Do We Still Not Know?

If God belongs to a category infinitely different from the human, why, then neither I nor anyone else can start with the assumption that Christ was human and then logically conclude that therefore he was God. Anyone with a bit of logical sense should be able to see this. The question of whether or not he was God lies on an entirely different plane: each person must decide for himself whether or not he will believe Christ to be what he himself claimed to be.

Faith protests against every attempt to approach Christ by means of historical facts. . . .

With regard to Christ we have only sacred history (which is qualitatively different from the historian’s account). Christ is the divine-human paradox that history can never digest or convert into a proof. . . . That Christ was God incarnate in his lowliness and that he will come again in glory, all this is far beyond the comprehension of history. This cannot be inferred from “facts” or from history, no matter how matchlessly you regard them, except through a matchless lack of logic.

It is infinitely beyond history’s capacity to demonstrate that God, the omnipresent One, lived here on earth as an individual human being. . . .

[Only faith says] God lived here on earth, in true lowliness, and that is what is infinitely extraordinary—extraordinary in itself. The fact that he lived among us is infinitely more important than all the extraordinary results ever recorded in history.

Søren Kierkegaard, in Provocations. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.