Clark has mentioned in a couple threads how he thinks my position is very similar to that of Soren Kierkegaard.  There are several important parallels between Kierkegaard’s thinking and my own, but this should not blind us to the important differences.  At the heart of our differences is that Kierkegaard follows the Protestant thinking of his time – the same thinking that he so strongly disagrees with is other ways – in assuming that religion in deeply and irretrievably individualistic.  This individualism is exactly what makes Kierkegaard the father of existentialism, while I on the other hand, am much more of a pragmatist of sorts.

A convenient way of looking at the differences between myself and Kierkegaard can be found in his reading of Abraham’s being commanded to sacrifice Isaac.  For Kierkegaard, this story illustrates how God and our faith in Him is neither reasonable nor moral, at least not in any human-centered or social sense that Kant, Hegel or any other modern thinker would recognize.  Abraham did not explain himself to Isaac for the simple reason that he could not explain himself.  There was, quite frankly, no reasons to give on the matter.  Any attempt at explaining, discussion or arguing, according to Kierkegaard, would have inevitably brought Abraham’s faith back into the realm of socially regulated reasons and morals.  (It is very much worth noting what Sartre also noted: that Abraham never for a single second questioned his interpretation of God’s commandment.)

It’s not that I so much disagree with Kierkegaard here.  I too resist attempts by many to domesticate God through the use of human-centered reason and morality of various modern stripes, and in most people’s view this is already too much.  Where I differ from Kierkegaard, however, is in bringing Isaac into center stage along with Abraham, for even though the latter did not question, reason about, resist or seek to reinterpret the word of the Lord, the former did not question, reason about, resist or seek to reinterpret the word of his mortal and fallible father.  While I agree with Kierkegaard’s rejection of the intrusion upon faith by the Scientific Revolution, I go even further in rejecting the intrusion upon faith of the Protestant Reformation.  This, for most people, is to jump out of the blue and into the black.

Isaac’s father could offer no explanation, reason or justification for what he was doing, nor, apparently, did Isaac expect any such things.  What mattered to him was that his father was a righteous man of the Lord who was quite obviously not chasing his own ambitions.  That much of the story is clear.  Perhaps we might suppose that Isaac also experienced some kind of inward confirmation of Abraham’s instructions.  But perhaps he didn’t.  All that we can be sure of is that Isaac had placed an immense amount of faith in another mortal and fallible person, regardless of how absurd what that other person said was.  The point I take from the story of Isaac is that in the same way that we are not supposed to domesticate God through the use of human reason and ethics, we are similarly not supposed to domesticate the righteous servants of the Lord through the same processes.   It is the equally irrational word of the Lord Himself – and that alone – that can legitimately domesticate His righteous servants.

This is the social element that Kierkegaard does not, in my opinion, give its full due and also, I submit, lies at the very heart of Mormonism.