I removed a lot of material from this blog so I could edit it together into book form for publication through Kindle—seems they have a rule about putting out for free what they are trying to sell. So, I need to start putting out some new material. I’m currently working on a paper examining connections between St. Augustine of Hippo and Søren Kierkegaard. Below are the notes I took on an article I first read when I was in my first year of doctoral study. At the time I got an A- on the paper, which sadly was written so long ago that I was still using an actual typewriter; I no longer have the one copy of that paper, so I am rereading and reanalyzing this excellent essay from Dr. Ferreira.
Ferreira, M. J.. 1987. “The Faith/history Problem, and Kierkegaard’s “A Priori” ‘proof’”. Religious Studies 23 (3). Cambridge University Press: 337–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20019226.
The problem is, how can faith that a particular historical event occurred (namely, the Incarnation, life ministry and death of Christ) be decisive for faith, while at the same time insulated from the results of historical research? Ferreira compares two attempts to address this problem: Tillich’s and Kierkegaard’s. Tillich admits that the historical details of the Christ are uncertain, but claims that this is unimportant to faith because the essence of faith is that one who has been grasped by the ultimate significance of the Christ event knows that it has ultimate significance, no matter how it actually happened. However, Ferreira finds all of this too vague. Tillich is so imprecise about “how the event occurred” that it becomes unclear how one can tell the Christ event from any other event. In the dark, all cats are black; and in the murky results of historical research into the life of the Christ, any event could be the Christ-event. If all details are uncertain and this doesn’t matter, then we really have no information at all, and one event is as good as another.
Ferreira points out that three times in the Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Climacus asserts that the story of the Incarnation is such that no human being could have invented it on his or her own. The only way it could occur to anyone, he says, is if the god suggested it himself. In a sense, then, his is an a priori, nonprobablistic proof for the truth of Christianity. Even if all the historical details are shown to be uncertain, and all we have is a little nota bene of historical moment that some generation has said that “the god was born among us, lived as one of us and then died,” that would have been enough to establish this faith as an alternative to recollection. And Climacus seems sincere in this claim, as he even repeats it in the Postscript. And if this argument sticks, then Climacus does have a way to claim that the Incarnation is decisive for faith, even if the details are uncertain. Whatever exactly happened, the god has put this idea into history.
At the same time, though, Climacus claims that uncertainty and risk are essential to faith. If I make the leap to believe in the truth of the Incarnation, I must believe through faith alone, despite uncertainty; but if I can know that this idea could not occur to any human heart but must have a divine origin, where is the risk? This seems to leave Climacus with a serious inconsistency. Either Christian faith is reliant on at least some historical datum, which would make it vulnerable to historical refutation, or the “proof” eliminates the uncertainty necessary for faith.
My answer: the fact that this “proof” is true can only be known by one who has accepted it in faith. As Climacus says in his “Moral,” his alternative to recollection depends on accepting several other concepts, such as Sin, the teacher as god/man and Savior, etc. and these ideas themselves cannot be known except by someone who experiences them. And if they can only be known by faith, anyone who lost that sense of faith by seeing them as certain would also loose the ability to understand these concepts truly, or to see why they could not arise in any human heart. You must first believe in order to understand.
philosophicalscraps 