Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #7: The Patron Saint of Deconstruction, The Apostle of Paradox & Radical Faith: Soren Kierkegaard
This episode dives deep into the restless brilliance of Søren Kierkegaard — the 19th-century philosopher, outsider theologian, and reluctant father of both existentialism and Christian authenticity. If you've ever doubted the plastic gods, burned out on hollow church talk, or longed for a faith that costs something real, Kierkegaard was speaking to you.
We explore:
- The Self as a Task
“The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.”
You’re not born yourself, you become yourself, and only through brutal honesty, dread, and surrender.- Truth is Subjectivity
“Subjectivity is truth. Truth is subjectivity.”
Faith is not a system of answers; it is an inward passion, lived, suffered, and chosen without guarantees.- The Leap of Faith
Faith is not irrational, but it transcends reason.
You don’t arrive at faith by deduction, you leap, trembling, into paradox.- The Knight of Faith vs. the Knight of Infinite Resignation
The knight of resignation gives everything up. The knight of faith believes he’ll receive it back, impossibly, through God.
It's the difference between giving up and giving over.- The Sickness Unto Death: Despair
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur so quietly.”
Despair is not feeling bad, it’s not becoming who you truly are before God.- Attack Upon Christendom
“The greatest danger to Christianity is… the pretend Christian.”
Kierkegaard savaged the church of his day for being socially safe, polite, and fake, what he called “playing at Christianity.”- Faith Beyond Certainty
“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”
Kierkegaard invites us not into blind belief but a raw, defiant trust that lives without certainty.- Authenticity Through Anxiety and Dread
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Your terror isn’t a sign something’s wrong — it’s the signal that you’re standing at the edge of becoming.
If you're deconstructing — or have burned down the easy answers — Kierkegaard offers you no comfort… only truth, paradox, and the possibility of becoming real before God.
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
When he said subjectivity is truth, what he meant is your relationship to yourself is fundamental, and if it's real you're not putting on. You can't do that really unless you want to be totally alienated from yourself and be somebody who doesn't have any identity other than the persona that you play in society. He was very big on individuality, but only that. Individuals had to have an authentic relationship with themselves, whether or not anybody else picked up on it or whether anybody else thought that was Christian in their church. It had to be an authentic relationship to themselves and their faith, and so you can't rely on other people, even your therapist, to tell you who you are, because you could be telling your therapist what you think your therapist wants to hear without authentically confronting your own fear and trembling and confusion and doubts about faith.
Speaker 2:So that confrontation, that inwardness, is what Christianity introduced to the world.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 2:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama. Sometimes, when I get bored, I like to fly above the clouds.
Speaker 3:Soren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, denmark, in 1813, into a wealthy but deeply melancholic family. His father, michael Kierkegaard, was a stern and religious man who had once cursed God as a child and spent much of his life fearing divine punishment. That deep sense of guilt was passed on to Soren, shaping his psychological landscape from the start. Kierkegaard was academically gifted. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen and became well known for his brilliance, wit and sarcasm. But even as he climbed the ranks of intellectual society, he wrestled with a profound inner conflict between reason and faith, structure and passion, tradition and authentic belief. At 27, kierkegaard was engaged to a young woman named Regine Olson, but fearing he could never offer her a normal life, plagued as he was by inner anguish and a sense of calling, he broke off the engagement, a decision that tormented him for the rest of his life and appeared often thinly veiled in his writings. He remained single and lived a relatively isolated life. He remained single and lived a relatively isolated life, pouring his energy into his work. Between 1843 and 1855, kierkegaard wrote a remarkable series of books under both his name and pseudonyms, exploring themes of despair, anxiety, faith, love and the absurd. His method was unique he didn't just teach doctrine. He created characters, voices and scenarios that forced readers to confront themselves. Works like Fear and Trembling, the Sickness Unto Death, either-or, and Philosophical Fragments challenged conventional theology and offered a new way of thinking about what it means to believe. At the heart of Kierkegaard's work is the idea that truth is personal, not merely propositional. He argued that faith isn't about intellectual certainty but about passionate commitment, what he famously called the leap of faith. For Kierkegaard to be a true Christian wasn't to go to church and follow rules. It was to stand trembling before God with nothing to lean on but trust. That made him deeply unpopular with the religious establishment of his day, especially the Danish Lutheran Church, which he accused of dead orthodoxy, and cultural Christianity In the last years of his life turned more openly polemical, launching scathing attacks on the church and calling Christians to embrace the suffering, scandal and paradox of the cross. He died young, at age 42 in 1855, after collapsing in the street and spending his final weeks in a hospital where he refused the last rites of the church he had so fiercely criticized.
