LEAP OF FAITH

metaphor used by the 19th-century Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard in his Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846; Concluding Unscientific Postscript) to describe commitment to an objective uncertainty, specifically to the Christian God. For Kierkegaard, God is totally other than man; between God and man there exists a gulf that faith alone can bridge. Kierkegaard was equally opposed to the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's rationalized Christianity and to orthodox attempts to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith by rational argument, and he insisted that religious truth is incapable of objective proof and can be appropriated only by an act of will. Kierkegaard praised aesthetic and ethical responses to life but maintained that they do not free man from dread and despair. Man requires a relationship with God founded on a commitment that has no conclusive evidence to recommend it; faith is a risk or, as the 17th-century French writer Blaise Pascal put it, a wager. Kierkegaard's emphasis on the God-man dichotomy influenced 20th-century religious existentialism and neo-orthodox theology, especially as embodied in the work of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth.