Wanda Warren Berry writes:

I may in my earlier post on "truth is subjectivity"
have underplayed the element of inwardness in Kierkegaard's
use of "subjectivity."  But I still think he means to
emphasize the "subject" as not only passionately concerned,
but as free and conscious and obligated to an Other, the Power
that constitutes the self.  Faith in this Power is never
"objectively" justified-- but that does not mean individuals
who in fear and trembling meet the Ground of Being through
a particular symbol of its re-constituting forgiveness
cannot experience community.  Each must make the movements
of faith herself; but community is still possible so long
as it respects the role of the individual and her/his freedom
-i.e., so long as the individual grants absolute authority
only to God.

Wanda's exposition is persuasive, and perhaps one should let the
matter rest there, - but then again, perhaps one shouldn't.

My question "Whose God?" sought to define a paradox and to
suggest a set of radical hypotheses about the dilemma of 
the individual man or woman in the midst of God's elect.
Isaiah saw him/her quite clearly:

     "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows
      and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our
      faces from him ..."
                           Isaiah 53:3
              
This Messiah, this messenger of God, this social misfit,
this outcast, this criminal onto whom society, in order
to obtain its peace, projects its hate and its cruelty.
(All in favor of capital punishment, please raise their
hands.)

When Caiphas, convinced of the political expediency of
a human sacrifice, arranged an impromptu plebiscite to
bring pressure on Pilate to crucify Jesus, he was in his
own way, currying popular support, doing what every
successful politician does in an election year. And
fair-minded people, like Pilate, went along with him
and approved Jesus crucifixion as the lesser of two evils,
the greater evil being the erosion of civil authority.

The crucifixion was an expression not of unique human depravity,
not of a unique error in judgment, not of a unique concatenation
of human failures; it was a predictable expression of normal human
group behavior, an exhibition of the fundamental physiology of
human association (Vergesellschaftung). In his calculated
subordination of the interests of the individual to the perceived
interests of society, Caiphas was no different from any other
politician before or after him.

Christian ethics has always construed the (excessive)
satisfaction of our nutritional and sexual proclivities
as sinful.  But the roots of *this* sin (the crucifixion)
are not of the flesh but in the association (Vergesellschaftung)
in which human beings are unavoidably enmeshed. The individuals
who advocated, arranged, and carried out Jesus' crucifixion
were neither gluttons, nor adulterers, were not communists,
liberals, abortionists, robbers, thieves or murderers: they
were average upstanding well-intentioned Sunday School attending
citizens like you and me, who loved their country and had its
best interests at heart.  They were not different from ourselves.
It was the church of Jesus' day which crucified Jesus. The
church of our day will do no less.

(The similarities between ourselves and those who crucified Jesus
are painful for us to contemplate.  We have a desperate need to
exonerate ourselves and to tell ourselves that was "they" who did
it.  This need is met by religious anti-semitism.  One of the
fringe benefits of being Christian is to be distinguished from
the Jews as those who crucified Jesus.  Once we understand that
we are saved but they are to be "cast out into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth," (Matt. 8:12),
that we are virtuous but they they are wicked, we can get on with
the job of executing what we conclude to be God's judgment and
crucify them, be it at Auschwitz or at Hiroshima.

If in this perspective the term "Christian Church" is a contradiction
in terms, it is a contradiction which is grounded in the New Testament
itself. Jesus' own relationship to the church of his day is epitomized
in his expelling from the temple the business men who had negotiated
some long-term leases there.  Jesus asks each of us on the one hand,
to pray, not on the street corners, but in secret, to take up his cross
and follow him; and on the other hand he tells us to establish a church
which, human nature being what it is, will unavoidably become complicit
in the next auto da fe. It is true, that we are two thousand years too
late for the original crucifixion, but as Jesus said, "Inasmuch as
ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have
done it unto me." (Matt 25:40) and we seldom miss the chance. 

Kierkegaard's flight to inwardness may be construed less as an attempt
to escape the outwardness of positivistic science and its presumptions
to give an exhaustive account of human experience, than as a struggle to 
escape the oppressiveness of human society, and of the objective,
public religion which it created. The measure of Kierkegard's
estrangement from the church is impressively echoed by Bishop
Martensen in a wonderfully eloquent rebuttal of the intemperate
attack which Kierkegaard had made on him. Bishop Martensen hit
the nail on the head when he wrote:

      But it surely will never do, that the considerable unevenness
      which one finds in the various developmental stages of the church
      should lead one to forget what must remain unaltered for all time,
      unless we are to abandon the article of faith which we learned 
      in childhood: I believe in one holy catholic church. For all
      who believe this know that there is in the church a testimony
      of truth which propagates itself from generation to generation,
      and that there are at all times and in all generations in the
      congregation as well as in the academies those who bear this
      witness and confirm the great fact of Christianity. Else the
      unity of the church should have been fragmented in the course
      of time. To be sure, it is futile to offer such considerations
      to Dr. S. Kierkegaard, whose Christianity knows neither church
      nor history, and who seeks Christ nowhere but in the "desert"
      or in the "secret chamber".
                 Berlingsche Zeitung, Thursday, December 28, 1954


      I apologize for my translation which I made not from the
original Danish, but from a rendering into German by Hajo Gerdes,
that I have among my books:
 
      Das aber geht gewisz nicht an, dasz man ueber der groszen
      Ungleichheit, die sich in den verschiedenen Entwicklungsstufen
      der Kirche findet, vergiszt, was zu allen Zeiten gleich sein
      musz, wenn wir nicht den Artikel aufgeben wollen, den wir als
      Kinder gelernt haben: Ich glaube eine einige, heilige, allgemeine
      Kirche. Denn alle, welche diesen Artikel glauben, wissen auch
      dasz es in der Kirche ein sich von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht
      fortpflanzendes Wahrheitszeugnis gibt, und dasz es auch zu jeder
      Zeit und in jedem Geschlecht, sowohl in der Gemeinde als unter
      den Lehrenden, solche gibt, die dieses Zeugnis tragen und die
      grosze Tatsache des Christentums bekraeftigen. Andernfalls wuerde
      die Einheit der Kirche durch die Zeiten hindfurch zerbrochen sein.
      Freilich ist es unnuetz fuer Dr. S. Kierkegaard solche Betrachtungen
      anzustellen, dessen Christentum ohne Kirche und ohne Geschichte ist,
      und der Christus nur in "der Wueste" oder und im "Kaemmerlein" sucht.
        Bishop Martensen
                 Berlingsche Zeitung, Thursday, December 28, 1954


As I suggested in a previous letter, the dialectic between the 
subjectivity of the cross and the objectivity of the church
remains unresolved. Kierkegaard could not resolve it; Bishop
Martensen could not resolve it. And neither can we.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com