possibility of being transformed within this relationship.Footnote 22 This means that any historical knowledge of Christianity, or any passionate interest in Christianity, which is prior to this transformation, can only ever be preliminary. If a person's existence is closed to God, it is not able to relate to God in truth. Therefore, a person's initial vision (her closed and unfaithful vision) of what Christianity is can only ever be a projection of his ‘pagan’ understanding (CUP, 201, 293–294, 606/SKS 7, 184, 267, 551).
Kierkegaard on becoming a Christian
While Climacus and Kierkegaard relate to Christianity in very different ways,Footnote 23 it is fair to say that they share a very similar understanding of what Christianity is. For Kierkegaard, the Christian does not merely relate to God by learning about revelation from her Bible and then struggling to correspond to it. Becoming a Christian clearly presupposes that this will happen. However, Christian transformation relies on an outward relationship with God: with God who ‘cannot be an object for [human] beings, because God is subject’ (KJN 73/SKS 20, 74; see also JP 2, 1449/SKS 26, 281). It involves the transformation of a person by way of a spiritual activity that comes to her from beyond her own existence, from beyond a preacher's Sunday sermon, and, indeed, from beyond the pages of her Bible.Footnote 24 Kierkegaard insists that we ‘always need grace beforehand’ (JP 2, 1493/SKS 25, 223).
Kierkegaard also thinks that Jesus Christ is not merely a historical figure who leaves behind information that can serve to fill in the blanks in a person's immanent relation to God. Rather, Christ is the God–human ‘mediator’ in and through whom all persons can be drawn into a relationship with God, by the power of the Spirit.Footnote 25 Consequently, it is not merely Christological or evangelical information that makes Christianity qualitatively unique, but the way in which the power of God in time actively enables a person to relate to God. So, it is not the case that once the Christian has accepted the Gospel message, she can then mediate the truth of Christianity to herself, in isolation from the presence of God. The only way whereby the Christian relates to the eternal truth, and continues to do so, is through a living relationship with God. On this account, it is not a person's passionate commitment to Christian teaching that is central, but rather, God's sustaining that person in her faith, thereby enabling her to relate both to God personally and thus to the truth that God is in himself.Footnote 26
Grace, for Kierkegaard, does not simply perfect a person's natural existence; it transforms it. Prior to becoming a Christian, a person cannot know what to expect. There is no prospective continuity, and there is no possibility of a person predetermining the condition of God's engagement with him. A person cannot methodically summon the grace of God into his life, and thereby use God to deliver himself into a life of faith.Footnote 27 Unlike immanent forms of religiousness, it is not the case in Christianity that ‘[w]hen a person rubs it [the wonderful lamp of freedom] with ethical passion, God comes into existence for him’ (CUP, 138/SKS 7, 129).Footnote 28 Becoming a Christian involves a free subject to free subject relationship that may require a person to be patient in his passion to know God (see KJN 5, 124–125/SKS 21, 119). Any existential continuity, therefore, can only be discerned retrospectively and in such a way that God's mediatory, transformative, and redemptive activity is understood to be both foundational and also unanticipatable. When a person is transformed by grace, he no longer relates naturally to God as if God were a conceptual postulate, an existential goal, or an object of his imagination.
Does this mean that the Christian is required to forget what it means to exist as a human being? No, by being drawn into relationship with God (the eternal truth), the Christian is given to know in truth what it means to be human, and to be so before the God who creates and sustains her. For Kierkegaard, a person discovers her humanity when her existence corresponds to the power that created her.Footnote 29 She discovers her humanity by coming to know the God before whom she stands. And she comes to know this, in truth, by the grace of God (see PF, 46/SKS 4, 252).
So, what can be said about whether a person can ready herself to become a Christian? To come to faith in God, Climacus suggests, a person must loosen her grip on her desire to see God demonstrated to her directly; she needs to let go of the priority she gives to her own immediate understanding and imagination. As he puts it, she needs to ‘let go of the demonstration’ in a ‘leap’ that he describes as meine Zuthat (my contribution) (PF, 42–43/SKS 4, 248). By ‘letting go’, a person resists the temptation to try to work God out in her own terms before turning to God for relationship. She becomes ready for the unexpected and submits herself to God, humbly placing her trust in God for everything.
For Kierkegaard, the venturing or willingness that characterizes the leap does not in itself prepare a person to know God. As Murray Rae notes, the leap that a person contributes ‘is more aptly defined as the removal of an obstacle to conversion. That obstacle is human pretence – the pretence that reason or the understanding enables us to attain the Truth on our own’ (Rae (Reference Rae1997), 166).Footnote 30 To be clear, by seeking to set aside her own pretence, a person does not positively prepare herself to become a Christian. It simply makes her more open for the unexpected: it makes her more open to the possibility of encountering something for which she cannot prepare herself; and it makes her more open to the possibility that her immediate perception of reality might be confused. For Kierkegaard, it would seem that such openness makes a person's existence more conducive to becoming a Christian.
