NOETIC DIALECTIC OF KIERKEGAARD

What is the task of Christian teaching? According to Kierkegaard, there are two types of dialectics by which communication takes place. One has been called the Noetic dialectic and another Religious dialectic. Essential to this dialectic are the distinctions between knowledge and ignorance and between truth and falsity. This is the dialectic employed by most teaching, scholarship and science in order to obtain more information or in order to understand a given subject matter. It of course can be applied to activities related to Christianity, for example, in order to obtain more historical information about the apostle Paul or about the formation and development of the Church.

As Kierkegaard saw it, the evasion of the requirements of a genuinely religious Christian existence, which had been going on for centuries, was now greatly amplified in his time because Hegelian philosophy had permeated the intellectual leadership and the scholarship of Christianity.This had influenced the intellectual élite and scholarly teachers of Christianity to examine various doctrines of the Gospel, in order to demonstrate how correct reasoning and understanding could reveal their truth. Consequently, only revelations which can be justified by reason were considered acceptable. Kierkegaard regarded this presentation of ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’ as a form of treason because it dared to presuppose that an infinite God and his infinite wisdom could be grasped by finite human understanding. Since, as finite beings, we cannot know God’s existence. Kierkegaard asserts that one can accept Christianity solely by making a ‘leap to faith’, and if we are unable to live in true faith then we should give up Christianity altogether. 

According to Kierkegaard, however, faith that is rooted in understanding is not true faith, but merely an intellectual acceptance of doctrines containing dogmatic truths. Genuine faith, which lies at the heart of Christianity, cannot be sanctioned by human reason. He observes that the general absence of true faith in contemporary Christianity is connected with, and reinforced by, the fact that virtually anyone can ‘become’ a ‘Christian’ – people now call themselves Christian merely because they are born to Christian parents in a Christian nation – and this has reduced Christianity to a mere fashionable tradition adhered to by swarms of unbelieving ‘believers’.

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