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The Ontology of the Offense: Rowan Williams and Johannes Climacus on Christology and Ontology

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Abstract

In Christ the Heart of Creation, Rowan Williams argues that Christology as expounded by the classical tradition in Western theology holds a bounty for thinking in Christian ontology about the God-world relation. In particular, he uses the work of Søren Kierkegaard throughout to show that the relation between finite and infinite, immanent and transcendent, is not competitive, and thus there need be no metaphysical problem when holding that the incarnate God-man is both fully human and divine. This essay argues, however, that Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous work cited by Williams holds the incarnation to be far more paradoxical and intellectually offensive than Williams allows. However, such priority of offense does not put an end to Christ’s central ontological position but rather shifts it to new directions in our thinking about theological ontology. Rather than Williams’ own conception of a cosmos in which the divine and non-divine are compatible and harmonious, Kierkegaard presents a doctrine of existence in which God and the human are in constant, dynamic engagement and in which temporal being bears ultimate primacy for Christian existence.

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Notes

  1. For some examples of this development, see Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988) and Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ian McFarland, The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019); and Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation: God’s Redeeming Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019).

  2. Richard Bauckham, “The Incarnation and the Cosmic Christ,” in Incarnation: On the Scope and Breadth of Christology, ed. Niels Henrik Gregersen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 26.

  3. In the Fragments, Climacus uses the Danish term Guden accompanied by a definite article, which, as Hong observes, alludes to the Greek ό θεός that is more ambiguous than a simple designation of the Christian God. Both Hong and Williams follow the English convention of translating it as ‘the god,’ so I will follow this convention when discussing the Fragments. However, where the terms shift from ‘the god’ to ‘God,’ I will revert back to the traditional capitalization.

  4. Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), xii.

  5. Ibid., xiii.

  6. Ibid., xiii.

  7. Ibid., xiii.

  8. Ibid., xiv.

  9. Ibid., 2.

  10. Ibid., 3.

  11. Ibid., 3.

  12. Ibid., 4.

  13. Ibid., 4.

  14. Ibid., 4–5.

  15. Ibid., 11.

  16. Ibid., 7–8. This argument repeats the same one made by Herbert McCabe against Maurice Wiles in “The Incarnation: An Exchange”: “To be divine is not to be a kind of being, just as to be a creature is not to be a kind of being, (the word 'nature' is used only analogically in the phrase 'divine nature'). To be a man, on the other hand, is to be a kind of being, and this is the kind of being that Jesus was and is.” Herbert McCabe and Maurice Wiles, “The Incarnation: An Exchange,” New Blackfriars 58, no. 691 (December 1977): 542–553. 550.

  17. Nota bene: Williams does not follow the convention among Kierkegaard scholars of discussing works according to their pseudonymous authors, rather he simply names Kierkegaard the author of the Fragments and the few other books he mentions, such as the Book on Adler. While I understand that Williams, working in his context, does not feel the need to follow this precise convention, for my part I will follow it.

  18. Williams, Christ the Heart, 187.

  19. Ibid., 187.

  20. Ibid., 187.

  21. Ibid., 187.

  22. Ibid., 187.

  23. Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, VII: Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 35.

  24. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 36.

  25. Williams, Christ the Heart, 187.

  26. Ibid., 187.

  27. Ibid., 188.

  28. Ibid., 188–189.

  29. I owe this insight to Dr. Paul Martens during a discussion of Williams’ work in his office during the spring semester of 2020.

  30. Williams, Christ the Heart, 268.

  31. Ibid., 268.

  32. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 55. This same passage is quoted in Williams, Christ the Heart, 269.

  33. Williams, Christ the Heart, 269.

  34. As Climacus emphasizes, this “servant form is not something put on but is actual, not a parastatic but an actual body” (Kierkegaard, Fragments, 55).

  35. Williams, Christ the Heart, 269.

  36. Ibid., 270.

  37. Ibid., 271.

  38. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 61.

  39. Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, XII.1: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 210.

  40. This summarizes part of the arguments made by Louis Pojman and Gregory Schufreider in particular. Though both debate over the role that objectivity and objective knowledge play in the Postscript, they essentially agree with the progression listed above. For a more detailed outline of Pojman’s overview of the Postscript’s argument, see Louis Pojman, “The Logic of Subjectivity,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 1 (March 1981: 73–83, 73–74). For the correspondence between Pojman and Schufreider, see Gregory Schufreider, “Kierkegaard on Belief without Justification,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12, no. 3 (1981b): 149–164, and Louis Pojman, “Kierkegaard, subjectivity, and paradox: A response to Gregory Schufreider,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12, no. 3 (1981: 165–169). “The Logic of Subjectivity” is Pojman’s concluding reconstruction of the Postscript’s argument that accords with some of Schufreider’s critiques. For his book-length treatment of Kierkegaard, see Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984).

  41. David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 174.

  42. Sylvia Walsh, “Kierkegaard’s Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 297.

  43. James Conant goes so far as to contend that all the logical claims made in the Fragments and Postrscipt, e.g. ‘truth is subjectivity,’ should not be taken as arguments at all, since they are part of one long parody of speculative reasoning itself. See James Conant, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense” in Pursuits of Reason, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1993, 195–224). For a critical response to that argument, see Genia Schönbaumsfeld, “No New Kierkegaard,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (December 2004, 519–534).

