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KIERKEGAARD ON BAPTISM
Dallas M. Roark Professor of Philosophy, Emporia State University

Soren Kierkegaard has a most remarkable sentence in his work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. He wrote, "When faith thus begins to lose its passion, when faith begins to cease to be faith, then a proof becomes necessary so as to command respect from the side of unbelief."(1) This insight has application to many areas on the modern scene, but in this paper it will be seen in relation to how one becomes a Christian. The search for security outside the commitment
of faith is a quality of paganism, not Christianity. "Christianity is precisely an affair of spirit, and so of subjectivity, and so of inwardness."(2)

Kierkegaard's emphasis on subjectivity may be offensive to some because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer, but this is an overreaction to a needed influence in Kierkegaard's time, in which he stressed the subjective because that was so lacking in his day. Sometimes we make distinctions between knowing God and knowing about God. The objective is knowing about God, and the subjective is knowing God. The subjective requires faith, the objective does not.
Louis P. Pojman wrote:

All objective inquiry is finite or relative inquiry and, thus, is relative to some higher interest; but Christianity demands infinite interest; absolute and total involvement of the subject in one's eternal happiness via the Paradox. Hence if one is infinitely interested in Christianity, one cannot be finitely interested in it.(3)

Kierkegaard was concerned that if one bases one's eternal happiness upon the sacrament of baptism one becomes a "comic figure")4 ) How does one know of one's baptism? Parents may tell of it, the church has a record, the person may have a certificate, but the person himself does not really know, especially when eternity hangs in the balance. If baptism is so important it would have been better to wait until adulthood so that the individual would know, or even better yet,
it should be repeated like the Lord's Supper is repeated, and the person would know for sure of his baptismal security.

Suppose that a man were concerned for his eternal wellbeing to the point that he questioned whether he had any right to call himself a Christian. If married , his wife would say to him:

Dear husband of mine, how can you get such notions into your head? How can you doubt that you are a Christian? Are you not a Dane, and does not the geography say that the Lutheran form of the Christian religion is the ruling religion of Denmark? For you are surely not a Jew, nor are you a Mohammedan; what then can you be if not a Christian? It is a thousand years since paganism was driven out of Denmark, so I know you are not a pagan. Do you not perform
your duties at the office like a conscientious civil servant; are you not a good citizen of a Christian nation, a Lutheran Christian state? So then of course you must be a Christian.5

Kierkegaard rejected this objective way of viewing life for a subjective approach.

It is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has absolutely no existence.6

Subjectivity means to encounter the paradox, the God-man in a way of commitment and faith. If one knows all the facts of Christianity, one is merely a historian, not a believer. To be a believer is only possible through faith. Hence the task of becoming subjective is the highest task one faces. 7

Kierkegaard noted: "To know a confession of faith by rote is paganism, because Christianity is inwardness."8

With these comments as a background, Kierkegaard had some pointed words about baptism. Infant baptism appeared to be somewhat comic for him. One can become a Christian when a child is a week old and the church has "managed to transform Christ into 'a friend of tiny tots'."9 People are Christians before they know what Christianity is all about. The child has no understanding of the paradox, let alone an understanding of God. The child cannot understand the humiliation of God in the incarnation nor the extent of the wonder that the Almighty was laid in a manager and swaddled in rags. Even more difficult is the inability of the child to understand that Christ came "into the world in order to suffer. "10 Additionally, one finds that giving up Christianity is not easy and living a lukewarm
religious life is quite acceptable. Christianity becomes important only at birth and at death.

The child is baptized at infancy and as soon as possible indoctrination occurs. But one cannot cram Christianity into a child. What is forced into the child is "idyllic mythology. "11 The process, however, involves an inversion of theology. The sacrament of baptism involves bringing the innocent child to God or Christ.12 But in Christianity it is precisely the sinner who encounters the paradox. The child is without sin-consciousness; only the maturing human has that.

Kierkegaard discoursed on Matthew 19 where Christ said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Among other questions he raised, is this: Why did he not say, "Go out and baptize little children"?13 Kierkegaard went so far as to say that infant baptism leads to heterodoxy.

One accentuates the sacrament of baptism with such exorbitant orthodoxy that one actually becomes heterodox on the dogma of regeneration, forgetting the objection raised by Nicodemus and the reply to it, because with hyper-orthodoxy one decrees that a little child has actually become a Christian by being baptized.14

When then does one become a Christian, according to Kierkegaard? It is not the age of childhood, infancy, but the more advanced age, the age of maturity. That is the time when a person will decide about being a Christian or not. I5 To force the child's existence into decisive Christian categories is akin to rape and great stupidity.