Speaker 3:And yet, despite his obscurity in his own lifetime, kierkegaard's influence has only grown. His work laid the groundwork for existential philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, theologians like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, psychologists like Rollo May, and writers and artists from Dostoevsky to Camus to Flannery O'Connor. He is, in many ways, a paradoxical bridge between classical Christianity and postmodern thought, both orthodox and radical, faithful yet disruptive, often called the father of existentialism, kierkegaard wasn't just a philosopher. He was a theological provocateur, a poetic genius and a deeply haunted soul trying to wake the church, and maybe the world, from a spiritual sleep. In this episode, we'll explore how thought speaks so powerfully into today's culture, where truth feels fragmented, the church is under critique and faith often feels more like struggle than certainty. But far from pushing people away from Christ, kierkegaard invites us in deeper to a faith that's not shallow or performative, but raw, costly and real.
Speaker 3:And with no further ado, I'd like to bring on Professor Larry Inchosti. Hello there, travis, good to see you. Larry, welcome back. And for those of you who are either newer to the podcast or haven't listened to the first episode, I did realize maybe some people do that they jump around. This whole podcast is based on a book that Professor N Chostey wrote. We call him Professor Larry, and so we've had him on every episode and we're planning to have him on every episode going forth through all the characters from the book, and we have a bunch of ideas beyond that. So welcome back.
Speaker 1:Thanks.
Speaker 3:So just to give our audience a little more scope on Kierkegaard's most notable works, just so they have an idea of what he wrote. A couple of them were just mentioned, but he wrote most of these between 1843 and 1850. In these seven years he wrote Either-Or Fear and Trembling Repetition, philosophical Fragments, the Concept of Anxiety, stages on Life's Way, concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, works of Love, christian Discourses, the Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. Very prolific guy, yeah. Very prolific years there. Just the last seven years of his life, it looks like yeah.
Speaker 3:So some of the interesting facts about him, before we dig in, is that he walked the streets of Copenhagen a lot. He would take long solitary walks, and I've actually been hearing this about a lot of very smart people through history. They would have their best ideas on walks. Nietzsche said the same thing. So Kierkegaard and Nietzsche must have been two peas from the same pod coming from completely different angles on faith. Locals called him the melancholy Dane because they'd always see him walking and it would help him think and write. The next one is that we already mentioned. He broke off his engagement, but he never got over the girl. So he thought about it the rest of his life and I guess appears a lot in his writings.
Speaker 3:Under a veil of not being super obvious, he had multiple pseudonyms and he wrote whole books in these pseudonyms to debate with himself. So he would present different arguments from different characters. But it was all him writing and some of those pseudonyms were Johannes de Silentio, vigilis, hoffnines and Anticomachus. So these are some of his pseudonyms. Komakis so these are some of his pseudonyms. But it wasn't deception, it was art. It was almost like a form of an author's performance, art, and it allowed him to attack weak faith of feeling like he was preaching doctrine or theology.
Speaker 3:His biggest masterpiece of fear and trembling he wrote in two weeks. That's a fun fact. He waged a one-man war on the church. He was calling the church out. Actually sounds stuff that would be relevant today. To call the church out for Things like being too cozy with power and afraid of suffering. So political power and comfort he was calling them out for us. How relevant is that? And he said they have Christianity without the cross was a part of his critique. And he once tried to publish a book without his name at all and even with all of the pseudonyms people knew it was him. So it was similar to Banksy. If Banksy tried to do something and not let anyone know it was him, people would probably still figure it out. So that's the clout he had. And the last fun fact is he never traveled outside of Denmark.
Speaker 1:Those are fun facts this morning as well.
Speaker 1:How would you frame bird's eye view not zooming in yet how would you frame Kierkegaard, what he meant to you and to your book, subversive Orthodoxy? Kierkegaard is the patron saint of subversive orthodoxy. Did you mean original, or did you mean orange juice? He was the original gangster of the subversive orthodoxy, in that he wasgaard's perspective wouldn't really be a fiercely intellectual defender of Christianity, but more of a humanist cultural critic that found interesting things in the Christian mythology but didn't have an existential commitment to the faith per se in the same way that Kierkegaard thought was necessary. If you wanted to live the Christian life. You couldn't just rely on humanist standards and see Christ as a humanist, but you had to make an existential commitment and he was the first person, because his writing seems so original, he was the first person, because his writing seems so original, to explain what an existential commitment is or what it means to want to live the truth and not just simply know the truth, how that would play out psychologically and spiritually.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's so much we get from Kierkegaard and I think also from Nietzsche, and we get so much of it in our modern American worldview that we don't even know came from them, and I think when I'm reading about Kierkegaard and reading some of his quotes and stuff, it's like he actually created a bunch of mindsets that we do have.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Like it's just me and my personal relationship with God. That came from Kierkegaard, pretty much, yeah, and you could see how having a radical faith came from Kierkegaard, because everybody around him seemed, from his perspective, very lukewarm and like the church had become very cultural.
