Dead Men Who's Influences Are Still With Us Today Episode 10

 

1️⃣ Kierkegaard as the Father of Existential Emphasis

Breese presents Kierkegaard as a major influence behind modern existentialism — the shift toward:

• Subjective experience

• Personal inwardness

• Individual decision

• The “leap” of faith

Kierkegaard reacted strongly against:

• Dead orthodoxy

• Cultural Christianity

• State-church complacency

Breese recognizes that critique had force.

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2️⃣ Where Breese Raises Concern

The issue, in Breese’s view, is what happened after Kierkegaard.

When faith becomes heavily centered on:

Individual inward experience

It can drift toward:

• Relativism

• Anti-rationalism

• “Truth for me” thinking

• Emotionalism detached from objective revelation

Breese suggests that while Kierkegaard intended to defend authentic Christianity, later thinkers used existential categories to detach truth from fixed authority.

In other words:

Kierkegaard aimed at awakening faith.
Later movements sometimes weakened doctrinal certainty.

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3️⃣ Tone Toward Kierkegaard

Breese’s tone here is more respectful and complex.

He tends to portray Kierkegaard as:

• Intellectually serious

• Spiritually earnest

• Reacting to real spiritual decay

But he views the existential turn as opening the door to modern subjectivism.

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4️⃣ The Broader Pattern Breese Sees

Across the three:

• Wellhausen → Scripture becomes historical development

• Keynes → Economics becomes managed engineering

• Kierkegaard (as received later) → Truth becomes internalized experience

Different disciplines.

Similar underlying move:
From objective external authority
To Me centered interpretation or management.

Breese’s concern is not conspiracy — it’s philosophical drift.

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5️⃣ And Here’s the Careful Balance

It’s worth noting:

• Kierkegaard himself defended core Christian doctrines.

• He was not a liberal theologian in the modern sense.

• Many conservative Christians still value his insights.

Breese critiques the trajectory more than the man’s heart.

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Now here’s something I think you’ll appreciate.

The earlier comment about an “invisible hand” guiding intellectual development — Breese’s argument is actually subtler:

He would say ideas share common soil.
When culture shifts its starting point (authority, revelation, transcendence), thinkers in different fields reflect that shift independently.

Not coordinated.
But connected by presupposition.

That’s less mystical — and more philosophical.

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