Kierkegaard and his gifts for the church

“I ’ve waited my whole life for this book. And so has the church.” So claims Richard Beck in endorsing Stephen Backhouse’s biography of Søren Kierkegaard. Although blurbs are often prone to exaggeration, Beck’s claim is not an overstatement. The church has been waiting for this book. Other excellent biographies of the Danish theologian have been written, but none is as accessible as this one.

Backhouse, who teaches social and political theology at St. Mellitus College in London, succeeds because he makes a clear distinction between Kierkegaard’s life and his ideas without divorcing the two. This distinction is mirrored in the structure of the book, which begins with biography (told in narrative form, at times in the present tense and with considerable poetic license) and ends with overviews of each of Kierkegaard’s major works. Understanding Kierkegaard’s ideas is impossible without knowing his biography, and Backhouse faithfully ties the two together.

At the heart of Backhouse’s narrative is Kierkegaard’s prolific use of pseudonyms, which has caused much consternation and misunderstanding. Kierkegaard used pseudonymous writing to lead readers toward the immediacy of a relationship with God, unburdened by concerns about the identity of the author of the book at hand. Ironically, the stubbornness with which Kierkegaard strove to deflect attention from himself has driven many readers into an obsessive investigation of the man as well as his beliefs. There’s deep irony in the very idea of a biography of someone who continually (and sometimes painfully) worked to conceal himself. Near the end of his life, Backhouse notes, Kierkegaard “stipulated clearly that he was not a witness to the truth, he was without authority, and he was not claiming to say anything that the New Testament has not already made clear.”