Dare to Believe

The Paradox of Christian Faith

I’ve been reading Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death this summer, and I just had to share the incredible passage below. Kierkegaard tells an imagined story of a day-laborer who was personally invited by the emperor for a formal visit. On top of that, the emperor did so with the intention of asking the day-laborer to become his son-in-law! Kierkegaard describes the hesitation and even embarrassment the day-laborer must be feeling, wondering if the whole thing was a joke designed to ridicule him. The invitation to such a welcome constitutes a kind of offense that would require great courage to believe it were even possible, let alone proper. Then, Kierkegaard applies the story to the scandal of the Christian message.

And now Christianity! Christianity teaches that this single human being [the individual], and so every single human being, whether husband, wife, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, etc., this single human being is before God – this single human being, who might be proud to have spoken once in his life with the king, this human being who hasn’t the least illusion of being on an intimate footing with this or that person, this human being is before God, can talk with God any time he wants, certain of being heard; in short this human being has an invitation to live on the most intimate footing with God! Furthermore, for this person’s sake, for the sake of this very person too, God comes to the world, lets himself be born, suffers, dies; and this suffering God, he well-nigh begs and implores this human being to accept the help offered to him! Truly, if there is anything one should lose one’s mind over, this is it! Every person who does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too exalted for him, because he cannot make sense of it, because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it, and therefore must have it removed, made into nothing, into madness and nonsense, for it is as if it were about to choke him.

The Christian faith is a double paradox: that the infinite, immutable God should stand in direct, personal relations, even to the lowliest of human beings; and that this same God would in fact become one of us, in the meanest of estates, to suffer and to die in our place in order to rescue us from our despair and to restore us to intimate friendship with him. The gospel chokes us with its apparent madness. We are left, then, with two choices: to walk away in sophisticated offense or to dare to believe, in “humble courage,” that the offer is genuine.