Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Compass Psychotheology

Contemplating the collapse of the Christian faith related in part to the popularization of Darwin’s godless evolution of the species, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) throws up his hands in despair. Of greatest import for him is not the unfolding advances of science, but rather that people’s belief in a Christian God has declined to the point where he declares in The Happy Science that, “God is dead! And we have killed him!” 

 

Nietzsche foresees the disintegration of any distinction between man and animal. He feels appalled at the consequences that will follow once everyone becomes aware of the implications of God’s demise in human eyes. He sees life as an encounter with nothingness—the brutal awareness that all a person thinks, feels, and does means absolutely nothing. 

As a young man, Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) shares Nietzsche’s vision of individuals’ alienation from one another and any lasting meaning; a vision of human beings as molecules in motion in the void of space and time. Kierkegaard’s own encounter with nothingness so shakes him that he seriously contemplates suicide.  

 

Shortly thereafter he has a conversion experience: an intimate encounter with Jesus Christ, which changes his stance from atheism to Christian existentialism. He comes to believe that without the anchor of Christ, people will drift on an ocean of relativity; through a relationship with Christ, however, they can find love and purpose in a fallen world.

Kierkegaard champions each individual’s subjective encounter with God as the source of an authentic life. In The Journals of Kierkegaard, he advocates a life surrendered moment-to-moment to God’s loving will:

"In the profoundest sense, really, there are only two parties between which to choose, and there lies the category 'the individual': either obedient to God, fearing and loving him, to cling to God against men, so that one loves men in God; or to cling to men against God, so that one distorts and humanizes God and 'savors not the things of God but those that be of men.'  For between God and man there is a struggle, a struggle for life and death." 

Kierkegaard sees human beings as universally needing faith in Christ, a faith that can never come by way of rational proofs or logical propositions, but only through a complete abandonment of self-will in the form of a leap of faith in which one reaches out to God in Christ, risking everything, to find that one is transformed as a child of God, the Holy Spirit bearing witness that one is born again. The person then continues responding creatively to God’s revelation of a unique destiny—a path of purposeful living that requires passionate pursuit.

 

In compass psychotheology there is, too, an emphasis on the irreducible category of the individual, the person whom God calls, loves, and leads into a creative future that requires personal choice and responsibility to actualize.  

But in compass psychotheology there is more faith in the Church, the worldwide Body of Christ, not because churches can’t become petty, superficial, and repressive of individualism, but because God has foreseen the fallibility of the Church and has made provision  to counter the depersonalizing tendencies with the power of his Word and the presence of his Spirit.

Given this dynamic partnering of the Son and Spirit in the world, in the Church, and in the personal lives of believers, compass psychotheology joins with Kierkegaard in suggesting that the way of following God’s unfolding will involves here and now choices more than dogmatized beliefs, and that the subjective experience of the truths of faith and doctrine is more vital than mental recitation.

For more about the compass psychotheology integration of philosophy, psychology, and science with Christianity, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY: COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED