critical review of "emerging prophet: kierkegaard and the postmodern people of god" by silas morgan

8/13/2019 Critical Review of "Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God" by Silas Morgan

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Silas MorganComments on Kyle Robertss Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God .2013 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture

Reading this book was a bit like catching up with a very old and dear friend. My own theological

imagination was birthed in the discussions, lectures, close readings, and seminars thatpreceded this book, through which its ideas were first generated, incubated, and expanded. Iwas fortunate enough to study under Kyle at Bethel Seminary, and in those early days, the maintheses in this book had their embryonic emergence in the midst of the discursive workroom ofgraduate seminars. So with the same kind of nostalgia and the ease of familiarity that oneenjoys when encountering an old friend, I read this book in its final form with great joy andanticipation. But as it often goes with old friends, when there is this familiarity that lends itselfto a kind of intimacy that comes with long and hard friendships, one also become easilyannoyed by the little idiosyncrasies, those minor qwerks that often go undetected. Myexperience of reading this book was much the same. See, in those early days, I learned, not onlyso much about the work of Sren Kierkegaard, but also about how to think theologically indeed how to think like a Christian. Indeed, it is truly ironic that of all the possibilities, it wasKierkegaard that taught me how to be a theologian! I am indeed quite certain that Kierkegaardwould consider this a bit more of an insult than a compliment. And so, in what follows, I will tryto leave Kierkegaardian details to the true Kierkegaard scholars that sit here with me, thosewhose books have taught me a great deal, not only about Kierkegaard, but also aboutChristianity. My comments then will be on this notion of Kierkegaard as a prophet, which I thinkamounts to a distinct hermeneutical strategy, a type that produces a particular Kierkegaard,one that may indeed prove to be quite different from the historical Kierkegaard if there issuch a thing.

At the risk of showing my hand, I will state my concern plainly and then hope to complicate itfurther in my comments: so much attention in Kierkegaard studies has been given to how bestto read Kierkegaard. Those familiar with his oeuvre know that Kierkegaard was astonishinglyself-conscious about his work and about his readership, coupled with his equally as complicatedideas about authorship. To read Kierkegaard as a prophet, not for Christianity generallyspeaking, but a prophet of a specific and particular theology, and for a specific group andreligious identity, one that is rather unique and idiosyncratic to North American Christianity,and even more specifically, to American Protestantism. (My Catholic colleagues at Loyola knownothi ng of the emergent church, for example, and see very little of themselves represented inthe theological and practical concerns listed in this book as essential to both Ks theological

project and to that of the emergent church the postmodern people of God). This bookcarefully and skillfully outlines the promise of reading Kierkegaard in such a way so as to alignhis theological interests with those of the emergent church, but what is the cost of thisapproach? What does one have to overlook in Kierkegaard in order to do so? It is important, Ithink, to heed the great Albert Schweitzers warning about the well -gazers where in the 19 th century life of Jesus scholars looked into the well of scholarship about Jesus andconveniently discovered there a Jesus whose life and ministry took a rather opportune shape:one that very closely resembled their own. In other words, I want to register a concern about


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the kind of reading represented here, in that I think it produces a version of Kierkegaard thathandily affirms contemporary theological sensibilities, perhaps in contradistinction, both to thehistorical Kierkegaard (if there is such a thing) and the effective Kierkegaard. Even while thebook seems to be aware that the prophetic nature of Kierkegaard ought to leave us all a bitunnerved, even if we find ourselves in large agreement with the theological, cultural, and

religious perspective broadly identified with the emerging church, this, I think, remains thedanger of the contextual approach to constructive theology that Kyle clearly works from here,and one that ought to be on the table if we are going to discuss the relevance of Kierkegaardfor our time.

The thesis of EP at the most elemental level is that Kierkegaards theology ought to be re adin conjunction with the emergent sensibility, so as to apprehend how it is that thisintertextuality might lend new resources for postmodern ways thinking and acting Christianly.Kierkegaard is a prophet for and of the emerging church: heralding the challenges andprefiguring the critiques that the emerging christianities level against both the conservative andliberal sectors of American Protestantism. Indeed that there are similarities betweenKierkegaards theology and the postmodern people of God; Ky le is quite convincing on thispoint. So much so that this book ought to become the place to go for those eager to betterunderstand these parallels and integrate the dynamics of this important relationship, not onlyin terms of understanding this very important movement within American EvangelicalProtestantism, but also in terms of understanding the contemporary salience of Kierkegaardstheology. This book represents both in such a manner that it can serve as an introduction toboth key aspects and theme s in Kierkegaards theological and ethical thought but also anintroduction to the theologies of the emergent church. Indeed, I find this thesis to beconvincingly successful and this is what bothers me. The Kierkegaard I read here is toofamiliar, too digestible, too agreeable.

