Talk About The Passion

I have a lot of fun reading books I mostly don’t understand and marking the parts I think I do understand while also writing out questions and comments in the margins. When I pick up the books again and read what I wrote and marked, I end up realizing that I’ve internalized all kinds of phrases and analogies and postures and moods and also, for some reason, repressed the memory of where they came from.

I’ve recently become reacquainted with an old friend in Kierkegaard. I read him madly in my twenties but had mostly forgotten him. I’m beginning to see now that a lot of my anger at bad faith actors within the Christian tradition in 2022 is weirdly in sync with what he was up against in his context. Returning to him over the last week has been a profound encouragement.

Here are a few passages from Philosophical Fragments I’d like to share:

The truth in the mouth of hypocrites is dearer to me than if it came from the lips of an angel or an apostle.

Belief is not a form of knowledge, but a free act, an expression of will.

If the contemporary generation had left nothing behind but the words: ‘We have believed that in such & such a year the God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived & taught in our community, & finally died,’ it would be more than enough.

That last one hits wonderfully in view of a question Preston Shipp recently published on Twitter:

Preston Shipp @preston_shipp

Hey Christians, if definitive evidence was discovered establishing that Jesus did *not* rise from the dead, how would your life change?

He was met with hundreds of replies like this:

Travis Richardson @trav899

@preston_shipp If that were the case then all of Jesus' ministry should be rejected as morally repulsive. But thank God that he did indeed rise from the dead, as would be expected from the true Lord of the Universe.

Anyway, Kierkegaard goes before us. The times are unprecedented. But only just.