Sárospataki Füzetek 15. (2011)
2011 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kónya Péter: Szlovák reformátusok a 17-18. században
Sawyer. Frank CHRISTIANITY as true faith — only realized by individuals, not groups. It is an ‘inward’ risk of faith which leads to passionate authenticity. “Christianity is not a doctrine...it is a message about living.... Christ did not appoint professors but followers.”20 It is harder to be a disciple of Christ if one is born in Christendom than if one begins life as a pagan. Christianity no longer exists. Preachers perform the magic of gaining their salary from nothing (since true Christianity no longer exists). (Training in Christianity) . Or: “Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world... — a believer travels forward.”21 DESPAIR — the opposite of faith. Despair is the choice of not creating our own ‘selP, and thus we move toward our own self-annihilation. (The Sickness Unto Death) DIALECTIC — in Kierkegaard means that opposites are not resolved but held in tension; in the area of knowledge dialectic means that what we think something means (even life itself) is not what it means. This is part of the irony of existence, which cannot be grasped directly but only indirectly and dialectically. There is a polarisation of thesis & antithesis, but no abiding synthesis for S. Kierkegaard. In Hegel polar opposites are ‘over come’, resolved by being integrated into a higher unity (synthesis) which become a new thesis. S. Kierkegaard rejects integration and synthesis in the name of individual authenticity in which the absurd cannot be overcome but must be acknowledged as always present because of our finiteness and our sinfulness. There is continuing estrangement. The dialectical or polar tension in Kant is born through consideration of the limits of empirical experience and the limits of reason, which in turn leads to the distinction between ‘pure reason’ and ‘practical reason’. In Hegel the dialectic is within historical reality with roots in the dialectic between the Infinite and the finite. In Kierkegaard the dialectic is between the estrangement of the individual and the creation of a new existential self.22 S. Kierkegaard could say: “doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world”.23 Faith brings doubt because we must face a crisis of decision. DISCIPLESHIP - S. I-Gerkegaard was a follower of Socrates’ method of raising questions that would destabilise people and a follower of Jesus Christ as indirect revealer (dialectically the Lord becomes a servant) of the way of faith. And Job suffering on his ash heap teaches us many things (existentially speaking), but not as a professor in front of a chalk board. The problem today is that Jesus has no disciples, only admirers (of his teaching). But we cannot gaze like detached speculators 20 S. Kierkegaard, Diary, 117. 21 S. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, trans. H.&E. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1993), 218. 22 See further William Barett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1962). 23 S. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, trans. Howard & Edna Hong (Indiana University Press, 1976), 399. 60 SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK2011/4