In the early ages of Christianity the task of the missionary was not to baptize, but to bring people to faith in Christ. It is easier to bring people to Christ in the early centuries than in Kierkegaard's nineteenth century. The problem is that when everyone is a Christian, no one is a Christian. Even the clerics complained that among the baptized there are so few Christians, that almost all, except for an immortal little band, are spiritless baptized pagans--which seems to indicate that baptism cannot be the decisive factor with respect to becoming a Christian, not even according to the latter view of those who in the first form insist upon it as decisive with respect to becoming a Christian.16

Rather than believing a creed, or the doctrines of the church, or being baptized, Christianity is something different. It is related to faith and an infant cannot have faith. It cannot make a commitment that is required by Kierkegaard for inwardness. He had a rather unusual definition that fits only the believer. "Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion of the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness, which in this instance is intensified to the utmost degree. "17 Faith in the paradox does not have the certainty of math, but its own certainty. The absurd--the fact that God became man--seems repelling to the mind of man, but it is held fast by commitment and intensified in man's life. That is what it means to become a Christian. Nothing else will do for Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard placed a comment in one of his brief imaginary conversations that defended his orthodoxy in an unusual way. He claimed: "It is certain all the same that I am a true orthodox believer, one who abominates the Baptists."18 In spite of this comment Kierkegaard operated in a position that is quite consistent with the Baptist emphasis.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript was published in 1846. In the last year of his life, 1855, Kierkegaard became increasingly critical of the established church and its theology. It was his intention to reintroduce Christianity into "Christendom." The church was in a process of making a fool of God. It was playing Christianity. He even raised the question of whether it would not be better for a child to be ignorant of Christianity until an appropriate age is reached so that the child would know that Christianity is something qualitatively different from "Christian" culture.

In August 1855, he described a typical man who had no religion and even believed that reading God's Word at home would make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who could know. But he married a wife, had a child and a crisis came. Suddenly, he must have a religion. They took the child to the priest who sprinkled the child with water three times, "and this they dared to present to God under the name of Christian baptism. "19

Kierkegaard contrasted this to the disciples of Jesus who had reached the age of discretion and who"promised to be willing to live as sacrificed men in this world of falsehood and evil."20

Why did the priests baptize before the age of discretion? Kierkegaard charged that the priests understood that their "trade would not amount to much “ 21 This is to say that many people would not be baptized if they were given the conscious decision to make for themselves. Since everyone was baptized in the state church, then it could not but be true that many uncommitted people were merely baptized pagans. Infant baptism made about as much sense as infant marriage to Kierkegaard. Infant marriage does not have the most important ingredient, which is commitment. The same holds true for infant baptism.

When a person presumes that one has been a Christian from two weeks after birth, it becomes more difficult to become a Christian later. But Kierkegaard insisted that it is possible and necessary. The child cannot have a consciousness of sin although it is required in the New Testament. 22

Baptism of infants leads to another problem, confirmation. Since infant baptism does not involve the infant personally, confirmation assumes the presence of a real person. The age of fourteen or fifteen is chosen because it is assumed that he is a man of sorts. But from the standpoint of the father, when it is a question of money, the child is not dry behind the ears. On this Kierkegaard noted:

Confirmation then is easily seen to be far deeper nonsense than infant baptism, precisely because confirmation claims to supply what was lacking in infant baptism: a real personality which can consciously assume responsibility for a vow which has to do with the decision of an eternal blessedness.23

If this decision were left to a more mature age, a person may make the decision not to be "feignedly Christian. "24

According to Kierkegaard, the priests were regarded as responsible for this. They had misled people even though they took an oath on the New Testament. They were perjured liars, people who made a joke of God. In Denmark, Kierkegaard claimed, Christianity did not exist. Instead the "little religiousness there is in the land is at the very most ... Judaism."25

Kierkegaard's intense desire to introduce Christianity into Christendom led to radical statements about the lack of real commitment to Jesus Christ in a personal way. He wrote: "I hereby repeat my protest, not softened but sharpened: I would rather gamble, carouse, fornicate, steal, murder, than take part in making a fool of God."26 For Kierkegaard, baptism of infants and confirmation were two ways that people side-stepped commitment to Christ and participated in making a fool of God:

lSoren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941),31.

3Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity, University, AL:University of Alabama Press, 1984), 46.
4Kierkegaard, 42 ..

19Soren Kierkegaard. Attack upon "Christendom" (Boston: The Beacon Press. 1956). 205.