Abstract
The past year has brought us a new Kierkegaard biography by Stephen Backhouse and a new introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought by Mark Teitjen. Common to both these books is their focal interest in approaching the 19th century Dane as a specifically Christian and theological thinker. Torrance’s book is a high-level scholarly contribution that shares this same perspective. Indeed, it takes as its central theme Kierkegaard’s own account of the origins, emergence and unfolding of Christian faith and life: just how does one become a Christian and what is the relation between divine and human agency in this process? Working synthetically across Kierkegaard’s later journals and writings, but with a particular focus on the arguments worked out in the ‘Climacian’ works—Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript—Torrance labours to show that becoming a Christian entails an transformative process driven by the living and active relation God forges with human beings. This takes place, as Torrance stresses, in history, yes because it involves the extended shaping of actual human lives in time and space—the existential aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought—but also and primarily because it involves a gracious and persistently generative encounter with the eternal God who enters into history in Jesus Christ. The exposition deals in turn with the character of Christian truth and the kind of reasoning that comports with it (chapter 1), Kierkegaard’s account of the incarnation as the possibility and actuality of salvation (chapter 2), the themes of sin, guilt, forgiveness and repentance (chapter 3), what it means to live with Scripture and the nature of discipleship (chapter 4), and finally the nature of the transition involved in becoming a Christian and the role of human freedom therein (chapter 5). Throughout the detailed and insightful analysis, Torrance demonstrates that Kierkegaard offers no rigorous systematic account of the interrelation of divine and human agency in the process of coming to faith. Instead, he suggests, we find an understanding which at once affirms the priority of divine grace and the reality of human freedom, and which coordinates the two—with shifting tactical, polemical and rhetorical emphases—within a view of governing divine providence in order to emphasise that the unfolding of the process of becoming a Christian is always variously superintended by divine will and action. Admitting that the account of divine governance on offer here demands greater pneumatological specificity than Kierkegaard himself provides, Torrance nevertheless strongly appreciates Kierkegaard’s insistence that Christian faith arises and flourishes only where the existence of actual human beings is crossed by the living God in personal, historical encounter. For the very possibility and reality of Christian faith and love rests in the transforming power of such encounters.