Furthermore, to elaborate a bit more on this point, it strikes me that Kyle offers here is both aparticular reading of Kierkegaard as a proto-emergent theologian, and amounts to a ratherstrategic use of Kierkegaard and his theology in service to the emerging forms of postmodernChristianity that as they try to find their unique way of articulation within the fractured andpolyphonic landscape of American Protestant Christianity. I read this project as an attempt toleverage a particular take on Kierkegaards oeuvre for the sake of a specific cultural andreligious formation, both in order to illuminate the significance of Kierkegaard FOR thiscontemporary sensibility (e.g., the influence that Kierkegaard has had on leading figures ofemergent churches), but also the role that Kierkegaard CAN and SHOULD play for these

communities of faith and their collective. I do think unfortunately that what ends up happeningis that the critical aspect of the prophetic voice gets lost a bit too much here, that the specificway in which Kierkegaard gets put to use articulates the relationship a bit too closely, that itoverlooks the ways in which if Kierkegaard as a prophet functions a bit like a critical theorist inrelation to emergent theology, and as such, would probably land a bit more distant fromemergent theology than presented here. The point here is not that Kyle gets Kierkegaard wrong,but that the deployment of prophet as the description of Kierkegaards r elation to the emergingchurch might be a bit of a misnomer.


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Perhaps we have all gotten a bit too comfortable with thinking and reading Kierkegaard asblatantly theological. Interestingly, one of the strong features of Emerging Prophet is that itsaxiomatic point of departure was once not such an obvious designation: Kierkegaard as theologian. As is well known, the idea of reading Kierkegaard as a self-consciously religious

figure is a relatively recent idea in the reception history. Not long ago, this book would havebeen greeted with mild to moderate suspicion, not because of the quality of the scholarship(which is actually quite exemplary) but rather the characterization of Kierkegaard asunapologetically theological. I wonder if we have become too accustomed, so comfortable withthis, that we find it all too easy to find Kierkegaard at home with the theological. We do find avery particular Kierkegaard here, one that is only conceivable after landmark texts in the field(not only the early Dupre, but also David Gouwens, Sylvia Walsh, Lee Barrett, C. Stephen Evans,Amy Laura Hall) wherein we all discovered in Kierkegaard a theological voice that had for a longtime been overlooked and therefore underutilized. EP is not merely an attempt to readKierkegaard as a conversation partner for postmodern forms of Christian faith and practice, (asthis move is altogether too easy, and also too frequently made in sessions like this, and soclich). Its strongest point especially for us this weekend as we struggle to articulate wellwhat it is that Kierkegaard means for our time, is to suggest that Kierkegaard can, and indeedmust, be read as a prophet . This decision to read Kierkegaard in and through such a modality

affords emergent Christianity an opportunity to not only use Kierkegaards work to aid theirown theological and ethical goals, but also to continue to think more and in some cases morethoroughly about key matters. But, what exactly? It seems too often that Kierkegaard ends updovetailing all too cleanly with the ideas of leading emergent figures, that the criticaluneasiness, the restlessness, the interventionary scandal that Kyle seems to see precipitating ata result of Kierkegaards prophetic interlocution, hardly registers amidst the frequent citationsof resonance, congruence, and partnership.

What does it mean to read Kierkegaard as a prophet ? What are the hermeneutical complexitieswith such a reading and is there enough evidence that the Dane would welcome such areading? Brueggemann. Would Kierkegaard have seen himself in this characterization anddoes such a question even matter for evaluating the relative merits of Kyles work here?

This further specifies my question about the relationship between the critical and the prophetic,especially in reference to the relation between Kierkegaards theology and that of the emergentchurch. I think there are some ways that Kyle privileges an idea of the prophetic as a kind ofanticipation or foreshadowing that predicts the course of events and ideas prior to their fruition.

Again, the argument, that Kierkegaard anticipates of many of the theological questions raisedby the emergent churchs challenge to both the conservative and liberal corners of AmericanProtestantism, seems quite right in my judgment, and yet I am not particularly certain thiscaptures the textured complexity of reading Kierkegaard as a prophetic voice, namely its critical and negative aspects. Is there is a sense in which Kierkegaard ca n also and must also be usedin order to critique and challenge the emergent communities? Is is true that we see glimpseshere and there (I am quite certain that Kyle has examples [e.g., chapters, page numbers) allready to go!) but they appear more or less to be rather slimmed-down attempts to anticipate


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this objection, rather than actually respond to it. I wonder how Kyle would respond if given theopportunity to say more.

Can we not also discern threads and layers of Kierkegaards work that present a rather stiffthreat to the veracity of emergent narcissism and self congratulatory practices, to the

heterogeneity, the way that postmodern Christianity is likewise branded, packaged, and solid inways that are surprisingly cultural, in the sense that emergent Christianity is often arranged,promoted, and structured in order to reach those who have been turned off by more ol d-school or traditional approaches to religious identity and practice (e.g., on the conservative sideor the liberal mainstream side)? If we are going to embrace the prophetic voice in Kierkegaard,is there not a sense that Kierkegaard has something to say about the ways that emergentChristianity has not avoided the monological trappings that accompany bourgeoisie culturalformations? The way that emergent Christianity, while it may not be Christendom proper, hasalso fallen prey to its form of cultural establishment with its own rituals, practices, andnarratives to which it is always already entangled.

