Kierkegaard and Johannes Tauler on Faith, Love, and Natural Desire for God: A Way beyond a Catholic/Protestant Impasse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For almost a century, an intermittent battle has been waged in Kierkegaard studies concerning the Dane's understanding of the Christian life and salvation. One way of posing the contentious question is this: on the issues of faith and love, justification and sanctification, and nature and grace, was Kierkegaard more Lutheran, or was he more Catholic? This article argues that this ambiguity about Kierkegaard's soteriological predilections is understandable, for his writings do not fall into the neat categories defined by post-Tridentine Catholicism or scholastic Lutheran orthodoxy. Rather than advocating for either of those doctrinal positions, his writings on justification and sanctification, nature and grace, and eros and agape continue a more nuanced trajectory rooted in some of the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages and extended later by the pietists. That trajectory defies the polemical binary classifications typical of the late sixteenth century. To clarify this alternative orientation, we will sketch the basic contours of Kierkegaard's scattered remarks about soteriology, and then explore their similarity to many of themes of Johannes Tauler (1300–1361), one of the most influential spiritual writers of the late medieval period. Tauler used a more metaphysical vocabulary to express a theological vision that exhibited significant formal parallels to Kierkegaard's later subversion of Catholic and Lutheran scholastic dichotomies. For both Tauler and Kierkegaard, the attractive beauty of God's self-giving love serves as the foundation for a theological vision that unites faith and love, justification and sanctification, and nature and grace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".