Kierkegaard and others maintain that Christian faith cannot rest on the results of historical research, since history can only yield knowledge that is merely "approximate." Faith deserves better than to co-exist in such an unstable partnership. Such an outlook implicitly involves an argument that has as its key premise a certain view of the corrigibility of historical knowledge and, as its conclusion, the claim that Christian faith and historical knowledge are incommensurate in principle. There may indeed be good reasons for claiming a Kierkegaardian impasse or incommensurability between faith and historical inquiry. I wish to argue, however, that certain assumptions built into the standard way of reaching this conclusion are open to question. In particular, the typical approach to these matters rests heavily on employing the traditional distinction between contingent and necessary truths in a way that: (1) draws potentially illicit conclusions about the epistemological liabilities of historical knowledge, and (2) introduces highly misleading implications regarding the epistemology of faith.
In key sections of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard -through his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus -speaks at length about the merely approximate character of all historical knowledge. In doing so, he is a self-conscious successor to Lessing, who spoke in the previous century of the "accidental truths of history" that are separated by an "ugly ditch" from the "necessary truths of reason. ''l Nothing, says Kierkegaard, "is more readily evident than that the greatest attainable certainty with respect to anything historical is merely an approximation. ''2 Even the "most masterly historical elucidation is only the most masterly 'as good as,' an almost." If all the angels in heaven were to put their heads together, they could still bring to pass only an approximation, because an approximation is the only certainty attainable for historical knowledge.., a