Philosophy & Christ

Kierkegaard and Christianity

Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of existentialism, was himself a passionate Christian. He taught that faith is not a comfortable conclusion but a ‘leap,’ a whole-souled trust in God that reason cannot fully secure; that each of us must stand as a ‘single individual’ before God rather than hiding in the crowd; and he fiercely attacked the lukewarm cultural Christianity of his day. His whole work is, in a sense, a bridge back to the real thing.

What Kierkegaard taught

Soren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855), a Danish thinker of dazzling range, is usually named the father of existentialism, yet nearly everything he wrote was aimed at one thing: how a person actually becomes a Christian. He distinguished ways of living: the aesthetic (chasing pleasure and novelty), the ethical (living by duty), and the religious (living before God). He described the passage between them not as smooth reasoning but as a decision, a leap.

In Fear and Trembling he pondered Abraham, the ‘knight of faith,’ whose trust in God went beyond what reason or ethics could justify. Faith, for Kierkegaard, is not certainty; it is passionate commitment held out over the deep. He wrote of anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ and of despair as the sickness of a self not rooted in God. And he insisted that truth about God must be lived inwardly, by the ‘single individual,’ not merely assented to by the crowd, for ‘the crowd is untruth.’

Where Christianity agrees

Here agreement runs deep, because Kierkegaard was writing from inside the faith. Christianity says yes to his insistence that faith is a matter of the whole person, not just the intellect; that it involves trust beyond what proofs can deliver; that each of us must answer God personally and cannot outsource it to a culture or a crowd. Christians have found in him one of the most searching guides to what it actually feels like to believe: the anxiety, the doubt, the leap, the joy. The Living Bread's existentialism study treats him at length as the Christian existentialist.

Where it differs

With Kierkegaard the question is less ‘where does he differ from Christianity’ and more ‘which Christianity is he attacking.’ His fury was aimed at ‘Christendom,’ the comfortable state religion of nineteenth-century Denmark, where being born Danish was mistaken for being a disciple. Some readers worry that his stress on the inward leap can sound like faith without content, or make belief seem irrational. Kierkegaard's own answer is that faith is not against reason but beyond its reach at the decisive point, and that its content is utterly definite: it is faith in the God who became a particular man, Jesus Christ.

What Christ offers the single individual

Kierkegaard spent his genius trying to get comfortable churchgoers to become real disciples, one soul at a time. His leap of faith is a leap toward Someone who leapt first:

The despair Kierkegaard anatomized, the sickness of a self that will not rest in God, is answered not by an argument but by a relationship. And the leap is not a jump into the dark; it is a fall into the arms of the God who came all the way down to us in Christ. To the single individual, weary of belonging to the crowd, Christianity offers the one thing Kierkegaard cared about most: to know God, personally, and to be known.

Frequently asked questions

Was Kierkegaard a Christian?

Yes, intensely so. Though he is called the father of existentialism, nearly all his writing aimed at how a person truly becomes a Christian. His sharpest attacks were on nominal 'Christendom,' the comfortable cultural religion he saw as a betrayal of real discipleship.

What is Kierkegaard's leap of faith?

It is the passage into genuine faith that reason alone cannot complete: a passionate, whole-souled trust in God, held out over uncertainty, like Abraham's. Kierkegaard did not mean a jump into the dark but a decisive commitment to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

What did Kierkegaard mean by 'the crowd is untruth'?

He meant that faith and moral responsibility cannot be handed off to a group. Each person must stand as a 'single individual' before God and answer for themselves, rather than hiding in the anonymity and easy consensus of the crowd.