Speaker 1:Yes, conventional, everybody believed the same thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, kind of like when you're in Texas now and it's like everyone's a Christian in Texas, like that's the joke. It's not really a joke, but it's like sure, like everyone goes to church. It's more normal there, but if you're in Boston, very few. So there's a cultural norm that he was speaking at, obviously in Denmark.
Speaker 1:The thing with Kierkegaard, and I think you're right to point out how a lot of his ideas have made it into our culture, like authenticity and being real and having a personal relationship to Jesus and all of those things, but they've also been bastardized and not really understood in the deep way that he intended as a philosophical critique, and so it's good to go back to him and look at what he actually said and the context of what she said. These things yeah. So that's what. Maybe we can do a little bit of that today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's what you're here for.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:She helped take me back to the source. One thing off the bat I see in him is a double edged sword. So there's one of his critiques was against the dogmatism and theological certainty of the church and certainty in general, not just the church but just certainty in general, the enlightenment. And then I think challenging that is good. And then I think where it has a negative it can be too far of a negative swing is where you lead into a relativism of just total subjectivity. I think the truth is somewhere in a balance of the two. But yeah, I think is that something in him is like a double edged sword in that way.
Speaker 1:No, I think the consequences of his popularity and fame after he died and everything, and him being taken up by the French existentialists and the German, like Heidegger and those folks and Jaspers, took him out of his Christian context and turned a lot of his best ideas into slogans. Turned a lot of his best ideas into slogans. And so if we could put some of these ideas, like truth is subjectivity, put that into its context of what he was trying to talk about when he said that, and also the crowd is untruth, that famous quote.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that has a huge implication here in your book yeah where he talks about that. It sounds like it sounds like such a critique on social media culture yeah like house of mirrors.
Speaker 3:I saw this line. This is how the world it's talking about the crowd. They look at, people look at. I'm sorry, let me back up. Modern christendom had become a civil order, given over to various hypocrisies and biblical pieties, but lacking any authentic relationship to the absolute. In other words, a sense of centered and coherent self-consciousness is precisely what individuals lack. Therefore, they look around at others, the crowd now. Think of social media here. They look around at others, the crowd, so that media. Here. They look around at others, the crowd, so that they might pattern themselves after the collective reality, but all they learn is what the others are. This is how the world seduces individuals from being themselves. The others, in turn, don't know who they themselves are, but only who the others are, and so everyone lives in a house of mirrors, seeking essential life in a world of appearances and never finding it.
Speaker 1:That's Kierkegaard in spades, but Kierkegaard himself like in the actual text. The concluding post-scientific postscript.
Speaker 3:Concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments.
Speaker 1:Concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments, that one is his mighty tome, in which he philosophically tries to explain what it means to be a Christian from a psychological, spiritual, anthropological point of view, that really you can't copy your Christian faith from anybody else, because it's really a dialogue with yourself in terms of the absolutes in your life.
Speaker 1:Your relationship with yourself is defined by it, and so that's the point that he's trying to make is that the self is a relation in which the self has with itself, and so he meant by that is that subjectivity. When he said subjectivity is truth, what he meant is your relationship to yourself is fundamental, is your relationship to yourself is fundamental, and if it's real, you're not putting on. You can't do that really unless you want to be totally alienated from yourself and be somebody who doesn't have any identity other than the persona that you play in society. And so he was very big on individuality, but only that individuals had to have an authentic relationship with themselves, whether or not anybody else picked up on it or whether anybody else thought that was Christian in their church. It had to be an authentic relationship to themselves and their faith in order for it to matter at all. To them.
Speaker 3:I think I hear what you're saying. That he's saying is that because he's looking at a world that has been very conformist and he's getting really critical of it.
Speaker 1:Yes, and one way of thinking of it. One of his famous quotes was that you can understand your life looking backwards, but the problem is you have to live it going forward. Understanding conceptually is applying categories to past experience, but unfortunately, life unfolds in new contexts and in ever new relationships with yourself, and this can't be formulated before the fact for individuals or for people living in time, and so faith comes in pieces. Sometimes. It doesn't come in terms of a complete theology and dynamic. It's dynamic and as you piece together your identity, you're piecing together your relationship to God and your faith. So it's a process that only God and your soul really have a front seat to, and so you can't rely on other people, even your therapist, to tell you who you are, because you could be telling your therapist what you think your therapist wants to hear without authentically confronting your own fear and trembling and confusion and doubts about faith. Fear and trembling and confusion and doubts about faith. So that confrontation, that inwardness, is what Christianity introduced to the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it relates to one of his quotes you have in the book about knowing oneself. Yeah, it's Sykegaard and you're saying it's from the Christian discourses. It says there is only one who knows what he himself is, and that is God. And he also knows what every man in himself is. For it is precisely by being before God that every man has his being. The man who is not before God is not himself. A man can be himself only by being before him. Who is in and for himself. If one is oneself by being in him, who is in and for himself. One can be in others or before others, but one cannot be oneself being merely before others. It's almost like Dr Seuss, right there.
