Christianity Is Incomprehensible

Kierkegaard insisted over and over again that a rational reconstruction of Christian doctrines cannot be given. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he wrote that

Christianity is no doctrine concerning the unity of the divine and the human. . . . If Christianity were a doctrine, the relationship to it would not be one of faith, for only an intellectual type of relationship can correspond to a doctrine. Christianity is therefore not a doctrine, but the fact that God has existed. ¹

Kierkegaard presented, with a heavy overlay of contempt, the position of a theologian who declared that

I have not only believed, but I have even explained Christianity, and shown that as it was expounded by the Apostles and appropriated in the early centuries it was only to a certain degree true; but that now, through the interpretation of speculative philosophy it has become the true truth. ²

Kierkegaard frequently used the terms “paradox” and “absurd” when presenting “the true truth.” The Incarnation, 46Original Sin, and atonement are realities at the heart of the Christian religion. Not one of these realities expresses an a priori truth or an evidentially supported empirical claim.