Existing Spiritualism before God had been dominated by clericalism, and intellectual reaction against religion had been limited to the reduction of all biblical references to God to a meaningless symbol. Sren Kierkegaard, a Denmark native, thinker, and writer, challenged both intellectual and clerical authority. In his Lectures on Good and Evil, published posthumously in 1855, Sren Kierkegaard maintained that to accept any sacredness and profundity of life is to reduce one’s ethical and theological responsibilities to God. To declare anything sacred or good is to reduce all one’s responsibility to God.
God does not give us any special gifts or rewards in this life. All we are offered is what we choose to give Him. In his Exegetical Philosophy, Sren Kierkegaard demonstrates how the concept of God and the idea of God’s attributes could be reduced to a base act of will. No external force acts to define or coerce us into acting out of our free will. There is no ‘way’ we can know what God wants from us in this life except by faith, and Sren Kierkegaard emphasizes the importance of this principle in his own work. In Exegetical Philosophy, Kierkegaard does not present an argument for God’s existence, but he points out how the concept of God and the concept of good and evil are arbitrary names given to concepts that have no external meaning.
The philosophy of Sren Kierkegaard is a polemical refutation of all religions. In his Exegetical Philosophy, he denies the possibility of any outside, eternal being. He claims that the concept of God and the concept of good and bad are arbitrary names given to concepts that have no external meaning. As he puts it, everyone would be right in everything, but none would be right in everything, for each would contradict the other.
For Sren Kierkegaard, God’s omniscience is a mystery. He says that God cannot possibly know the thoughts or intentions of everyone, since each will always have an ideal of his own. Everyone would also have a different picture of God, a picture that necessarily conflicts with God’s image in the Christian and Muslim faiths. For example, everyone would see God as omniscient (all knowing and all seeing), but everyone would also see God as loving (so that He protects them in every possible way) and as omnipotent (to be able to create anything), while only a few would see God as just and justifiable (so that He just keeps the creation safe).
Everyone would believe in miracles, but only a few would experience them. Everyone would value faith above knowledge, but only a few would base their value on learned knowledge. Everyone would accept the Christian worldview, but only a few would cling to it wholeheartedly. Those who hold onto these beliefs most wholeheartedly accept all theories of religion, including those that place God at the center of everything and place God’s will above all other things. The entire edifice of the Abrahamic faiths, even as they argue against the truths of evolution, are based on faith and theosthetics. It is as though every one of us are holding a mirror of ourselves.
Sren Kierkegaard would call this the “shift of consciousness.” This is because we are awakening from our various senses to the reality of our world around us, through our senses and through reason, but we are not seeing the world anew. We are merely passing through it, passing though in a manner that makes all of our prior ideas seem foolish and irrelevant. We are becoming aware, but we are still blind.
Sren Kierkegaard would say that we must look at ourselves through the lens of light. If we were able to see through our own mistakes, we would see everything clearly. If we could realize the interconnectedness of all things and the essence of all that is, we would then see ourselves as a part of all that is. In other words, we would see ourselves as a part of the Whole.
This is the secret Christian should discover. If he were to open his eyes to the light of God, he would then see himself as a part of the Whole. If he would then begin to follow Christ, he would then see God as the creator of his own reality and image. If he would then accept his personal bankruptcy, without holding on to any of his former self, he would then be able to see what a great role God plays in our lives and how he sees himself and others.