Dyadic Approaches to the Divine: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Religion and Gender in a Post-modern World
Dyadic Approaches to the Divine: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Religion and Gender in a Post-Modern World
Understanding the role religion could or should play in the modern era is a central topic in the study of religion. Today, in world where God is almost, but not quite dead, how can we translate traditional beliefs into the post-modern world? Furthermore, we must ask ourselves what role gender can then play in this newly born definition of religious experience. To answer these questions we must first, as a matter of logical of necessity, examine the nature of religious experience itself and see if a reasonable case can be put forward that there may be more than one type of approach to the divine, and if this is indeed the case, we must then see if a correlation can be made between religious experience itself and gender.
In modernity three distinct spheres of culture are referred to; respectively these are known as the culture spheres of science, morality, and art – the basis of which is derived from the works of Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Pure Practical Reason, and Critic of Judgment). The three existence spheres formulated by Kierkegaard, the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious seem to have been composed in a similar spirit to the three culture spheres of Kant. What is of great significance in the work of Kierkegaard is that he identified two separate strands of religious thought: Religiousness Type A and Religiousness Type B. These two diametrically opposed forms of religion can be defined in the following way: Religiousness Type A can be understood to embody the fourth culture sphere that has been glossed by the makers of modernity, and Religiousness Type B