On Kierkegaard and the Truth

by Paul L. Holmer, David J. Gouwens (Editor), Lee C. Barrett (Editor), Stanley Hauerwas (Foreword by), David William Cain (Afterword)

Overview

Paul L. Holmer (1916-2004) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota (1946-1960) and Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School (1960-1987). Among his many acomplishments, Holmer was one of the most significant American students of Kierkegaard of his generation. Although written in the 1950s and 1960s, Holmer's theological and philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard challenges much in the contemporary scholarly discussions of this important thinker. Unlike many, Holmer refuses reductionist readings that tie Kierkegaard to any particular "school." He likewise criticizes biographical readings of Kierkegaard, much in vogue recently, seeing Kierkegaard rather as an indirect communicator aiming at his reader's own ethical and religious capacities. Holmer also rejects popular existentialist readings of Kierkegaard, seeing him as an analyzer of concepts, while at the same time denying that he is a "crypto-analyst." Holmer criticizes the attempt to construe Kierkegaard as a didactic religious thinker, appreciating Kierkegaard's "cool" descriptive objectivity and his ironic and stylistic virtuosity. In his important reading of Kierkegaard on "truth," Holmer pits Kierkegaard against those who see "truth" empirically, idealistically, or relativistically. Holmer's carefully textured account of Kierkegaard's conceptual grammar of "truth" in ethical and religious contexts, fifty years after it was penned, addresses immediately current discussions of truth, meaning, reference, and realism versus antirealism, relativism, and hermeneutics. It will be of great interest to all interested in Kierkegaard and his importance for contemporary theology and philosophy. This is the first volume of The Paul L. Holmer Papers, which includes also volume 2, Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays, and volume 3, Communicating the Faith Indirectly: Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Prayers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621894346
Publisher:	Cascade Books
Publication date:	01/06/2012
Series:	Paul L. Holmer Papers , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	342
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David J. Gouwens is Professor of Theology at Brite Divinity School. He is the author of Kierkegaard's Dialectic of the Imagination (1989) and Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996).

Lee C. Barrett III is Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Heidelberg Catechism (2007), Foundations of Modern Theology: Kierkegaard (2009), and co-editor of Kierkegaard and the Bible (2010).
One of our most formidable Christian apologists, Paul Holmer, joined the heavenly symposium on June 29th 2004. Dr. Holmer was a product of Salem Covenant Church in Minneapolis. As a graduate student at Yale University during the Second World War, Paul Holmer's thesis (on Nietzsche) was impounded with a government clamp-down on his Kantian (and supposedly pro-German) Professor Ernst Cassirer. Young Holmer easily took another topic, finished his Ph.D. and returned to the University of Minnesota where he taught for 14 years. In 1960 he went back to Yale as professor of philosophy and theology, teaching for 26 years--a brilliant 40-year career doing what he had mastered and what he loved. Paul Holmer wrote a half dozen books, many articles and was especially highly regarded as a brilliant teacher.

David J. Gouwens is Professor of Theology at Brite Divinity School. He is the author of Kierkegaard's Dialectic of the Imagination (1989) and Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996).
Lee C. Barrett is Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Heidelberg Catechism (2007), Foundations of Modern Theology: Kierkegaard (2009), and co-editor of Kierkegaard and the Bible (2010).

Stanley Hauerwas is professor emeritus of ethics at Duke University where he held the Gilbert T. Rowe chair for more than twenty years. Among his numerous publications are Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998) and Living Gently in a Violent World, with Jean Vanier (2008). His latest publication is Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth (University of Virginia Press, 2023).
David Cain is Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia, and minister in the United Church of Christ. He is editor of Sermons of Arthur C. McGill, (Cascade Books, 2007), and author and photographer of An Evocation of Kierkegaard / En Fremkaldelse af Kierkegaard (1997).

Table of Contents

Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Author’s Preface
1 An Introduction to the Problem
2 A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Philosophy
3 A New Way of Philosophizing
4 The Bible and Christianity
5 History and the Sciences
6 Truth Is Subjectivity: Some Radical Criticisms
7 Truth Is Subjectivity: Some Logical Considerations
8 Some Epistemological Questions
9 Kierkegaard and Metaphysics
10 Kierkegaard and the Nature of Philosophy
11 Indirect Communication
12 Kierkegaard and the Sermon
13 Faith and Christianity
Afterword: Paul L. Holmer: Self-Effacing, Swaggering,Nonpareil—David Cain
Appendix—Paul L. Holmer: A Select Bibliography
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Paul L. Holmer was and is still a largely unheralded Kierkegaard scholar and analytic philosopher. This volume and the collected works series it introduces should do a lot to correct that oversight in both fields. We owe the editors, both of whom were Holmer's students, a great deal of thanks for their labor of love."
-Robert L. Perkins
Stetson University

