OK I know it's late. (See Monday's post, for what exactly it is that's late). The book was elsewhere and I had other things to do than go looking for it. That time of the year. A concatenation of my own and other people's deadlines, and an understandable desire to preserve the fugitive fragments of a rapidly eroding sanity.
But I've now retrieved it. So here's the promised Kierkegaard passage in which he makes cognitive dissonance an art form, and in doing so makes Christian discipleship modelled on Jesus sound far too difficult. Which Kierkegaard (and Jesus) would say, is as it should be.
"To be sacrificed is...as long as the world remains the world, a far greater achievement than to conquer; for the world is not so perfect that to be victorious in the world by adaptation to the world does not involve a dubious mixture of the world's paltriness.
To be victorious in the world is like becoming something great in the world; ordinarily to become something great in the world is a dubious matter, because the world is not so excellent that its judgement of greatness unequivocally has great significance - except as unconscious sarcasm."
(Quoted in the superb Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. A Brief Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2001), 124
See what I mean? Makes you feel positively cognitively dissonated, eh!
But read it till you get it!
And then be grateful for those Christian radicals like Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, J H Yoder, and other theologians of the cross, whose task is to disperse the algae of complacency and intellectual comfort, that threatens to suffocate thought and heart by occluding light and reducing oxygen.
I know. A far fetched image. But whatever else Kierkegaard does, he agitates the depths of thought, breaks up the settled mental surface, and makes the heart beat faster.
.....................
Just after writing the above, I was chasing through a biography of Malcolm Muggeridge for something, and came across this from one of Muggeridge's favourite writers, Simone Weil:
"He whose soul remains ever turned in the direction of God while the nail pierces it, finds himself nailed on to the very centre of the universe...It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the branches of the Cross."
From Simone Weil, Waiting on God (Fontana, 1950) 93-4.
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