ABSTRACT
Edward John Carnell’s academic life began and ended with the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. His Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy from Boston University was entitled The Problem of Verification in Sören Kierkegaard,1 and its redacted version, The Burden of Søren Kierkegaard,2 appeared in 1965 only a few years before his death. His reflection on numerous topics important to apologetics, theology, and philosophy of religion is embedded inside his indebtedness to, and his disagreement with, Kierkegaard’s theology of existential faith, truth as subjectivity, and critique of Christian culture. He was rather convinced that Kierkegaard too easily jettisoned public evidences from the analysis of Christian theological claims in his embrace of paradox, subjectivity, and dialectics as markers of Christianity. For Carnell, God, as the proper object of Christian faith, is a verifiably historical fact that can be confirmed through the inner witness of the subject’s heart. Kierkegaard disagrees: God is unknown and is not accessible via the conceited human attempts to rationally explain or account for God for the sake of their own intellectual prowess.3 God is such that existence cannot be proven; faith, then, is paradox that offends the rational sensibility of the human person, calling the subject into a place of restless dread and painful risk.4 Clearly, these theologians differ.
