Norman Geisler on Existentialism

I was reading an article by Norman Geisler entitled “Beware of Philosophy: A Warning to Biblical Scholars”, in it Geisler gives an admonition to biblical scholars over varying forms of philosophical schools of thought . Below is an excerpt from the article with a critique on Soren Kierkegaard’s existentialist paradigm:

 

The father of modern existentialism was not a twentieth-century French atheist but a Danish Christian named Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) who could have signed a statement subscribing to the historic fundamentals of the Faith. He wrote: “On the whole, the doctrine as it is taught [in the church] is entirely sound.”28 Nonetheless, few have done more from within the evangelical fold to methodologically undermine historic orthodoxy than Kierkegaard. Indeed, it was his philosophical son, Karl Barth, who gave rise to Neo-Orthodoxy. Kierkegaard concluded that even if we assume that the defenders of Christianity “… have succeeded in proving about the Bible everything that any learned theologian in his happiest moment has ever wished to prove about the Bible” namely, “that these books and no others belong in the canon; they are authentic; they are integral; their authors are trustworthy–one may well say, that it is as if every letter were inspired.” Kierkegaard asked: “Has anyone who previously did not have faith been brought a single step nearer to its acquisition? No, not a single step.”29

Then Kierkegaard posed the opposite, namely, “that the opponents have succeeded in proving what they desire about the Scriptures, with a certainty transcending the most ardent wish of the most passionate hostility–what then? Have the opponents thereby abolished Christianity? By no means. Has the believer been harmed? By no means, not in the least.”30

At the minimum, Kierkegaard’s bifurcation of fact and value is axiologically misplaced. In fact, it has been biblically disastrous, as Barth, Brunner, and Bultmann demonstrate–or whatever other “B’s” may be buzzing around unorthodox circles. We need only mention the Kierkegaardian inspired beliefs that: 1) Religious truth is located in personal encounter (subjectivity); 2) Propositional truth is not essential to the Faith; 3) Higher criticism is not harmful to real Christianity: 4) God is “wholly other” and essentially unknowable, even through biblical revelation. These give further significance to the Pauline warning to “beware of philosophy.”

28Soren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers 6:362 in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).  29Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.Hong (Princeton, MJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 29-30.  30Ibid., 31.