(Nb: I am currently doing some work comparing the critical modality of Kierkegaard withthat of Marx, and so I see more and more that the kind of critique that Kierkegaardtakes up is far more in line with the critical theory of ideology la the Frankfurt School,and with the contemporary Zizek who would have an ideological field day with the coverimage of the book, which packages and mediates Kierkegaard as an commodified objectof consumption and fetishism, complicit in and benefiting from the corporatedeployment of cynical aesthetics.

And so, here it seems , in Kyles account, as if Kierkegaard is considered less of a prophetic figureand more of a proto-emergent figure, as if Kierkegaard would be quite at home at the Wild

Goose Festival or at IKON. There are times where relevancy and parallel blurs into equivalence.At this point, the prophetic relationship between Kierkegaard and the postmodern people ofGod becomes more about their united struggle against predominant modes of Christianityrather than Kierkegaard in direct interlocution with the ideas and agendas of emergentChristianity itself. Bluntly put, is Kierkegaard an emerging prophet or is he an emergentpatron saint (albeit from 19 th century Scandinavia rather than 21 st century urban NorthAmerica)? This might stem from a bit of onesidedness in the bookd in regards to what theprophetic is, in that its critical modality, namely the idea of that the prophetic is a criticaltheory gets little attention here. Following Max Horkheimers classic definition in the 1937essay Traditional and Critical Theory, critical theory is a social theory that critiques dynamics

rather than simply trying to understand and explain the world as a merely descriptive ornormative way. Fueled by a negative dialectics , critical theory integrates Kant and Marx in theirrespective uses of the term critique, in that it examines and establishes th e Iimits of a body ofknowledge, by accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental concepts as they areused by that knowledge regime. Marx further politicized it into a critique of ideology, linkedirreducibly to the liberating praxis of social revolution; as such, critique is always part and parcelof what a prophetic imagination affords theology. Perhaps this aspect of the prophetic gets abit lost in the midst of Kyles eagerness to make the case that Kierkegaard is a germane voice


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for the postmodern people of God, in an effort both to illustrate Kierkegaards continuedrelevancy but also to, in some ways, provide some legitimation for emerging churches asoffering truly historical and tradition-ed forms of Christian thinking and action. (The strangealliance between some post liberals and emergent folks around narrative theologies ismotivated in part, I think, by this). It seems as if Kierkegaard (and the apparent similarities

between his theology and that of the emergent folks) is used as a source of legitimation for thelatter; likewise these similarities are also used so as to defend the salience of Kierkegaard forimportant theological and ecclesial matters in some Protestant sectors in our time. If we areto understand the prophetic vocation to be ideologically critical, or said even more strongly, as a critical theory, on account of its the very own negative dialectics, a critical prophetic theologymust restrain itself from the kind of theological immediacy that the emerging church is so quickto embrace and as such, I wonder if Kierkegaard is much less of a friendly voice for thepostmodern people of God, but also a far more prophetic and thus critical - one.

What does this mean then for how we ought to understand what Kyles book here offers us interms of the relevance of Kierkegaards theology for the emerging church? And I offer these asopen questions, some of which are truly open for me, and others that are less so.

First, do we agree that Kierkegaard can and should be used in this way: leveraged for the sakeof illuminating particular theological ideas and interests of a specific and particular religiousidentity and practice? Does this not strike us as serving a kind of identitarian politics thatKierkegaard would find problematic? Do we run the risk of participating in a kind ofSchweitzerian well, whereas like the life of Jesus research in the nineteenth century,concurrent with Ks own authorship , in our quest to understand the contemporary significanceof Kierkegaard, we look into the well, and much to our delight we see the theological shape ofKierkegaard in the water or better yet, as framed, contoured, and fetishized into the screen of

our iPad Minis?

Second, what characterization best fits Kierkegaard in relation to postmodern forms ofChristianity: as a prophet or a critic? Indeed, it is clear that he can and must be both to beeither one. In this book, however, I would hazard to say that Kierkegaard comes off as far moreagreeable to emergent theology than he does in terms of an albeit anachronistically criticalrelation.

Finally, most of us here are going to be eager to protect the salience of the Kierkegaardianlegacy and argue f or his continued importance for our time. But again, because of the

scandalous particularity of Kierkegaard, his method, the writings themselves, the rhetoricaldevices, indeed the very strategy of indirect communication, do we not render a disservice tohis authorial intent, his Point of View, in the sense that it is clear that Kierkegaards concernand writings have rather occasional scopes and therefore have a kind of limited reach?

I raise these questions as a dear friend of this book, as a grateful reader who sees so much ofhimself present in its pages, and who is willing to risk pressing hard at a few nits, preciselybecause I consider the book to be quite important. Indeed, I have learned much from this work


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and the countless conversations that preceded it about what it means to be Christian, topractice a restless, uncertain, and doubting Christian faith, and to appropriate hope and justicein a broken world desperately in need of both. I hope our conversation this morning can help usunderstand this book better; it certainly warrants and deserves this kind of consideration.

critical review of "emerging prophet: kierkegaard and the postmodern people of god" by silas morgan

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