Did Jesus really love his disciples?

We pretend that it was only the ungodly who were offended at Christ. What a misunderstanding! No, the best and most kindly man, humanly speaking, who has ever lived, must be offended at him, must misunderstand him; for what love is, divinely understood, this the best of men could learn only from Him. The love Christ, humanly understood, was not self-sacrificing - anything but that; he did not make himself unhappy, in order, humanly understood, to make his disciples happy. No, he made himself and his disciples, humanly speaking, as unhappy as possible. And he who had had it in his power to establish the Kingdom of Israel and make everything so pleasant for himself and his followers, as every contemporary could see clearly enough! [...] No, humanly speaking, it was indeed madness: he sacrifices himself - in order to make the beloved equally unhappy with himself! [...] Was this really love: to gather some poor, simpleminded men about him, to win their devotion and love, as no other had ever won it, to pretend for a moment to look out for them, as now the prospect of the fulfillment of their proudest dream is revealed to them - in order suddenly to reconsider and change the plans; in order without being moved by their prayers, without paying the least attention to them, to plunge them down from this seductive height into the abyss of all dangers; in order, without resistant, to give his enemies power; in order, under mockery and insult while the world rejoiced, to be nailed to the cross as a criminal; was this really love?

- Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), 90-91.

Did Jesus really love his disciples? He demanded everything of them and then abandoned them, leaving them vulnerable and liable to persecution. He lead them along a path that involved loss of property, freedom, friends, community-standing and ultimately, life. Was he really of any help to them? Kierkegaard's point is that Jesus' claim to love is incomprehensible without reference to God. Do you agree?
Photo by AL.
Five points for naming the department that occupies the rooms in the centre of the picture.

Kierkegaard on the origin of sin

The unexplainability of evil

Sin came into the world by a sin. Were this not so, sin would have come into the world as something accidental, which one would do well not to explain. The difficulty for the understanding is precisely the triumph of the explanation and its profound consequence, namely, that sin presupposes itself, that sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is presupposed. Thus sin comes into the world as the sudden, i.e., by a leap; but this leap also posits the quality, and since the quality is posited, the leap in that very moment is turned into the quality and is presupposed by the quality and the quality by the leap. To the understanding, this is an offense; ergo it is a myth. As a compensation, the understanding invents its own myth, which denies the leap and explains the circle as a straight line, and now everything proceeds quite naturally. ...To want to give a logical explanation of the coming of sin into the world is a stupidity that can occur only to people who are comically worried about finding an explanation.

-Søren Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis),
The Concept of Anxiety, 32, 49-50.

I have posted on this idea a number of times before (see especially this whole series): we must not find an explanation for sin and evil. It is always a sad and shocking interruption, an alien intrusion into God's good world. Its existence is a puzzle, since it apparently pulls itself into being* by its own bootstraps. This is what Haufniensis seems to be getting at with his talk about the quality and the leap - it is a closed circle with no natural entrance: sin presupposes its own existence. To explain it, to find a natural line of development from non-sin to sin, is to change its character as sin, to make it logical, even necessary and useful and thus - good!**
*Or into non-being, if we take Augustine's view of sin as privation - as lack of being.
**Of course, the Bible affirms that God can bring good out of evil, but this is a secondary move and must not become a justification for evil.
Ten points for guessing what kind of structure this picture is of.

Kierkegaard on hermeneutical thrombosis

How many no longer want to read this post because of the offputting title? Would it make a difference if I had said 'Kierkegaard on how not to read the Bible'? Thrombosis is where circulation of the blood is slowed or stopped by a local hardening/coagulation of the blood flow.
How not to read the Bible

...the Bible has often had a harmful effect. In beginning a deliberation, a person has certain classical passages fixed in his mind, and now his explanation and knowledge consist in an arrangement of these passages, as if the whole matter were something foreign. The more natural the better, [however, particularly] if he is willing with all deference to refer the explanation to the verdict of the Bible, and, if it is not in accord with the Bible, to try over again. Thus a person does not bring himself into the awkward position of having to understand the explanation before he has understood what it should explain, nor into the subtle position of using Scripture passages as the Persian king in the war against the Egyptians used their sacred animals, that is, in order to shield himself.

-Søren Kierkegaard (or rather, his pseudonym: Vigilius Haufniensis), The Concept of Anxiety: A simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin, 40.

This is a great image: in the siege of Pelusium, Cambyses, the Persian king, placed animals sacred to the Egyptians in the front of his army. Sometimes, we take key biblical passages hostage as sacred animals in order to thwart attacks on a cherished theological position. Haufniensis wants instead a more 'natural' reading, where we submit even our long-established beliefs to 'the verdict of the Bible' time and time again. This means looking at problem passages and letting them loosen our grip on those we feel we know and love. This seems to be the complement to the usual hermeneutical principle of reading difficult passages in light of easy ones: re-reading familiar passages in light of difficult ones.
Ten points for the name of this famous ancient copy of the Bible. And ten for being able to pick the passage.
I've joined a new reading group attempting to tackle Kierkegaard/Haufniensis' Concept of Anxiety. We've set up a blog for the group to discuss the text here.
In other news, Barth CD II/2 arrived today.

Kierkegaard on love

How is it possible to love when to do so makes us vulnerable to being hurt, rejected - or perhaps worst of all - ignored? Is it really wise to be so unsafe? Will not those who forget themselves in self-giving love be forgotten? Here is Kierkegaard's answer:

No, the one who in love forgets himself, forgets his suffering, in order to think of someone else's, forgets all his misery in order to think of someone else's, forgets what he himself loses in order lovingly to bear in mind someone else's loss, forgets his own advantage in order lovingly to think of someone else's - truly, such a person is not forgotten. There is one who is thinking about him: God in heaven. Or love is thinking about him. God is Love, and when a person out of love forgets himself, how then would God forget him! No, whle the one who loves forgets himself and thinks of the other person, God is thinking of the one who loves. The self-lover is busy; he shouts and makes a big noise and stands on his rights in order to make sure he is not forgotten - and yet he is forgotten. But the one who loves, who forgets himself, is recollected by love. There is One who is thinking of him...

- Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), 281. Cited in Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, 103.

The security of the divine attention makes the 'risk' of love a secure investment. Let us spend wisely.
Ten points for the Sydney suburb in the picture.

Kierkegaard on wearing masks

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II.146

Last night I saw Match Point by Woody Allen, an exploration of deception, justice and ultimately, luck. Can life be mocked? With luck, yes, until midnight. But as Kierkegaard points out, there is a cost to be paid even in the remaining hours.