"Paul Holmer was one of the most interesting and original religious thinkers in mid-twentieth-century America, yet he is little known today. So[enter back slash through O]ren Kierkegaard was his central scholarly interest and his unusual and provocative reading of Kierkegaard is important."
-David Kelsey
Yale Divinity School

"Almost fifty years ago Paul Holmer finished a manuscript about Kierkegaard but then left it unpublished. Instead, emulating Socrates, Holmer spent the following decades focused on encouraging Yale Kierkegaard students to examining their own lives with intellectual rigor. The result was a revolution in American Kierkegaard scholarship . . ."
-Andrew J. Burgess
The University of New Mexico

"With the two-hundredth anniversary of Kierkegaard's birth approaching in 2013, what a treat to have Paul L. Holmer's long awaited and now posthumous On Kierkegaard and the Truth to clarify Kierkegaard's status as a philosopher and the role of logic and reason in his thought. A master philosopher and teacher himself, Holmer knew how to cut to the very essence of a thinker's thought, as he does here with Kierkegaard's."
-Sylvia Walsh
Stetson University

"Professor Paul L. Holmer was the doyen of Kierkegaard studies for much of the later part of the twentieth century. His jargon-free writings are crisp, clear, epiphanic, and always in earnest . . ."
-Gordon Marino
St. Olaf College

Editorial Reviews

"Paul L. Holmer was and is still a largely unheralded Kierkegaard scholar and analytic philosopher. This volume and the collected works series it introduces should do a lot to correct that oversight in both fields. We owe the editors, both of whom were Holmer's students, a great deal of thanks for their labor of love."
-Robert L. Perkins
Stetson University

"Paul Holmer was one of the most interesting and original religious thinkers in mid-twentieth-century America, yet he is little known today. So[enter back slash through O]ren Kierkegaard was his central scholarly interest and his unusual and provocative reading of Kierkegaard is important."
-David Kelsey
Yale Divinity School

"Almost fifty years ago Paul Holmer finished a manuscript about Kierkegaard but then left it unpublished. Instead, emulating Socrates, Holmer spent the following decades focused on encouraging Yale Kierkegaard students to examining their own lives with intellectual rigor. The result was a revolution in American Kierkegaard scholarship . . ."
-Andrew J. Burgess
The University of New Mexico

"With the two-hundredth anniversary of Kierkegaard's birth approaching in 2013, what a treat to have Paul L. Holmer's long awaited and now posthumous On Kierkegaard and the Truth to clarify Kierkegaard's status as a philosopher and the role of logic and reason in his thought. A master philosopher and teacher himself, Holmer knew how to cut to the very essence of a thinker's thought, as he does here with Kierkegaard's."
-Sylvia Walsh
Stetson University

"Professor Paul L. Holmer was the doyen of Kierkegaard studies for much of the later part of the twentieth century. His jargon-free writings are crisp, clear, epiphanic, and always in earnest . . ."
-Gordon Marino
St. Olaf College

From the Publisher

…this too-brief summary cannot do justice to the complexities and depth of Holmer’s reflective thoughts on Kierkegaard and truth…This volume would be very helpful for anyone interested in Kierkegaard’s concept of truth, his means of communicating it, and perhaps also for those looking to bridge the ‘continental-analytic rift’.

Reviews in Religion and Theology, Vol.21, No.1, January 2014 - Victoria Davies

...Holmer occupies an eminent place in the transmission of Kierkegaard's thought in twentieth century America. This book breathes renewed breadth and depth into that influence. [...] As Hauerwas concludes, 'this is not just another book "about Kierkegaard"; rather, this is a book that forces us to read Kierkegaard as if our lives were at stake. In the process I think that you will find that the fear of God makes joy possible'.

The Expository Times, Vol.125, No 3, December 2013 - Simon D. Podmore

Paul Holmer, who died in 2004, was a major figure in Kierkegaard studies in the post-war USA. This volume has been lovingly reconstructed from his papers by David Gouwens and Lee Barrett, who have done us a service in making such a significant piece of work available.

Modern Believing, 54.3, July 2013 - Steven Shakespeare

On Kierkegaard and the Truth [...] gives us a carefully argued and well written inquiry of Kierkegaard as a philosopher. [...] H.'s book is still an important book to read particularly because of the fruitful and for his time very innovative way that H. uses the later Ludwig Wittgenstein in H.'s interpretation of Kierkegaard's reorientation of thinking about religious, existential and ethical matters.

Theologische Literaturzeitung, No 139, Vol 2, February 2014 - Iben Damgaard