This seems right. If, for example, an atheist, such as Richard Dawkins, were less confident in his own capacity to understand the nature of reality, and more open to the possibility of God's existence, it would seem fair to say that he would be more likely to become a Christian. Or, to put it another way, such humility would seem to increase the likelihood of him participating in the kind of occasion that is conducive to becoming a Christian: such as an occasion of prayer, attending a Church service, or listening to the witness of a believing Christian.
But, again, prospectively, a person cannot know that she is open to the grace of God. She can only know retrospectively that she was open to God, because she has become a Christian. A person knows that she is blessed because she has been given the eyes to see and the ears to hear (Matt. 13:16). And, when this happens, the Christian does not boast of her own ability to open herself to God, but boasts of the grace of God, which drew (and is drawing) her into a life of faith. The Christian does not boast of the capacity of her own ‘flesh and blood’ to perceive the truth of the Gospel message, but of the revelation of the ‘Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 16:17).
When a person turns to the God whom she does not yet know, she awaits a transformative experience that is very different from the transformative experience that might take place in a marriage between equals, or that a parent might experience when raising a child – to refer to Laurie Paul's examples.Footnote 31 If anything, she awaits an experience that is comparable to the transformative experience that an infant might come to experience when kept in a loving relationship by a parent. In this relationship, the infant comes to know the parent she did not immediately have the ability to know. The reason for this is that the relationship with God – which undergirds Christian conversion – is not chosen or maintained in the way that a person might be able to choose or maintain a relationship with a spouse or a child. While there are choices that need to be made to become a Christian, for Kierkegaard, the Christian does not have the freedom to realize the relationship with God for herself. A person cannot simply commit herself to a known set of circumstances by which she can know that she will undergo the transformative experience that takes place in a relationship with God. Instead, she must trust that God will draw her to himself and keep her in this relationship, transforming her in ways that she cannot even begin to understand.
Kierkegaard does not know the mind of God. Again, for this reason, he does not attempt to offer a systematic explanation why there are certain dynamics within the contingent order that can increase the likelihood of a person becoming a Christian. Nonetheless, he does assume that this is the case. For him, if we do not acknowledge that human agency has a pivotal role in the process of ‘becoming a believer’, we end up with ‘a fatalistic understanding of election by grace’ (KJN 6, 420–421/SKS 22, 415). Rather than human beings being the variable in deciding whether or not a person becomes a Christian, God becomes the variable. And this is not an option for Kierkegaard. As such, it is somewhat understandable why Dalferth would criticize Kierkegaard for suggesting that a person can prepare for the workings of grace. Yet Dalferth's criticism is also somewhat uncharitable. Prospectively, Kierkegaard does not think that a person can know what it means to prepare to become a Christian – let alone actually prepare herself to make this happen. No human mind has an inside knowledge that can know precisely how, when, why, or whether God will draw a person into the Christian life. Kierkegaard's theological vision simply does not have the self-confidence to assume that human beings possess an intentional command over the workings of grace.
There is something else that is worth mentioning here, which may further clarify Kierkegaard's own position. As Murray Rae points out, ‘the leap’ is a Climacean category; this category, he notes, ‘is almost completely absent from the writings of the so-called Christian authors, Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard himself’ (Rae (Reference Kierkegaard, Cappelørn, Garff, Knudsen, Kondrup, McKinnon and Mortensen1997), 22). That is, ‘the leap’ is the generic category of a non-Christian who is pondering how to become a Christian. Kierkegaard does not make the same use of the leap. When Kierkegaard looks back over his life as a Christian, he does not recount the leaps that he made to become a Christian. Rather, he speaks of God's governance (Styrelse) that supported him ‘indescribably much’ (KJN 5, 243/SKS 21, 233). He speaks of the Holy Spirit who gives faith (FSE, 81/SKS, 13, 103). And he speaks of the love of God made known to the world in Jesus Christ:
Lord Jesus Christ, you who loved us first, you who until the last, loved those whom you had loved from the beginning, you who until the end of time continue to love everyone who wants to belong to you – your faithfulness cannot deny itself. Alas, only when a person denies you can he force you, so to speak, you the loving one, also to deny him. (CD, 282/SKS 10, 103)
Conclusion
When becoming a Christian, for Kierkegaard, a person trusts and hopes that God is at work in her life; she must ‘believe in a providentia specialissima [special providence]’ (JP 2, 2083/SKS 26, 241). However, she cannot know this with certainty, nor can she have any command over God's activity. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, there is a sense in which a person cannot even know for certain whether she has actually become a Christian – in so far as she cannot directly see God delivering her into a life of faith. So, becoming a Christian is not as clear-cut as hearing for the first time with the help of cochlear implants. To an extent, it is more comparable to getting married or achieving a post-impressionist vision of art. However, it is even less clear-cut than these experiences because it depends upon a spiritual activity that comes to a person mysteriously, from beyond her subjective experience of the world and, indeed, from beyond the surface phenomena of this world. This activity can only be known by the eyes of faith [Troens Øie], and even these eyes are having to look through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12; see JP 4, 3916/SKS 27, 303).