Speaker 1:It's similar to that mirrors passage you read a little earlier. Yeah, it was right after that, except it's a little bit more philosophical, because the two philosophers that were big in his youth, that he read and adopted language from One was Hegel the Mythology of the Spirit, and for him Hegel got it exactly where philosophy was aiming at the ultimate abstraction that would explain the dialectic of human history. No, it was that each individual was searching for their relationship to the absolute, and that was a person-by-person activity. It wasn't a historical abstract activity and it was concrete in the present tense, unfolding, not something that you could look back and understand all human history from this abstract point of view. Absolutely ass backwards.
Speaker 1:You know the beginning of Descartes' philosophical meditations. He talks about how he's going to live a conventional life and believe what everybody else believes as a practical expedient, and then that'll allow him to be a true thinker in his professional work as a philosopher. And Kierkegaard, whose philosophical ideal is Socrates no, you either live the truth or you're not a lover of wisdom. You want to live your wisdom. You don't want to just play the conventional game of the culture you're in and then on your days, in your writing, den be a philosopher and write about these abstract truths that are impossible to embody.
Speaker 3:Did he think of himself as a philosopher?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think he did. I think he thought of himself as a Christian apostle who wrote philosophy.
Speaker 3:That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think there's a bunch of reasons why I love this guy yeah.
Speaker 1:But there's one other quote, and this is another abstract quote, but I think it might help again to connect the concrete to the abstract here for us a little bit. Kierkegaard wrote an essay in which he made a distinction between the Christian apostle and the cultural genius. A genius was somebody who actualized the full potential of any great science or art form. So the genius was somebody like Bach, who took German music and ran it through its paces to essentially complete all the possible counterpoint that was imaginable, right? Or Einstein, who took physics to its ultimate conclusion and then one step further, and so they were great embodiments of human potential, but it was always at a human level, whereas the apostle, he said and then this is his definition, which is another one of these head spinners he said the genius is only whose ends are only eminent. They're ends that are only what's possible now for a human being in history, where an apostle is absolutely paradoxically teleologically placed. Paradoxically teleologically placed. Now, when I read that, I thought that was a perfect description.
Speaker 1:I was writing my book on Thomas Merton at the time, and Thomas Merton is a creature of paradox. He was like a world-famous hermit, right. He was a writer who believed that silence was the ultimate eloquence. Yeah, he was famous for being a poet, but he wasn't a very good poet, so he had all these contradictions, a lot of paradoxical facets of him, like Kierkegaard, and so why was he so influential? Why was he a bestseller in the 50s and why does he continue to influence people in his books on spirituality? Because he really he wrote about spirituality more than theology and he really wasn't a very good theologian. He's probably a good theologian, but he wasn't a very original one.
Speaker 3:Now are you connecting Merton to the concept? You just read that Kierkegaard was saying about apostle yeah, about apostle. So can you say it again, Because it was pretty heady and I want to try to capture the meaning.
Speaker 1:And I think it's why maybe Goethe wouldn't fit the Kierkegaardian, except in certain phases of his life he would. Okay, this is the Kierkegaard definition of an apostle. It's someone who is let me get it right, Wait, this is something you have memorized. Yes, I've memorized it. It explained all of Kierkegaard in one sentence. That was my take on it Absolutely, paradoxically, teleologically placed.
Speaker 1:Another way of putting it is a Christian, unlike a pagan philosopher or a Descartes rationalist, is someone who is absolutely, absolutely, paradoxically, teleologically placed. And to unpack that a little bit means that this is not something he does as a hobby. This is a reflection of his character and belief, right, the fullness of his individual relationship to the absolute. Okay, so he's absolutely. Now, paradoxically and we haven't really got into why paradox is so important to Kierkegaard but maybe we should do that next, and then I think we'll have the big picture. I think we'll have the big picture, but paradoxically meant, not dogmatically in the sense of you have a set of beliefs and you believe them and you know the truth.
Speaker 1:No, an authentic person. Life unfolds into the truth, which means that sometimes he contradicts himself in order to get into a new phase of existential commitment. He becomes the most famous hermit like Merton. How can you become a famous hermit? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? No, it's a Christian paradox of living beyond the mere rationality of a system whose internal consistency is more important than your authentic capacity to live in the truth. Yeah, so it's absolutely paradoxically and then teleologically placed. It's focused on the ultimate ends of things.
Speaker 3:For the audience. Teleologically has to do with trajectory of human history, that there's a story, that there's an ending. That's the concept of teleological, I believe.
