A “repetition” of the ancient path with Soren Kierkegaard.1For Kierkegaard true repetition goes beyond simply repeating acts in conformity to social expectations. He rejects inauthentic existence where one simply conforms to social expectations. Repetition is a philosophical and existential act of renewing everything that one had in order to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of one’s personal life and relationships. It seeks to reassess one’s life commitment and intentionally takes personal responsibility for choices made in order to create a new, authentic self
Reimagining Church and Christian Faith: A Kierkegaardian Critique
The contemporary call to “reimagine church and Christian faith” is often presented as a bold attempt to jettison outmoded church beliefs and practices in order to initiate a creative response to new cultural realities. However, we are mindful of cultural analysts who note with irony that youths who rebel against the social conventions of their parents end up wearing the same clothing fashions, listening to the same pop music and repeating the same platitudes to express support for diversity and social justice. In reality, these youths are merely exchanging one form of social conformity to another in the name of creativity.
It is ironic that churches also conform to the latest religious fashion in the name of “reimagining church and Christian faith”. 2Several prevailing characteristics of the contemporary “reimagine church and faith” movement (following its predecessor, the Emergent Church Movement) include the following: 1) A culture of experimentation and innovation to create seeker-sensitive services. 2) Use of multi-media and bands which incorporate contemporary music styles and art to attract a new generation of youth growing up in a culture of musical performance and entertainment. 3) Relevant messaging where practical advice and personal faith stories replace “mystifying” spiritual and doctrinal teachings of the traditional church. 4) Inclusive approach to Christian faith without demands for adherence to a set of clear-cut theological doctrines.
While these adaptations in church structure and faith practices to engage contemporary culture are not inherently problematic, the concern arises when these innovative external expressions of seeker-sensitive services have in practice inadvertently diminished the timeless truths of the gospel and supplanted inward spiritual passion and obedient discipleship. This dynamic raises important questions about the extent to which these shifts reshape the church’s spiritual identity and doctrinal continuity. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) would diagnose this call for innovation as a symptom of a deeper spiritual sickness – the sickness of an age that has lost its inward passionate commitment of faith and its sense of eternity. In such an age, truth is reduced to nothing more than fashionable opinion. For Kierkegaard, when the church thoughtlessly follows the latest fashion, it is simply accommodating itself to “the spirit of the age” (Zeitgeist). It ceased to be the Church of the New Testament. It has become what he calls Christendom – Christianity domesticated and made respectable, a form without inwardness, reflection without obedience.
1. Reflection Superseding Passion
Kierkegaard distinguishes an earlier “age of revolution,” where conviction produces action, from the “age of reflection” in his time, when endless deliberation replaces decisive commitment. The present age, he observes, “is essentially a sensible, reflecting age, devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.”3Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review (Princeton University Press, 1978). (TA), p. 68.
This description fits the modern church’s temptation to substitute discussion for discipleship, programs for passion, and innovation for obedience. Church life and mission becomes an unending process of “reimagining,” as if constant self-revision could sustain the passionate faith and mission of the church. For Kierkegaard truth is subjectivity, that is, truth is about existence which must be personally appropriated and lived out by the individual. Faith is not a system of ideas but a decision to be lived – a leap of inward commitment made “before God.”
2. The Process of Leveling and Doctrinal Equivocation
One of Kierkegaard’s central insights is the phenomenon of leveling—the abstract, social force that erases all qualitative distinctions, making every truth merely one opinion among others. “The trend today,” he writes, “is in the direction of mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so many uniformly make one.”4TA p. 85.
When the church joins the bandwagon of “reimagining,” it becomes a participant in this leveling. The clear and authoritative revelation is obscured, the eternal Word of God is reduced to one voice in a cacophony of competing ideas in the public arena. All doctrines become negotiable. Core doctrinal distinctiveness, grounded in divine revelation, is undermined by ongoing doctrinal adaptation to prevailing cultural thought patterns. All convictions become relative, personal opinions. In such circumstances, “truth” no longer commands obedience; it merely elicits discussion. Kierkegaard saw this as the death of Christianity by reflection (intellectualism and detached knowledge) – an equivocation where everything remains, yet nothing has any significant meaning. The result is a church that talks endlessly about reform while inwardly dying of spiritual boredom, that is, a sense of emptiness that elicits endless distractions.
