Abstract
What is grace? If we are saved by grace, what room does this leave for human freedom and agency? Does grace continue and perfect, or does it radically disrupt, what comes naturally to human beings as they try to lead good lives? Martin Luther famously compared our situation to a horse that is ridden by either God or the devil. Which is it: is salvation up to us or to God? Rippling out from the great disputes between Augustine and Pelagius, and Luther and Erasmus, these vexed questions continue to impact theological debates across a wide range of topics. Versions of these questions continue also to haunt secular thought: for example, in ongoing debates about the role of luck in human flourishing and ethical goodness.
Within the context of post-Lutheran thought, Søren Kierkegaard is widely recognized as a towering figure. Regarding the theme of ‘grace and works’, however, Kierkegaard's writings deserve more attention than they have so far received. While he offers no systematic treatment of it, much of Kierkegaard's work is responsive to this theme in both its theological and philosophical dimensions. Because of his unique place in the Augustinian tradition of Christianity after Luther, his writings have long attracted sympathetic readings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians. Moreover, a new appreciation of Luther's importance for modern European philosophy has recently led to a new interest in how the theological questions of grace and works have been inherited by this tradition. How then are we to understand Kierkegaard's work in this post-Lutheran context? How does it stand in relation to the traditional disputes about grace and works? Might it provide resources for a kind of via media between opposing positions in these disputes? And how in this connection should we understand Kierkegaard's place within the post-Kantian philosophical tradition?
The purpose of this special issue is to bring together philosophers and theologians on these questions and explore them in depth. The primary aim is to develop an account of Kierkegaard's contribution to discussions of grace and works and in this way not only to advance Kierkegaard studies but also ongoing fundamental theological and philosophical debates.
A few years before his death, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: Does Christianity want to abolish striving with the help of grace? No, Christianity wants—precisely with the assistance of grace—to have the Law fulfilled, if possible … When something is required of a human being in such a way that his doing it, and doing it perfectly, is decisive for his eternal salvation, he instantly collapses in despair … Get rid of this anxiety about the salvation of his soul—that is what makes him incapable of doing anything whatever. It is removed by grace—you are saved by grace, by grace through faith … Christianity’s view is that precisely this is what it is to give a human being the courage and the desire to strive.
1
To reflect upon passages such as these, the editors are delighted to curate the following contributions:
Lee Barrett investigates Kierkegaard’s account of the connection of human beings’ natural loving capacities to God’s gracious enabling of love. Although natural love is distinct from the uniqueness of grace, Barrett suggests that Kierkegaard emphasized a continuity between our love and God’s self-giving grace when trying to stimulate the appropriate yearning that is a precondition for welcoming God’s grace.
Joshua Furnal traces the development of Kierkegaard's view of sanctification in light of Kierkegaard's brief commentary on Hugh of St. Victor's Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Furnal observes a structural affinity between Hugh's distinction between restorative and cooperative grace and Kierkegaard's distinction between grace and works, which indicates a non-competitive relationship between divine and human agency.
Through a comparative analysis, Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal uncovers the influence of the German Dominican mystic, Johannes Tauler, on Kierkegaard's view of the relation of grace and works. She suggests that like Tauler, Kierkegaard sought to help readers and, respectively, listeners to become receptive to grace by humbling themselves and refraining from fathoming ‘what is not given to be understood’.
Greg Marcar explores Kierkegaard's claim in Works of Love that love is necessary for any work to be pleasing to God. Marcar suggests that Kierkegaard's distinction between loving and non-loving works can be illuminated by Jacob Boehme's mystical understanding of the ground of the soul.
In conversation with the spirituality of the Philokalia, Daniel Watts offers a constructive and critical account of Kierkegaard's corrective to Martin Luther regarding a competitive picture of passivity and activity in our receptivity to grace. Watts argues that Kierkegaard offered a participatory view of receptivity that involves a distinctive, middle-voiced, form of human agency in which the believer learns to acknowledge her need for grace and is thereby transformed in the process.
David Batho analyses Kierkegaard's view of demonic evil to offer a psychologically nuanced account of evil actions that are performed under the guise of the good in order to connect Kierkegaard's analysis to his ethico-religious concerns. Batho suggests that demonic muteness can be disambiguated from the silence that makes a pact with the good in Kierkegaard's writings in such a way that silence becomes beneficial as an ethico-religious ideal.
Robert Stern explores how Kierkegaard and K.E. Løgstrup both offer two different ways of overcoming obstacles to the love of neighbour by standing in right relationship to God and by seeing life as a gift. Stern asks whether Løgstrup provided a secular alternative to Kierkegaard's view of grace as the condition of possibility of the love of neighbour.
The editors hope that this special issue will be well received and invite readers to continue the discussion presented here. Perhaps this collection may serve as a basis for a fresh theological perspective in Kierkegaard Studies that will be explored even beyond this academic format as a result.