Kierkegaard’s Conception of God

Philosophers have often misunderstood Kierkegaard’s views on the nature and purposes of God due to a fascination with his earlier, pseudonymous works. We examine many of Kierkegaard’s later works with the aim of setting forth an accurate view on this matter. The portrait of God that emerges is a personal and fiercely loving God with whom humans can and should enter into relationship. Far from advocating a fideistic faith or a cognitively unrestrained leap in the dark, we argue that Kierkegaard connects this God-relationship to (a particular kind of) evidence and even knowledge. However, such evidence and knowledge – and hence God himself – may remain hidden from many individuals due to misconceptions of God and misuses of the human will. In one of his last philosophical works, Kierkegaard (hereafter K) exclaims: ‘Oh, to what degree human beings would become – human and lovable beings – if they would become single individuals before God’. This exclamation expresses a main goal of K’s literary efforts, early and late: to invite readers to ‘become single individuals before God’ (1851a, 11). Accordingly, he remarks: ‘To me, not personally but as a thinker, this matter of the single individual is the most decisive’ (1859, 114). He also puts this goal as: ‘To come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God’ (1876, 106). A key limitation on K’s invitation to self-knowledge before God is that ‘I cannot make my God-relationship public’ in a way that disregards its ‘purely personal inwardness’ (1859, 25). We shall examine K’s understanding of God and a God-relationship, in the light of his mature work beginning with his ‘turning-point’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846).