3. The Crowd and the Loss of Authenticity
For Kierkegaard, “the crowd is untruth.” 5Kierkegaard writes, “There is a view of life that holds that truth is where the crowd is, that truth itself needs to have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life that holds that wherever the crowd is, untruth is, so that even if– to carry the matter to its ultimate for a moment– all individuals who, separately, secretly possessed the truth were to come together in a crowd (in such a way, however, that “the crowd” acquired any deciding, voting, noisy, loud significance), untruth would promptly be present there.” Soren Kierkegaard,“The single Individual” in The Point of View (Princeton UP, 1998), p. 106. The crowd represents the abdication of inwardness, the surrender of the individual’s direct responsibility before God. “The individual does not belong to God, to himself, to the beloved, to his art, to his scholarship,” he writes; “no, just as a serf belongs to an estate, so the individual realizes that in every respect he belongs to an abstraction in which reflection subordinates him.”6TA85. In the crowd, the single individual disappears into anonymity; truth is dissolved into opinion, and faith becomes a matter of public agreement rather than personal decision
The modern impulse to “reimagine” the church is often driven by the anxiety to remain acceptable to the crowd – to secure its approval by conforming to the spirit of the age. In striving to appear inclusive, progressive, and relevant, the church risks losing the very inwardness that defines Christian existence. The gospel is softened to avoid offense; discipleship is reshaped to fit cultural expectations. Spiritual authenticity is replaced by imitation. But in doing so, the church risks abandoning its vocation to be a sign of contradiction. True faith requires what Kierkegaard calls inwardness – the courage to stand as “the single individual” before God, in fear and trembling, rather than to blend into the crowd.
Authentic Christianity is not conformity to social consensus but obedience to divine command, even when it offends public sensibilities. When “relevance” replaces repentance, and “innovation” replaces obedience, Christianity becomes religious performance to gain public approval. What remains is not the church of Christ, but the church of the crowd – a superficial form of religiosity, that is, Christianity without Christ, faith without following Christ, piety without passion.
4. The Loss of Passion in the Quest for Relevance
Kierkegaard recognized in the modern passion for novelty a deep spiritual malaise a despair that seeks amelioration through activism and publicity. “The present age is an age of publicity,” he laments, “the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity.”7 TA70. James Collins writes, “They [Nietzsche and Kierkegaard] agree that the individual is being emptied of all value and engulfed in some dominant totality: the majority, the race, the class, the nation or humanity itself. Kierkegaard calls the typical contemporary self a cipher-man or a fractional man, having importance and purpose not in himself but only as an element in a quantitative social whole. What counts is not the quality of individual judgment and character but the weight of public opinion. The public is an anonymous but all-powerful presence, whose ends are advanced by the press and other means of impersonal communication. James Collin, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Princeton Up, reprint, 1983), p. 184. Much of what passes for church “innovation” today serves the same function: it keeps us busy talking about transformation while avoiding the pain of actual repentance. “Reimagining” becomes a substitute for “repetition” – for renewing the eternal decision of faith. Kierkegaard warns that an age “devoid of passion changes the expression of power into a dialectical tour de force: it lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it.”8TA77
When the eternal truths of revelation are obscured, theological doublespeak and moral equivocation follow. Language becomes elastic enough to conceal unbelief. The church becomes pragmatic, measuring success by visibility and relevance rather than by faithfulness to the gospel. Kierkegaard identifies how “the sickness unto death” – despair, a fundamental alienation from one’s true self and God.9Kierkegaard identifies three forms of despair which is not mere unhappiness but a “sickness of the spirit”: not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be an authentic self, and acting in such a way that denies one’s authentic relationship to God.– propels churches to throw themselves into endless distractions which are in reality evasions of accountability in the presence of the eternal God. In short, it is to exchange the eternal for the temporal.
5. Authentic Renewal: Repentance, Not Reinvention
Kierkegaard’s vision of renewal is not reimagining but repetition. Repetition for him means the re-appropriation of an original passion, the reawakening of passionate faith to attain a more profound and authentic existence – a return to one’s first love of God. Authentic reform, then, is existential and spiritual, not strategic. It challenges individuals to live as “the single individual” before God, rather than as anonymous members of the crowd.
True renewal and attainment of authentic self is a fruit of repentance, costly discipleship and obedience. Renewal comes not by reimagining the church for modern times. It is the fruit faithful disciples who embody a living faith and courageously wrestles with the anxieties of self-knowledge. The call for each believer and the church is to live with passionate inwardness before God and to resist being conformed to the spirit of the age (zeitgeist).
6. “Repetition”: Returning to the Ancient Path
Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom speaks with prophetic urgency to our time. The call to “reimagine church and Christian faith” risks exchanging the eternal for the temporal, and obedience for approval by the world. The true task of the church is not to conform to modern sensibilities but to recover what Jeremiah called “the ancient paths” (Jeremiah 6:16) – the way of inward repentance, passionate faith, and costly discipleship.
To live “before God” (coram Deo) is to resist the crowd, the leveling process, and the despair and emptiness of abstract reflection. It is to rediscover that truth is not a concept but a life exemplified by a Person (Christ). The path of the church to authenticity and missional success is not by “reimagined” itself for the world, but “repetition”, an inwardly renewal with fear and trembling of faith before the eternal God.
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Source of inspiration: Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review (Princeton University Press, 1978).
Note the sharp contrasts between reimagining with Kierkegaard’s vision of authentic faith before God. For Kierkegaard, repetition goes beyond mere recollection. It overcomes boredom and despair of life through a process of renewal that involves memory and a conscious, subjective individual choice to renew one’s life by faith and God’s grace. This leads toward authentic experience of life that looks forward with a sense of purpose and direction.
Note also the key words in Kierkegaard’s thought: inwardness, subjectivity, the single individual, despair, leveling, the crowd, Christendom, repetition, offense, fear and trembling.
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