Speaker 1:Yes, that there's an ultimate end to things. Human beings can't instantly know the ultimate ends of things unless you want to say you know what God thinks because you went to church and they told you. They told you, and so you have this rational, objective understanding of the ultimate ends of your life, or God's vision of the universe. That's maybe more than you really know, and, if you're honest, you don't even know who you're going to be in a year and a half or how your beliefs are going to change in the light of a human crisis. Ain't that the truth? So let's just be real about it.
Speaker 1:And the Christian apostle is one who believes there's a purpose to it, but I don't know it yet. Maybe and faith is living with that knowledge that there is meaning, but you haven't yet, maybe, got it all together To a Christian apostle, or a Christian apostle is more like somebody who is aware of their incapacities, their limitations, their sin, and stands naked before God in fear and trembling, and says, unlike Descartes, I don't know the meaning of life, nor am I willing to pretend, like I do so, that I can pursue it in my library on Fridays. I have to pursue it in my life as it's unfolding before me and right now I don't know and I'm in crisis and I'm just living on faith and a prayer, and it says Amen.
Speaker 3:It sounds like what I would call cosmic humility.
Speaker 1:Cosmic humility. That's what it is, but it isn't that you lose yourself. It's like my relationship with myself needs God, because I am not all that.
Speaker 3:And humility in that I am not God and I don't know everything and I'm not going to pretend like I really know as many things as I pretend I know.
Speaker 1:And even though I have a PhD in physics, or even if I'm the greatest scientist in the world, that when I'm facing death or looking at the absolute, or if someone says, how can you live the truth of the cosmos? I think it was Richard Dawkins, the famous selfish gene guy, who said that evolutionary biology doesn't really give him rules to live by. But if you were to ask him his ethics, he would say I just try to live like an average Christian, which is funny. It's like a proving point. Abstract knowledge is a kind of knowledge, but it isn't the only kind of knowledge. There's one's relationship with oneself, existential experience that is more directly addressed by the Christian apostle than it is by Descartes or a contemporary enlightenment scientist. Not that those things aren't great, but they don't help you with these questions of self and values and meaning.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, as scientists even today would tell you, science never was trying to answer those questions deeper meaning and so there was a false conflict for a long time, probably through the 1900s, where people thought science was at odds with faith, and it's like just that they're talking about two different things that they both weren't talking about, like the bible. The genesis wasn't writing a science textbook or one thing, and the scientists weren't trying to write about the deeper meaning of life. That's right. So it's like why was there such a conflict there? I think all the assumptions were off on both sides.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it got twisted around because science didn't address those problems, those problems didn't matter.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or you shouldn't waste your time on those problems because they're unanswerable. There's still questions we ask ourselves, whether the scientists do or not what's my relationship to myself and am I an authentic person? And those kinds of questions come up, and that's what the subversive orthodoxy is about, is there's a lot of people that thought those were still good questions and so they pursued them and the scientists dismissed them. But now we look back at them and we say, gee, at least they addressed the issue. What do I do with science? What do I do with all this power and this technological advancement?
Speaker 3:power and this technological advancement, yeah, so this is a good segue into what I told you is that in college I did some course that was like worldview, yeah, uh-huh, and it was somewhat of a fundamentalist brainwashing before you go to college, so you don't get brainwashed the other way become a atheist, which actually turns out.
Speaker 3:I was thankful for it because it did expose me to things like this. One book was called seven men who rule the world from the grave, by a guy named breeze, and his take on kierkegaard was kind of like on the defensive, here's a guy who is basically causing post-modernism, oh, and it turns out the things that he didn't like about Kierkegaard are the things I like about Kierkegaard now. But yet what's so cool about Kierkegaard is that he is the father of deconstruction and postmodernism, but he didn't step away from Christ. He actually went deeper at Christ, which is just crazy paradox. Yeah, yeah, which is accused of liberal theology, accused him of faith detached from doctrine and truth, which I don't think that was a fair critique, most likely. And then another critique he had was just subjectivity over objectivity, and that's anti-enlightenment and that's where theology had gotten to. We have to have our seminary tell us exactly what this passage means and exactly how to pray in the scientific way according to the text.
Speaker 1:Yes, because we want the scientists to respect our faith. So we want to show how Noah's Ark was really 5,000 miles long and we can prove it scientifically or something. It just seemed, from Kierkegaard's point of view, the completely wrong question. It's like you're buying all these false premises about the nature of truth as being objective, when there is such a thing as subjective truth, your relationship with yourself, whether you're lying to yourself, whether you're being honest with yourself, whether you're lying to yourself, whether you're being honest with yourself, those are elements of human experience, and Goethe addresses that, and Blake addresses that, and all the novelists of the 19th century address that, and they weren't just people that didn't have anything to say. So let's go to the three ways, three stages.
