The computer revolution has downloaded the power and money to be made in exploiting human nature in the information age. As you know, it is called Face Book. The world and we Americas have stampeded to this tool to expand our social connections. The human need to belong to a group will find attachment somewhere, be it a street gang or Sunday morning worship. How many friends do you have? The answer to that question is what seemingly quantifies one’s value in our culture. Friendship is the American social ethic.
Grouping together has been a survival tactic from time immemorial and is not to be cast aside. Our list of friends brings security as we humans face a multitude of threats as a group rather than alone. The question for we thinking adults is to what extent? When does being a part of a group block our individual potential? When does our mutual admiration society shield us from the harsh realities of life instead of positively confronting them? Sadly most of us don’t go there or even ask the question.
The Church has a similar choice to make. If we are not there already, will we be the Face Book church? If so, what is the possible downside resulting from such an emphasis? The social Face Book ethic says, as do all human religions, “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck”. This conclusion is thought to be truth and tends to be the priority of the Face Book church. Is it? Should not Christianity cling to the primacy of faith in Jesus Christ? A faith that can not be seen or heard and surely does not walk.
Denominationalism has increasingly fractured the Church ever since the Reformation. The American Church has become a compound fracture. We already gather together with differing doctrinal, ethical, geographical, social, worship, racial and economic priorities. Will the addition of the Face Book church turn worship into a multitude of Christian cliques? Will not the Face Book priority make it impossible for the church to speak to this American culture with any semblance of unity and credibility? At what point do we cease to be Christian?
These are desperate times for the American church. The Danish people faced just such a crisis 200 years ago when the Lutheran Church was the state church. Christianity was the national, normal, expected life long gathering of family and friends of all Danes around a system of doctrine and worship. If you were a Dane, you were also a Christian. The gathering of believers was primarily a Protestant social order of friends and family who could think and live like what appeared to be Christian. The duck definition was enough to warrant the label of Christian.
Into this context arrives Soren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855). In his person and thought he documented in his many writings, what it meant to be a Christian. He insisted that faith is more than a viable thinking system of believable doctrinal statements. Faith is more than an agreed upon ethical and social standard that fosters the warm and fuzzies for the duck flock. According to S.K., faith is an individual, desperate, called out “leap” into the stratosphere of “no matter what”. A leap of faith beyond any human description or justification.
Based on the biblical account of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his “son of promise”, S. K. named this faith the “teleological suspension of the ethical”. Ultimate things will stretch us beyond everything else upon the earth, even our agreed upon rules for life. This was such a radical understanding of faith that it won him no friends. Educated in the university to be a minister, he pastured no church, never married but instead chose to dive into the exposition in writing of an authentic faith that we believers avoid. And for most of us S.K.'s definition of faith is so very demanding and scary.
Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism (Wikipedia). In just a few short years he explored God by exploring our human condition, our fears, pain, guilt, desperation, beliefs, etc., etc. The man and his situation in life is the beginning of all truth about God. Most of the philosophers who followed S. K. reduced existentialism to a mere anthropology (Becker, The Denial of Death). This is like constructing a math problem and then abandoning the problem and leaving it answerless. The answer for Kierkegaard was the Religious Man as that believer who has taken “the leap”.
“The leap” was not for the faint of heart. It was and is a commitment to doing not just being. The most scary part of the agreement is that the individual must commit before really knowing what he is committing too. The faith of the truly Religious Man is blind obedience that is beyond human explanations. And it will not be a pleasant experience. Pain and suffering is the reward for this commitment. In 1976, Elmer H. Duncan wrote an introduction to the thought of Soren Kierkegaard in one of a series called, “Makers of the Modern Theological Mind”. Please let me quote from page 92.
Why did Kierkegaard paint such a picture of Christian faith--- paradoxical, a life of suffering,shame, etc.? Of course, he was replying to Hegel and Feuerbach and the Danish Lutherans. But he also meant to be honest, to “tell it like it is”. And I find that young people respect his honesty; they find S.K.’s difficult faith-- and the challenge it involves-- more appealing than some popular alternatives that I shall not mention by name. But we might just whisper , “Are our churches so different from those Kierkegaard criticized?”
The author was asking this question of the Church of 1976, thirty five years ago, before the computer revolution and the threat of the Face Book spirituality of the Church. The popular alternatives then and through these intervening years have been and are pure foolishness. We have reaped a self involved laity and clergy who have downgraded spirituality to the level of being satisfied with mere earthly relationships. We have lost our distinctive. Being a true believer is not fun and certainly not popular. N0netheless, let us flee with due haste from the mere suggestion of a Face Book church (1Cor. 6:18, 1Timothy 6:11).
G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca
