Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial

by Simon D. Podmore

Invoking the biblical motif of Jacob's struggle with the Face of God (Genesis 32), Simon D. Podmore undertakes a constructive theological account of 'spiritual trial' (tentatio; known in German mystical and Lutheran tradition as Anfechtung) in relation to enduring questions of the otherness and hiddenness of God and the self, the problem of suffering and evil, the freedom of Spirit, and the anxious relationship between temptation and ordeal, fear and desire. This book traces a genealogy of spiritual trial from medieval German mystical theology, through Lutheran and Pietistic thought (Tauler; Luther; Arndt; Boehme), and reconstructs Kierkegaard's innovative yet under-examined recovery of the category (Anfæ a Danish cognate for Anfechtung) within the modern context of the 'spiritless' decline of Christendom.
Developing the relationship between struggle (Anfechtung) and release (Gelassenheit), Podmore proposes a Kierkegaardian theology of spiritual trial which elaborates the kenosis of the self before God in terms of Spirit's restless longing to rest transparently in God. Offering an original rehabilitation of the temptation of spiritual trial, this book strives for a renewed theological hermeneutic which speaks to the enduring human struggle to realise the unchanging love of God in the face of spiritual darkness.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction - Struggling with Towards a Kierkegaardian Theology of Spiritual Trial
1. The Secret Lost in Translation
2. The Old Devotional Anfechtung in Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch
3. Melancholia Coram Luther's Theology of Anfechtung
4. God's Fire in the Anfechtung in Arndt and Boehme
5. Before God in Temptation and Spiritual Trial in Kierkegaard I
6. To the God-forsaken Temptation and Spiritual Trial in Kierkegaard II
7. The Desire of Spirit
8. The Temptation of Spiritual Trial
Index

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Roland Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Podmore begins this book on Søren Kierkegaard with an extended discussion of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture Jacob and the Angel (1941). He writes, “the statue does not depict Jacob struggling as such, but rather a Jacob who has struggled and who now hangs drained and weary in the embrace of the angel. This is not Jacob conquering God; nor is it the angel asking to be released. The angel holds a depleted Jacob up; Jacob does not have the angel in his grasp.” Podmore’s interpretation of this sculpture sums up his reading of Kierkegaard’s notion of “spiritual trial” (Anfægtelse) remarkably succinctly given that it takes him 270 pages to unpack it. Anfægtelse, which could also mean temptation, trial, or struggle, takes place when the believer wrestles with God and with the self, seeking to overcome his or her own weakness and to know God’s presence more intimately, especially in the face of God’s apparent absence. Even though mystics sometimes talk about being “overshadowed and overwhelmed” by God, Podmore writes, spiritual trial “also reveals a sense that God’s omnipotence withdraws, out of love, in order to create the space for something other than God to become itself.” The Spirit is restless, Kierkegaard said, and this restlessness produces Anfægtelse which, however painful it may be, is a genuine and ultimately positive expression of sincere spirituality.

Read my full review here: https://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/10/...