Speaker 3:Before we go there. I have an interjection that that idea of what you're just saying and we have been talking about it is that idea of not lying to yourself and truly, truly knowing yourself. I don't think that was really emphasized in Christian faith that much. It was more about knowing God. There was a famous AW Tozer quote which was like what you think about God is the most important thing about yourself, and I really hate that quote now because it really had only to do with knowledge and theology. Do you have the right thinking about God? Which is all that statement was saying was the most important thing about you having the right theology. And ultimately, I have to share this story for you and for our audience.
Speaker 3:A person in my life that had the right theology and was very certain, one of the most certain people I've ever known and was very critical of anyone who had wrong theology or wasn't a Christian. Somebody that was very judgmental, was my youth pastor and he pushed a lot of people away. His certainty and his harsh guarding of the church, the youth ministry and theology and such a rigid person turned out well. Did he truly know himself? Did he really know God? Because ultimately, in 2018, we found out he had slept with underage girls at a previous church. It came out 20 years later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not an uncommon story, is it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just the certainty that goes along with these types of characters is always at a very high level, and judgmentalism is at a very high level of those who are hiding something.
Speaker 3:So it's kind of like for me even at times when I was a pastor or a church planter and I was struggling with my own self was ripping apart my marriage, my parenting. Ultimately, I believed what I thought were correct things. What did that have to do with the fact that I was being torn apart right now? Did I know God in that and did I even know myself? I really did not know myself very well at the time. So I think what Kierkegaard is saying is super relevant just to living, but also to living in faith. And, as he's saying on his terms, he's talking about faith, but I think it's true for everyone just to truly know yourself, to have cosmic humility, to understand like you could just be believing things because a bunch of people believe it around you and then you think you know something, but you're really just walking in a form that somebody else formed for you.
Speaker 1:And if you're struggling with faith, or if you're being honest with yourself, maybe you know God loves you. You don't believe. If the existence of a God is something you don't understand, maybe you haven't perceived or thought the right thought about God yet. Don't blame yourself. Stay true to your authenticity until it's made clear to you. Otherwise, then you have the big breakdown where doubt and faith come together.
Speaker 1:That's the paradox you can't doubt unless you have faith and you can't have faith unless you have doubt. It's the person who can't have faith unless you have doubt, it's the person who opts for objective certainty who doesn't understand that faith is a relationship between the finite human being and the absolute, transcendent God. That is unknowable by my faculties, and if I could prove him mathematically or scientifically, he wouldn't be absolutely. He would be within my bailiwick, I could have him in my garage or pictures of him or whatever they sell you. As to the search for historical Jesus, I'm going to find his fingerprints somewhere and it's going to give me the faith that I'm struggling to possess that life isn't unfolding in stages, and that's why we should go to the Stages in Life's Way that he wrote, which is another key to understanding existential Christianity.
Speaker 3:Okay, so you were going to tell us about the Stages on Life's Way. Okay, Stages on Life's Way. Which book did this come from? Do you know?
Speaker 1:from the. I think the book is called stages on life's way. Oh, it's one of the books, yeah, but this concept comes up in other books as well and they represent the three different modes of human existence the, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. And these are not like psychological categories, they're existential stages, and by that he means they're ways that people experience their lives that most, if not everybody, goes through, because they are basically a changing relationship of yourself to yourself. They each have a different relation.
Speaker 3:I don't think people even use the word worldviews anymore because, yeah, it seems like they're like psychological or spiritual stages, slash maturity levels.
Speaker 1:Yes, they're more like that.
Speaker 3:And in your book.
Speaker 1:I did see that Faust only made it to stage two, right? Yeah, I think he did, and we didn't talk about that when we were dealing with Goethe, because Goethe was a hard one to talk about. Goethe was like his own animal. Yeah, it started with Kierkegaard. We could have labeled him better. But anyway, let's just go through the aesthetic phase first, because I think a lot of young people I know I was this way in my 20s and the aesthetic stage is where life is about enjoyment and the avoidance of commitment and suffering avoidance of commitment and suffering. So if you're living in the aesthetic stage of life, you're essentially looking for the good life, the pleasant life. What's the crazy?
Speaker 3:life.
Speaker 1:La Vida Loca La.
Speaker 3:Vida Loca. Yes, this is a lot of American culture. Just have fun, enjoy your life.
Speaker 1:Yes, have fun For Kierkegaard. He had a character in Either or as the seducer who was the hedonist it's sort of like a Hugh Hefner character and he wrote what this person's philosophy of life would be if he could speak. And so he had a pseudonym for the guy I think his name was A or something and he explained that the aesthetic stage, your purpose in life, is to avoid boredom and despair through novelty, art and witty reflection. And so you're living. Sounds like my children, yes, trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 3:And then you living Sounds like my children yes, trying to avoid boredom.