  44. And of course, there is the issue of whether the pseudonym Climacus is adequate to write about Christianity at all, given that he professes not to be a Christian: can one whose argument that Christianity may only be grasped within existence then succeed in understanding what Christianity is from outside of that existence? This issue far exceeds the present work, so I will only suggest that the difference between Climacus the non-Christian and, say, Kierkegaard the Christian is not a disagreement over objective propositions and arguments (of the ‘what’ of Christianity) but of existential tone and decisive commitment to Christianity (of the ‘how’ of Christianity). Climacus admits he is only a humorist (Postscript, 617), while the religious person can move past humor in utmost earnestness: “Humor is the last stage in existence-inwardness before faith” (Postscript, 291). Therefore, the Christian (i.e. Kierkegaard) may write such little earnest superfluities as the Upbuilding Discourses, while Climacus can only write in biting irony and humor. But this does not make the arguments within the Fragments and Postscript any less intelligible or accurate about Christianity in the objective sense: “…humor becomes the last terminus a quo in defining Christianity [emphasis added]. Humor… [is] a pagan speculative thought that has come to know all the essentially Christian” (Postscript, 272). Therefore, Climacus’ arguments hold and should not be considered nonsense alien to Christianity itself. And this is why one often finds ‘objective’ agreements between, say, the arguments in the Fragments and Postscript and Kierkegaard’s own journals.

  45. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983, 217).

  46. Ibid., 221.

  47. Ibid., 221–222.

  48. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 55).

  49. In a footnote, Marion relates this work of “powerful elucidations” to that of Bertrand Russell: for him, “the paradox is to be dispelled through a logical distinction (for example, of classes) in order to bring it back into common rationality. On the contrary, it is necessary to save and reinforce the paradox in the strong sense, so that it introduces us into an uncommon logic” (55). I suggest that, with regard to the person of Jesus Christ, Farrer, McCabe, and Williams ultimately follow Russell’s path in bringing the paradox of the incarnation “back into common rationality,” even if with an earnest theological zeal.

  50. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84.

  51. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 245.

  52. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 13.

  53. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 332.

  54. In this respect, Maurice Wiles puts the point well in his debate with McCabe: “It seems to me not unreasonable to regard 'being created' as part of the meaning of man (which there's no point in drawing attention to when what is at issue is the relation between man and other creatures) and 'not being created' as part of the meaning of God. Now if there is an analogical relationship between God and man, if indeed there is any real relation between them (as you want strongly to insist), then they inhabit a common logical world, though not of course a common logical world of shapes. Prima facie at least there is a case of self-contradiction involved. I do not myself want to argue dogmatically that there is clear self-contradiction, but I am certainly not clear as you appear to be that there is not” (McCabe and Wiles, “The Incarnation,” 543). It seems difficult to accept McCabe’s already-cited rejoinder outright. Can one simply discard createdness as an existential attribute? Is that not part of the “meaning of man”?

  55. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 47.

  56. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 53.

  57. Hermann Diem, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence, trans. Harold Knight (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1959, 71).

  58. Hampson, Kierkegaard, 85.

  59. Walsh, “Kierkegaard’s Theology,” 297.

  60. Williams, Christ the Heart, 88.

  61. Ibid., 88.

  62. Ibid., 87.

  63. Hampson, Kierkegaard, 83.

  64. Ibid., 84.

  65. Ibid., 85.

  66. Ibid., 85.

  67. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, 202.

  68. Ibid., 202.

  69. Hampson, Kierkegaard, 84.

  70. Such an argument must be briefer than it should, as a full one might take up an entire interpretation of the Fragments, of which there are already many. I hope only to point the way here to how the Fragments sets Christ as the center of creation.

  71. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 9.

  72. Ibid., 11.

  73. Ibid., 13.

  74. Ibid., 13.

  75. Ibid., 55.

  76. Ibid., 19. Climacus repeats this claim in the Postscript: “…faith, sensu strictissimo as explicated in Fragments, refers to coming into existence” (Kierkegaard, Postscript, 210).

  77. Diem, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic, 70.

  78. Here I am concluding with a point that, I think, quite resembles Andrew B. Torrance’s position: “…Kierkegaard’s Christian thought needs to be associated with a Christian realism: a realism that prioritizes the reality of the living God who personally involves himself with creation, in history, and does so over against independent human ideas of God” (64). Andrew B. Torrance, “Kierkegaard on the Christian Response to the God Who Establishes Kinship with Us in Time,” in Modern Theology 31, no. 2 (January 2016: 60–83). However, I do not understand why Torrance sees fit to dispel the so-called ‘existential’ aspects of this point; one can, and I think should, hold to concrete historicity and realism and also be an ‘existentialist,’ depending on the meaning of that often-bastardized term. In light of his own critiques throughout his book, Williams might consider this way of thinking a ‘mythologizing’ or ‘remythologizing’ tendency that comes with Lutheran-leaning thought (cf. Williams, Christ the Heart, 10, 157–159, 175–181, 272). But I contend it is a ‘realist’ one that aims for a genuine reckoning with the historical, interactive character of God’s revelation as recorded in the Scriptures.

  79. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. VI: Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, trans. M.J. Hanak and ed. David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002, 84).

  80. Ibid., 84.

  81. Ibid., 84.

  82. Paul Wienpahl, “An Unorthodox Lecture,” MANAS Journal 9, no. 24 (June 13, 1956:1–6, 2).

  83. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 61.

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Spinks, C. The Ontology of the Offense: Rowan Williams and Johannes Climacus on Christology and Ontology. Int J Philos Relig 90, 19–41 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09785-5

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