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A big part of his writing is geared around this question of how do we integrate theology and science? My own conclusion is that he came up with the wrong answer because in many ways he lays the basis for the disintegration of those two.

The message between the lines of his writing is that anything physical is merely machine, including our own bodies. And we have to understand those objects according to the laws of physics. And things like minds are not subject to the laws of physics, and they operate according to a different set of rules. So he tells the scientists to keep their nose out of theology and philosophy, and he tells the theologians and philosophers to keep their noses out of science.

Kierkegaard was a lightning rod. Why is he so controversial, and what were the issues that he brought up that are still vibrating today?

He discussed, what is this relationship between being good and being Christian? What's the relationship between ethics and faith? Kierkegaard lived in a day when the prevailing tendency was to think that the sign of a good Christian was a morally good person, an easy social respectability and conformity. And so what Kierkegaard does is he lays that over against the story of Abraham and Isaac and he says all of these rules we set up for ethics don't seem to apply here. As a matter of fact, if Abraham acts ethically, it doesn't seem that he can act in faith. We expect people who are acting ethically to be able to explain what they're doing. Abraham can't do that. He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't know what God will provide for the sacrifice, so he simply says God will provide. His actions don't benefit the greater good. And so Kierkegaard really reminds us of God's transcendence, God's otherness.

I think we've run into this idea in our society where everything is so relational that we tend to reduce God to our good buddy. There is that side of immanence, the God who is within me, who knows me, who loves me, but that also has to be set over and against the fear and trembling that Kierkegaard talks about. This is a God who we can't control.

That is what attracts a lot of my students to Kierkegaard when they read him. They seem to know somewhere deep inside that faith requires something radical. It's that pearl of great price. Everything else gets hocked at the pawnshop in order to get it. And so they respond in many ways to this call that faith should be all-consuming. But on the other hand, they get all these messages that if you're good enough and smart enough and people like you, you must be a good Christian.

Marx took the issues of money and social justice seriously. Those are huge blind spots for evangelicals.

Marx tended to look at all religion as simply a way that the powerful use to justify why they have what they have and poor don't have it. One of the things that I think is so valuable in Marx is that he recognizes the centrality of work to our identity. I walked into a Sunday school class one time and I asked folks, "How many of you in here don't like your jobs?" And almost half the hands went up. And I thought, here is an area that Christians aren't really addressing. Here's this huge chunk of our lives. We may talk about how to witness in the workplace, but we don't talk about how to integrate our own spirituality or understand our spirituality in light of economic systems and the structures around us that are sometimes quite deadening.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48