Speaker 1:And then you and most Americans Develop a persona in your relationship with yourself is you're somebody who has the best of everything, or you're somebody who knows how to have a good time. Or you live for the parties, or you live for your aesthetic work, which is not seen as an ethical obligation but rather just a beautiful way of living your life, with pleasure and happiness, a minimum of pain and suffering that come from having a commitment. But this only lasts for so long because ultimately the state amuses themselves to a point where they begin to find these things meaningless. P Diddy party that you've gone to, or the 5,000th wine high or whatever, living for yourself and your pleasures, you begin to despair that it's all meaningless.
Speaker 3:So when you hit that point now you're which you could have solved already, because the book of Ecclesiastes was written like 2,000 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's also Faust right, he lived for pleasure and power. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so he came to the end of his rope and it was like is this it? I'm beginning to think I want to have some significance in my life. And so you undergo a crisis, or a crisis undergoes you, and you are forced to look at yourself in the mirror and you see a pleasure seeker or someone avoiding commitment and you say I'm ready for the ethical stage. And so then you move into the ethical stage, and the ethical stage is a life of responsibility and commitment, and so it has aspects to it like duty, selfhood, marriage, a profession, a job, relationship with yourself as your relationship, with a series of responsibilities and tasks and things you can be proud of good work, professionalism.
Speaker 3:Does even service or charity fit in here?
Speaker 1:Service charity. A good example for regard would be the tragic heroes in Greek tragedy. Guard would be the tragic heroes in Greek tragedy. They all live for, either like Antigone to protect her brother, or all the tragic heroes of classical literature, the hero with a thousand faces. He's an ethical figure to win Helen back for the Greeks. They have a cause and their life has meaning, and so what's the trajectory on? This one, the first one's predictable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The second one is you become a self with maybe a professional life, maybe an ethical ambition. Maybe you're like at a service job let's say you're a missionary or something but over time you realize that Maybe you're like a service job let's say you're a missionary or something but over time you realize that. But for Kierkegaard, you realize that you can't do it. You can't really do what you set out to do. I wanted to educate all the children in America and I can barely educate five of these kindergartners and, if I'm honest with myself, my useful idealism has dried up.
Speaker 3:And so there's got to be something more than just me and my virtue. So this stage is you had good intentions, but it's just not enough and you're running out of out of gas, or you're just not good enough.
Speaker 1:You're not living up to your own ideal, even. Yeah, and why even do it now? Because the bad guys win. You can't save the world and you're powerless to be any, so this is unlike the person who's tired of the party. This is the person who's tired of the party. This is the person who's tired of the job. This is the kind of the burnout period. It's hard of duty, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so this is where everyone who's listening to our podcast is at. They're all probably in their mid forties, and this is the leap of faith.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the absolute, paradoxical, teleological leap. I don't know why it's this way, but there's got to be some reason that I don't get. That's motivating me to continue to believe in a larger order, and it must be in God's hands or I'm going to give up. Yeah, so you.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's it, just as you're saying. That brought three of my friends testimonies to mind of how they found God.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:And that's the paradox. It's like when I realized I couldn't do it on my own, I just turned it all over to God and said you're going to have to carry me because I can't do it Now. That's the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and for a Kierkegaard, that's really the only way you get to the religious faith.
Speaker 3:How does he defend that from Nietzsche saying oh, you're so weak-minded. What does Kierkegaard say to that?
Speaker 1:It is weak-minded because I'm a finite creature. I'm not a superman like you, Nietzsche, who is going to kid himself about Back to honesty of cosmic humility.
Speaker 1:Yes, the honesty of the cosmic humility. Now, maybe if you are a Nazi and you are Adolf Hitler, you think you can take over the world and usurp gods, but the track record so far you're finite. You can't be Superman. Superman is an imaginary projection of the ego that has to die. And so the religious stage is not about doctrine or dogma, but about passion and commitment for something that on the face of it, seems absurd, for something that on the face of it seems absurd. So you believe because you have faith and commitment and devotion. You don't believe because somebody proved it to you and gave you a guarantee that if you believe, everything's going to go great for you. In fact, if you believe, it might not go great for you and that might be okay. And it's like where Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is steep, but it bends toward justice. That's a statement of a faithful person.
Speaker 3:That's a teleological statement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a teleological statement. Yeah, it's a teleological statement. It bends toward justice. He's not saying I know exactly where it goes and I'm going to take you there.
Speaker 1:It's no, I'm on this journey and I might not make it with you but I know that we'll make it there eventually and I have faith that it bends toward justice. So this is the one part I wanted to read to you. You have tragic heroes in classical literature who stand for something and die, usually for their commitment, but their values live on because they stood for them. So you have Achilles or Odysseus or Antigone, and these are essentially humanist heroes with a thousand faces right. They go through a trial, they develop these skills, they come back and give the good fight and then they pass on the boon to the community and they're celebrated as great heroes. Well, he had his Christian counterpoints to the tragic hero, and one was the knight of faith. And the knight of faith is somebody who carries on, not because they're going to get a boon that's going to renew the community. They don't know if they're going to get a boon or not, but they're carried by faith.