So, when considering whether he himself is a Christian, Kierkegaard notes: ‘[I] aspire to it, fight for it, pray about it, and trust to God I am a Christian’ (PV, 129/SKS 16, 111). However, out of his deep respect for Christianity, he is trepidatious about asserting his status as a Christian.Footnote 32 He explains: ‘to say about oneself that one is a Christian means to speak with God, and that therefore a human being must speak with fear and trembling’ (PV, 140/SKS 16, 122). The problem with certainty is that it intimates that a subject has a command over her relationship with the object of her knowing; it suggests a form of command that is not proper to a faithful relationship with God. Genuine faith in God is characterized by a humble recognition of the incompleteness and provisionality of one's beliefs: a recognition that keeps a person turning to God for upbuilding in the struggle to become a Christian.
We can see, therefore, why Kierkegaard would resist the suggestion that a person can prepare to become a Christian. His appreciation for the uncertainty of faith does not concur with the suggestion that grace can be anticipated in the mind of a person who is thinking about becoming a Christian. Again, while he is happy to acknowledge that there are human practices and mindsets that seem pivotal for becoming a Christian, he does not present them in any straightforward way as conscious preparation for the miracle and mystery of grace. Not for a moment does he think that a person is privy to (let alone able to prepare herself for) the way that God works in the world. What Kierkegaard does affirm, albeit unsystematically, is that a humble and passionate interest in a personal relationship with the living God is conducive to becoming a Christian in a way that a speculative or inward-looking analysis of Christianity is not.
What is central for Kierkegaard is not a theory of conversion but the reality to which conversion corresponds. This reality, the reality of grace, is not something to be passively observed, systematized, naturalized, or domesticated. Grace is not to be introduced ‘as a matter of course’ – a mere step in the process of coming to faith – ‘which, after all, means that it [grace] is taken in vain’ (PV, 16/SKS 13, 24). It is present as an activity that comes from beyond human existence to draw persons to embrace God wholeheartedly with a humble and loving adoration. And whether grace draws a person into a personal relationship with the God, ‘depends on whether it so pleases God’ (JP 2, 1452/SKS 26, 345). That being said, a person can trust that God lovingly wills to draws all persons to himself, and so the person who seeks God can hope and trust that she will come to find the grace of God working in her life (Mt. 7:7; Lk. 11:9).
To conclude, for Kierkegaard, the Christian's story of her conversion is not to be told as a story of her own existential adventure, or of her own transformative experience. Rather, it is to be told as the story of God drawing that person to himself, in and through the person of Jesus Christ, and, indeed, through the power of the Holy Spirit. The story of Christian conversion is to be told as the story of God finding that person in the wilderness. It is not a story of how a person prepared herself to find God in the wilderness.
Of course, the story of a person's conversion can be narrated in either way. But, for Kierkegaard, one way is faithful and the other is not. In retrospect, for the Christian, the story of conversion is a story of God's governance, the story of God's faithfulness; it is not the story of an imaginative person, but the story of the mediator, the high priest, who graciously delivers a person across a chasm that would otherwise be uncrossable or, we might say, unleapable.
So the Christian must resist the temptation to start the story of her conversion with ‘I’: ‘I grew up in a Christian home’, ‘I went to a Christian camp’, ‘I found God at a particularly difficult time in my life’. If a Christian begins in that way, she must quickly pause and correct herself with the Apostle Paul's words ‘yet not I’ [ouk egō de], and confess that her conversion is enabled by ‘the grace of God that is with me’ (1 Cor. 15:10).Footnote 33
But why would the Christian confess that her faith is grounded in the grace of a God who is hidden from view? Would this not convey to the (secular) world that she is a blind fideist – someone committed to the activity of an invisible being? For Kierkegaard, the Christian does this because it is a part of her faithful calling to recognize and confess that God has spoken to her – that God has called her out of her confusion into a life that is devoted to the living God. Any temptation to reduce this calling to the ramblings of her own imagination would be to prompt a forgetfulness of her calling. It would be to deny the reality of God, and turn her own idea of God into the object of her faith. Furthermore, it would be to disregard the one true grounding of the Christian faith – the God who delivers a person into a life of truth. So, for Kierkegaard, the Christian must always testify that God prepares her to become a Christian in a way that she could never do for herself.
