1.   S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 48.

2. Ibid., 218.

3.    S. Kierkegaard, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. P Gardiner (New York: Free Press, 1964), 306-7. Several Kierkegaard scholars have informed me that the position expressed in these quotes    is actually misleading, and that his real position is more like my own. They admit, however, that statements such as those I’ve quoted here certainly seem to indicate his position is as I describe it, and also that this (mis)understanding of him has long constituted his intellectual legacy. Since that is the case, I will leave the quotes as examples of the position being described, with the acknowledgement that they may not be accurate as to what Kierkegaard himself intended.

4.    F. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 46.

5.     A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Mentor Books, 1955), 165. This has been a prevailing view in Western thought for a long time, and has been shared by thinkers who otherwise differ widely. For example, in his doctoral thesis (Berlin, 1841), Karl Marx quoted David Hume with approval as follows:

’Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought to be everywhere acknowledged, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions, and justify herself. . . . This puts one in mind of a king arraigned for high treason against his subjects.

Marx then immediately adds his own comment that “the consciousness of man [is]  the supreme divinity. There must be no god on a level with it” (from “Foreword to Thesis: The Difference between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and the Natural Philosophy of Epicureus,” reprinted in Marx and Engels on Religion [Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House], 14-15).

6.     B. Russell, Why I Am NOT a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 32-33.

7.    Thomas Aquinas, De Trinitate exposition 2.3.

8.   As a matter of historical accuracy, it must be added that there was always a greater strain of resistance to the scholastic position among Jewish and Muslim scholars than among Christians. Many Christian thinkers who took the general scholastic position with respect to reason and divinity beliefs felt free to appropriate many Greek philosophical concepts in developing their theologies as a result. Thus they, e.g., ended up understanding God’s nature as equivalent to Plato’s Forms, and construed the idea of the human soul in a Hellenistic fashion rather than in accord with the way Bible writers spoke of it. This topic will be treated at greater length in chapter 10.

9.   J. Calvin, Commentary on the First Book of Moses (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd- mans, 1948), vol. 1, 63.

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