Speaker 1:Night of faith, the other night was the night of infinite resignation. And the night of infinite resignation is and the night of infinite resignation is someone, like a nihilistic existentialist, doesn't know if they're doing the right thing, if there's any reason really to serve the poor, but they can't think of anything else that makes sense to them that's any more important. So they do it anyway, with the kind of infinite resignation that my thought is worth it, even though it doesn't give me any pleasure or meaning beyond the fact that I choose to do it. That's the atheistic existentialist, whereas the night of faith holds out, the paradox that maybe there's something out there that I don't understand that will, like the resurrection or like the turnaround in people's lives, give meaning where right now I don't see it, and so that's the night of faith.
Speaker 1:Like Martin Luther King man that whole his life is, and these Christian heroes are running on faith. There are no guarantees in that world other than the guarantee they have with their relationship to their God in fear and trembling. And that's why Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling and said a Christian lives in fear and trembling as to the consequences of their faith. And not drinking a latte at the megachurch rally put on by the dancing pastor or whatever that he was in tune with the fact that they're suffering.
Speaker 1:Yes, and then not everybody knows or can know. And if you're really honest with yourself, your faith comes in stages. And maybe you were a hedonist in your 20s and maybe you're a burnt out idealist in your 30s and now in your 40s. And maybe you're a burnt-out idealist in your 30s and now in your 40s, you're willing to turn it over to God or, like the 12-step program, to whatever higher power you believe may be in control of things, and put your trust in something larger. And that trust is, for Kierkegaard, the leap of faith. That's what that's about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did. Actually I noticed that realizing the powerlessness was in that chapter, Like that was part of his leap of faith verbiage, and you almost wonder if the AA got that from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they did, maybe unconsciously, Because Kierkegaard was the leap of faith is a great term, but the fact that for Kierkegaard that it's almost an inevitable stage you and psycho-spiritual development it's like you got to go through I don't know for him. You go through all phases at some point in your life and I think they also. You go back and forth sometimes.
Speaker 3:That's a little too gracious, because I think some people stay stunted in different mentalities and cultural norms. Unfortunately, people don't even develop. Sometimes Somebody is the same at 25 as they are at 65, which is sad when you see it. But it's cool to hear just how those three stages work together, because I didn't read that book and I didn't know how one led to the next and how that second to third. I could relate to a lot of that.
Speaker 1:And then we're dealing with these Christian writers and philosophers and critics and meta-historians and people like that. Kierkegaard gives us some interesting conceptual frameworks. Understand them. The Goethe is second stage. Faust, if we're lucky, he's going to make it to the second stage. He's going to move out of an aesthetic life of pleasure and power into an ethical point of view. He'll be like Oppenheimer. He'll have realized that his science has an ethical dimension to it.
Speaker 1:But now you're going to turn that over to God. And if you're going to turn it over to God, how would that look? And that's why the Christian writer said we're going to ask Stavsky he writes a whole 400-page novels on that question what would it look if this hedonist turned himself over to God? Is that even possible? I'm going to be a realist writer. I'm going to tell what's possible for people in my generation. What would it look like for them to do that and try to tell the truth about their internal relationships with themselves, not just how it looks from the outside? That's why literature is so important, because literature and writing is really the only place you can get inside the character. Movies, they can talk, you can have a voiceover, but it's pretty much we're looking at him from the outside and seeing behavior and maybe some self-talk. But novels and poetry get right inside the psyche and the scripture does that too. Get right inside the soul, the self's relationship with itself.
Speaker 3:We're out of time, but I want to thank you so much for helping us with Kierkegaard. He's an exciting one for me. I see so much parallel to modern culture, the modern church, so it may be worth revisiting him as well later. And I want to update you I did. I finished One Day of the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, okay.
Speaker 3:I finished my first orthodoxy book since we started the podcast and it's not even a big book, but it still took me a little while. But yeah, I want to read some Kierkegaard. I want to read guys along as we go. It's really fun.
Speaker 1:Walker Percy was a big Kierkegaard fan, so when we get to Walker Percy we'll recapitulate the themes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he's coming up on a few in the future, but, yeah, thank you all so much for listening and thank you all for being here. Okay, thanks, adios, and that concludes this episode. I think there may be something in here for all of you, each of you whether you're a skeptic, a believer or somewhere in between, on your own deconstruction journey. We're going to be exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic, and this revelatory faith doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. The prophetic voice doesn't seem to come from the pulpits or the seminaries. It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the unexpected corners of culture. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Adios.
Speaker 2:This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Inchosti Outro Music.