My Descent Into Kierkegaardian Madness

Lawrence Hart

What as a younger man I could be flattered into believing was the eccentricity of creativity or avant-garde thinking, I now, as an old man, recognize to have been early signs of an insidious disorder. As a “left-handed Okie” boy growing up in the farmlands and oil fields just west of Bakersfield, I knew nothing of the lunatic Kierkegaard or his wild scribbling before a class in Christian philosophy where the passion of his lunacy was reduced to harmless academic categories and analyzed as sterile intellectual propositions – but no one talked about the enormous weight of suffering freighted by such madness.

Poor Soren deteriorated to the point he thought he was a goose — a lean goose with strong wings capable of bearing him upward in heavenly flight. In his delusional thinking he came to believe that the “church” is a flock of geese – plump, delicate, and incapable of flight. Quite frankly I am afraid that this same eusebegenic malady (a disease you can only contract in the church) may consume me as it did Kierkegaard. My only hope lies in the fact that my spiritual imagination simply lacks the amplitude of power to plunge me into such depths.

Researchers who have done the most thorough examination of Kierkegaardian madness are fairly definite in their conclusions regarding its etiology. Those who look too long into the abyss of the institutional church lose their mind; their grip on sanity, and the prognosis for a complete recovery is poor – although not a few are able to maintain what passes for normalcy in our culture by either cutting the roots, submitting to lobotomies, or becoming prostitutes.

That one very occasionally meets men and women of immense integrity, profound spirituality, and purity of heart who see the institutional church mired in the sins of arrogance, injustice, selfish ambition, willful blindness, bureaucratic inaction, banality, and guided more by the politics of power and control than the Spirit; and, yet nevertheless, having looked into the abyss continue to love and serve with complete equanimity, only deepens my despair. Surely their ability to see what is with such clarity while remaining completely sane must be by sheer grace, pure gift, but why is it a gift reserved for so few – I don’t think I can endure it.

Whether it came from someone quite sane or entirely mad I don’t know, but there is a saying that keeps swirling around in the fog of my mind: “The simple church of Jesus went from Palestine to Greece where it became a philosophy, then it went to Rome where it became a government and an institution, and finally found its way to America where it became an enterprise.”

Eugene Peterson is one of those who has managed to hold on to his sanity in spite of anger and frustration with the “shop keeper” mentality of clergy and laity. The entrepreneurial church with which Peterson is so disturbed is about catering to select customers, and always anxiously watching the bottom line. It is about – well it is about “the golden calf” and all that sort of thing. The institutional church is about preserving itself – about protecting money and property and playing the politics needed to accomplish that end. It is about cliques and “in-groups,” and about seldom accepting the risks of love and service. With a wise nod of its head it speaks of “loving fearlessly,” but it is neither loving nor fearless. In his mad ravings Kierkegaard shouted that Christendom is infested with “twaddlers” – cordial, helpful people, institutional insiders, who show up with their little pales, basins, and squirts where there is a fire, but lack the requisite “seriousness” to deal with the crisis. “Superficiality,” goes the lament, “is the curse of our age.”

The church as a philosophy is the church in the grip of “sophists” – academics who grind and sift all the nutrients from Scripture. Like expert illusionists they dazzle and amaze with misdirection, brazenly advertising their work as objective science when it is neither. The truth is while Biblical scholars announce their conclusions as certainties their work is based entirely on conjecture and their reasoning is as circular as a dog chasing its own tale. Their theories, no matter what evidence to the contrary, are like zombies, no matter how many funerals are planned they cannot be put to rest. God becomes a concept, Christ an abstraction, and Scripture a self-help book.

What is to become of me? What am I to do? SK launched a foolhardy frontal assault against the “church” – fool hardy like the last desperate act of a kamikaze pilot in the face of unacknowledged defeat. Or to change the metaphor somewhat, Kierkegaard thought he could dismantle the whole apparatus by shining a light, so to speak, into the dark abyss. But unmotivated people cannot be changed by insight. It is said his early death was due to natural causes – natural causes if one thinks death due to a fevered spiritual imagination is natural. But I digress. Kierkegaard’s response offers no guidance. Perhaps I should flee to some desert hermitage, but my wife probably wouldn’t let me take the dog, and what of the innocents I have now led out into the desert. Should I tell them there is no water in the springs of Raphedim other than what can be squeezed out of the wet mud? Should I companion with other desperados in disparate places without stained class, without incorporation, without exemption, without “twaddlers,” lawless except for Yahweh’s law of love and compassion, and without authority except for the authority of Christ and the Holy Spirit? Is there a hidden diocese somewhere, a kind of safe house, with a Kierkegaardian Bishop? Should I call Francis? Or might Francis call me?

I know! I know! You think I am joking, am the joke, or speaking gibberish, the language of Bedlam. Or, that I am either intentionally or unintentionally trying to be annoying. And I do remember a time when my first born declared himself to be “Son of Annoying Man.” But I cannot stop my raving. God help me. God remove this fire in my guts.