DE Weekly: Kierkegaard, Surrender, & the Leap of Faith
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 15, 2025.
Kierkegaard, Surrender, & the Leap of Faith
“Who am I, and what is my fate?” In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about how existentialism sought to answer this question through examining all facets of existence. I introduced the French philosopher and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal, and his philosophical argument commonly referred to as “Pascal’s wager.”
To refresh your mind (or to catch you up to speed), Pascal’s wager is an argument that posits we, as humans, engage in a gamble regarding the existence of and our belief in God, a belief which ultimately defines our fate.
Pascal argued that using logical reasoning––if we are truly logical beings––we should believe in God and act accordingly.
As I also shared last week, Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and Christian theologian, had a similar idea to Pascal’s, one we call today his “leap of faith.”
Kierkegaard, often considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, took a different approach to the same question posed in Pascal’s wager.
When it comes to the existence of God and of our belief in Him, Kierkegaard wrote, we must embrace a belief that transcends the limitations imposed on us by reason and the desire for concrete evidence.
In short, Kierkegaard also arrived at the same conclusion as Pascal (namely, that we should believe in God), but for a different reason.
Not because we can prove it, not because we can reason ourselves into it with logic, but because that kind of belief requires something beyond certainty, beyond finite reason.
It requires a leap of faith.
This leap requires of us total surrender, a transcendence beyond reason without proof and ultimately, Kierkegaard argues, a choice.
Here’s where Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is patently existentialist. For him, this leap and this belief is a deeply personal act, totally subjective.
It involves personal commitment to something that he ultimately sees as unprovable. With this decision comes uncertainty and oftentimes despair. But, we choose to believe anyway.
If you’re detecting a hint of what our friend Albert Camus would call “the Absurd,” well, you’d be absolutely correct.
The situation is absurd, as was Pascal’s reasoning himself into religious conviction. Kierkegaard saw the absurdity of belief from a purely rational point of view, which is exactly why he argues a level of transcendence of reason (what he calls faith) is needed.
It just so happens to align with what Catholic social teaching says, as well, that being you can’t prove a negative with a negative. You can’t say God does not exist simply because you can’t point out where He is.
The reason Kierkegaard is often referred to as the first existentialist despite his differences from many of them is because of his reasoning and the conceptual framework he employed in his philosophy.
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is not only personal, not only something we must arrive at on our own; it’s necessary for us to live an authentic life that we find meaningful and fulfilled.
It’s one remedy for what he called the “chasm” of existence: the fact that humans exist in a state of “nothingness,” and that the only way to escape this nothingness is through a leap of faith of some sort.
Although theirs wasn’t a question of belief in God (most of them were self-proclaimed atheists), the existentialists sought to remedy this same nothingness.
So while their leaps of faith weren’t toward God, they were toward an equally self-revelatory experience, such as individual meaning, purpose, value, and moral order.
In life, we are all tasked with difficult decisions, and all in search of beliefs we can hold on to.
Must we move beyond reason and logic to sometimes attain these beliefs? Must we sometimes embrace the irrational, the uncertain and unfalsifiable? For Kierkegaard, the answer is yes.
That doesn’t make us inauthentic. That doesn’t mean we are acting in bad faith. It simply means we have made an existential choice, much like all the existentialists did as well.
We must make an inward commitment to realize our Self so that we might turn it into an outward commitment which we can practice with the Other.
“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.” –– Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I think I’m going to end up writing more of these two-part newsletters as time goes on. Sometimes I feel as though I can’t cram everything about a given topic into one. I hope you enjoy this format.
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