Risking Proclamation, Respecting Difference. Chris Boesel

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      The openness and complexity of the context of modernity wherein the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel with regard to faith, the ethical and Abraham appears to remain unsettled and in play constitutes the space in which the rest of this book unfolds. It is an openness and complexity that, to my mind, slips under the radar of leading theological work on this issue. My reading of this openness and complexity allows an account of the imperialistic bad news (according to Hegel . . . and Said) entailed in the Christian proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ as Messiah and Lord, while also accounting for the imperialistic bad news (according to Kierkegaard . . . and Derrida) entailed in the modern West’s remedy of that Christian faith. We are able to see that what is at issue in the diagnosis and remedy of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor is an either/or between two kinds of imperialistic discourse (as in, two understandings of faith in relation to the ethical). There would seem to be no avoiding some risk of complicity in the bad news of interpretive and material violence to Jews within the histories of Christendom and the West more generally. The openness and complexity of the modern context, then, confronts us with a predicament in which—from the perspective of the ethical—it seems we can do no other than to choose our poison, for the sake of a possible remedy; we are confronted with alternative risks to be run, risks to be borne.

1. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 83.

2. Ibid., 95.

3. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87. This critique has three main targets, Hegel’s concept of History, the role of the subject in Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s concept of Being. Levinas sees each of these as resulting, each in its own way, in an “imperialism of the same” (85) in relation to the other.

4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 96, 84.

5. Ibid., 89.

6. Hannay, “Introduction,” 29.

7. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 86.

8. Ibid., 86, 87. Kierkegaard has Johannes repeatedly stress the extent to which the ethical-universal, as opposed to the paradox of faith, is constituted by the ability to be understood. As Hannay notes, Hegel’s conception of the ethical is marked by the possibility of being understood through “sharable thoughts” of “common language” that “suffice for people to describe and justify their actions and attitudes to one another” (Hannay, “Introduction,” 10–11). This is the persistent thorn in Johannes’s side in relation to Abraham; he cannot understand him. The way in which Abraham constitutes an un-subsumable surd calling into question the adequacy of a “common language” by which faith can be understood foreshadows the “postmodern” nature of the argument.

9. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 86.

10. Ibid., 88

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 90. At issue here, in the relation of Kierkegaard to Hegel, are diametrically opposed understandings of God and God’s relation to the universal (conceived of as the ethical life of the societal whole, the world-historical). Whereas Hegel understands God to be in continuity with—indeed, within—the world-historical, Abraham stands in a relation to a God independent of and over against the societal whole and the world-historical. It is Hegel’s understanding of God and the God-relation, i.e., of faith, that is the ultimate target of Kierkegaard’s critique: “Where Hegel goes wrong . . . is in talking about faith.” (84) However, Hegel’s misconception of faith, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, is clearly related to distortions in Hegel’s assumptions regarding the ethical. A “new category” (88) for genuine faith, then, would have transformative consequences for a conception of the ethical.

13. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 73. The brackets are mine.

14. Hannay, “Introduction,” 14, 19.

15. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 77.

16. Ibid., 52.

17. Ibid., 67.

18. Ibid., 68. My emphasis.

19. Ibid., 69.

20. Ibid., 69–70. The brackets are mine.

21. Crites, Twilight, 75. Similarly, Hannay suggests that what the sacrifice in this story symbolizes is the extent to which Abraham was willing and able to “accept that human life, Isaac’s, Abraham’s, everyone’s, acquires its meaning and value from the source of creation itself, not from the . . . forces of creation that confront a person and bear him along in the world” (Hannay, “Introduction,” 14). My own suggestion is that it may be interesting, and perhaps even edifying, to reflect on the figure and meaning of Christian baptism here, as symbolic of precisely this Abrahamic double-movement of faith—giving one’s life away (dying) to receive it back from the hand of God (rising to new life).

22. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 98.

23. Pertinent here is the relation in Kierkegaard’s thinking between the incognito of Abraham and the happy burgher as both knights of faith (indistinguishable to the neutral observer from a murderer and a bourgeois philistine, respectively) and that of the career of Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate in time (for example, in Philosophical Fragments). Also pertinent for our central problem is the extent to which, given a certain incognito, faith leaves any discernible marks or traces in the concrete world by which it might be recognized and distinguished from unjustifiable violences. Kierkegaard may allow for such marks and traces, despite the incognito. For instance: 1. Faith is based on the determinate content of the promise of God. 2. A knight of faith never takes disciples. 3. A knight of faith is a witness and never a teacher. On Kierkegaard’s terms, then, it would be perfectly appropriate, indeed, mandatory, to make an unambiguous and adamant distinction between a knight of faith and, say, a Jim Jones, or, closer to our concerns, a Nazi clergyperson of the German Evangelical Church.

24. I am following Kendall Soulen in this particular phrasing. See, Soulen, God of Israel.

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