Abstract
Søren Kierkegaard’s ambivalence about Martin Luther is well known. He lauded him in his public writings while lancing the Reformer in his private journal for being “undialectical.” That is, Kierkegaard thought Luther often failed to hold grace and suffering, Christ the Redeemer and Christ the Pattern, together in the tension necessary to avoid a one-sided Christianity of either rank legalism or “Fantanomianism,” that is, the fantasy that a glib, comfortable faith sufficed (p. 101). The latter, of course, was the major threat in Kierkegaard’s view. This tension, thought Kierkegaard, allowed justification and sanctification to receive equal treatment in preaching and Christian living, for lack of which Kierkegaard held Luther at least partly responsible for the antinomianism of his Danish state church.
Why did Kierkegaard judge Luther in this way? Coe answers by investigating the editions of Luther’s sermons Kierkegaard read devotionally and from which he quoted and derived his understanding of Luther—the editions by Benjamin Lindner (1739–1742) and Jørgen Thisted (1828). Both collections left out swaths of text, thus altering Luther’s meaning, often having omitted polemical passages that provided the tensive elements in Luther’s thinking Kierkegaard found disagreeably absent. Kierkegaard perceived an inconsistency in Luther’s thought that caused him to alternately praise and criticize Luther.
Coe, however, lays Luther’s unedited passages alongside Kierkegaard’s comments, showing that Luther in fact was not guilty of proffering a one-sided account of Christianity. On the contrary, Luther is found to have used the very dialectical tension Kierkegaard accused him of neglecting.
The key to fruitfully reading Luther, for Kierkegaard, came down to the right relationship among groaning, crowing, and sighing. These three referred to despair, presumption, and anxiety (p. 79). Kierkegaard praised Luther,” the master of us all,” where Luther described the Law as the cause of the anguished conscience. Such a conscience makes one tremble and groan, leaving no recourse to human abilities but only to the gospel. This necessary preface to hearing the gospel for Luther had become conventionalized in Kierkegaard’s world, replaced by an undialectical substitution of the gospel for the law or turning the law, the catalyst of subjective anguish for Luther and Kierkegaard, into a merely objective guide to citizenship. Contrarily, Kierkegaard observed, “Remove the anguished conscience, and you may as well close the churches and turn them into dance halls” (p. 80).
Conversely, “crowing” expressed “overconfidence in one’s capacity to know and do right” (p. 83). For Luther, this meant a rooster-like pride in spiritual accomplishment. One could crow about other things too, such as sole confidence in unconditional grace that alleviates all doubt and suffering, turning deaf ears to the call to discipleship. Enlightenment certainty could crow when it offered an objective reading of Scripture. A call for radical trust in divine providence would no longer exist; instead would be a historical-rational surety based on quantitative, grammatical-exegetical study (p. 85), none of which requires the reader’s anguished conscience.
What is left to do is “sigh.” Sighing is existentially ambivalent. A sigh is the intersection of humility and resolve, acceptance of grace and suffering at the same time, a state in which one cannot help but be anxious and yet bolstered by grace. In isolation from this sighing, groaning, and crowing leave one hopelessly burdened or neglectfully cavalier, respectively. A sigh is a middle way between the two and the fitting outcome for the ever-present anxiety that accompanies living and believing. A sigh is exhaustive relief (p. 88). Where Kierkegaard found Luther with this balanced sighing, he lauded him. A concluding chapter on Anfechtung (Danish Anfægtelse) explores this issue in detail and demonstrates a nuanced consensus between reformer and philosopher.
Readers of Luther will recognize in his description of sighing the result of Anfechtung, or his agonized conscience. For him, it was a sigh of resolve, or temporal relief from present Anfechtung, that he preached, as when Mary at Cana, the hemorrhaging woman, or blind Bartimaeus, all importunate, received answers in their questioning or healing from their suffering.
Conversely, Kierkegaard preached a sigh of resign. In Kierkegaard’s account, believers should expect relief from Anfægtelse only eschatologically. Suffering, not temporal relief, is the existential reality to be expected. Kierkegaard underscores the prayer “thy will be done” to mean believers should not expect relief to come in this life unless God allows an exception. However, Coe shows how Kierkegaard misread Luther as giving Christians expectation of too many concessions to cross-bearing and thus needlessly criticized Luther at precisely the point Luther could have been brought to bear on the antinomianism Kierkegaard was fighting.
Kierkegaard privately “lances” this view as “undialectical,” though Coe shows instances in which the editors did not provide Kierkegaard with fulsome quotations from sermons in question, through which he would have learned that Luther did, indeed, not promise miracles and temporal resolutions amid sufferings.
For Luther, Anfechtung is involuntary. Luther took this perspective contrary to what he saw as late medieval monasticism’s contrived asceticism. Involuntary suffering, for Luther, is sent by God to test and strengthen Christians. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, stressed voluntary Anfægtelse and lauded Luther for what he saw as his voluntary suffering at Worms. Such voluntary suffering was, for Kierkegaard, necessary for discipleship and exactly what he found wanting in his Danish church context. The nuance between reformer and philosopher was, as Coe shows, often dependent on their different contexts.
Luther emerges as the hero Kierkegaard publicly lauded him for being, but not the shortsighted theologian he privately lanced him for presumably being. One gets in Kierkegaard, Coe shows, not an advance on Luther, but a misreading of the reformer where Kierkegaard used edited volumes of Luther’s sermons. Coe shows, consequently, Kierkegaard’s use of Luther in his public writings, presenting a description of Luther in which the dialectical tensions Kierkegaard longed to see were artfully provided. To condemn the great reformer before a Lutheran public would have been to make the state of spiritual life at the heart of Kierkegaard’s concern even worse. Kierkegaard did not see, however, that his theologically ideal Luther was, after all, the actual Luther, if only Kierkegaard had access to complete texts and more extensive reading of the reformer.