The Freedom to Become a Christian: Kierkegaard and Barth on the Transformative Relationship with God

Abstract

This study explores Søren Kierkegaard’s and Karl Barth’s understanding of the process of becoming a Christian. It proposes that the accounts of both thinkers do not concern a single event in which a person suddenly becomes a Christian but, rather, a transformative process of becoming that is grounded in an active relationship with the God who is present with us and encounters us in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, it involves a growing in relationship with God that takes place within the history of the Christian church – a history characterised by a community of individuals who respond and witness to the grace of God.

I explore also the ways in which Kierkegaard and Barth confront some of the key errors that arise in overly systematic accounts of Christian conversion: (1) the inherent weakness of approaches that seek to dichotomise, and then quantify separately, the contributions of God’s grace and human freedom; (2) the inclination to objectify God and human beings in ways that neglect their existence as active, living persons who require to be conceived in irreducibly diachronic terms; (3) the overemphasis on conversion as a monadic event of individual transformation rather than an event of reconciliation; (4) the tendency to prioritise epistemology over ontology in discussions of what is involved in becoming a Christian; and (5) the propensity to lose sight of God’s all-embracing and inclusive purpose of reconciling persons into the one true form of existence for which they were created.

Underlying all of these errors is a failure to recognise that becoming a Christian involves consciously becoming who we are created to be in and through a personal and, indeed, dynamic fellowship with the triune God who is love in his innermost being. In this way, becoming a Christian is about becoming persons who are set free to live according to our true human nature. For Kierkegaard and Barth, the Christian faith is not one way among others to be true to our humanity. Rather, it involves conscious participation in our one true humanity, in and through an outward relationship with the eternal God who has established kinship with us in time.

At the same time, this study shows that both thinkers are fully aware of the importance of human reflection, decision and action for the Christian life. However, it is maintained that their appreciation for these factors is held together with an understanding that individuals cannot independently deliver themselves into a relationship with God. They both recognise that it is only God who draws persons to himself, in and through the mediation of the God-human, Jesus Christ. For both, therefore, a person’s freedom to become a Christian needs to be understood in terms of an awakening that occurs through an encounter with God. It is not the freedom to awaken ourselves into the Christian life but a decision to embrace the Christian life into which God awakens us. With a mutual appreciation for this, we shall see that neither contends that we can fully answer the question of how or why a person becomes a Christian. Any attempt to do so is always an attempt to explain a reality that is beyond human understanding: the mystery of God’s grace.