“Why should anyone want to become a Christian? The reason will not be primarily intellectual. The most basic decisions we humans make about the direction of our lives are always rooted in what we care most deeply about. To become a Christian a person must care about eternal life.

But who does not care about eternal life? Wouldn’t everyone want to live forever? Perhaps at a superficial level. But Christianity conceives of eternal life not simply to be acquired beyond the grave; it is also a new quality of life to be acquired in the here and now. And few seem to want it most in this life.

What most people want most are temporal goods: houses, automobiles, membership in the club, prestigious jobs, power and sex. People who want these things most of all have difficulty getting too excited about eternal life. When they try to conceive of eternal life they naturally think of it as an endless extension of the kind of life they enjoy now. But such an endless extension can seen very distant and unreal and, to tell the truth, even boring. Many temporal activities take on a different character if we truly think of ourselves as carrying them on for eternity.

According to Kierkegaard, what is really attractive about eternal life, Christianly conceived, is that it will provide an endless opportunity to enjoy God as God has made himself known in Christ. This is only really attractive to those who love God, those who genuinely enjoy his company. These are the same people, of course, who abhor sin and who see the separation from God that is the result of sin as hell.

Now one might think that the task of the evangelist or ‘missionary to Christendom’ would be to make people desire to know God so that they would be more likely to turn to Christ, and that a knowledge of psychology would be helpful for this. This would be a mistake, however, since only God can truly induce a desire for himself. Still we are in the neighborhood of the truth at this point.

Only God can instill a desire for himself in a human being. Yet there is a sense in which God has already done this for everyone. He has placed a desire for eternity in the human heart. He has created us in such a way that we cannot find our ultimate happiness apart from himself. This deep truth makes it impossible to separate Kierkegaard the missionary, interested in helping people find God, from Kierkegaard the psychologist, interested in helping people become healthy and happy. It is true that most of us do not realize God has planted this deep desire within us, or at least we do not realize it clearly. It is also true that we have conflicting desires; God is the one we do not wish to know, and so our need for him is one we do not easily acknowledge.

Nevertheless, there are symptoms of our deepest need present in our lives. Here is where the psychologist can be helpful to the ‘spiritual physician.’ The psychologist can help us see these symptoms for what they truly are and thereby can help us move toward greater self-understanding.

This greater self-understanding does not necessarily or automatically lead to Christian faith. A person may see his need for God and self-consciously rebel against God. Self-understanding can lead to defiance as well as humble faith. But self-understanding at least makes faith a live possibility, If we understand that we are spiritual beings, intended for eternal life, then we have the option of seeking our true destinies or decisively rejecting our true selves.

Kierkegaard likes to put the matter like this: Christianity is the solution to the problem of human existence. Most of his contemporaries did not understand Christianity because they did not understand human existence profoundly enough. One cannot understand the solution without understanding the problem.”

(C. Stephen Evans, Soren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology)

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

(St. Augustine, Confessions)