Introduction to Part Four
Kierkegaard’s “attack upon Christendom” ensured that his relation to the church would remain famously uncertain. After all, while he was denigrating a particular instantiation of the Christian ekklesia, he was doing so for the greater good of Christianity and the church. Such, at any rate, has been the argument of commentators such as Howard A. Johnson, who claims that, in attacking the Danish state church, Kierkegaard was “attacking something to which he was devoted.” Vernard Eller agrees, albeit in a different sense. For him, Kierkegaard’s “attack upon Christendom” discloses his association with “classic Protestant sectarianism,” meaning that Kierkegaard’s ecclesiology best corresponds to the churches of the Radical Reformation. Still others wonder if Kierkegaard might not have been closest to Roman Catholicism toward the end of his life, while some even argue that Kierkegaard sought to jettison the notion of “the church” from Christian thinking altogether.
Given such widely divergent appraisals, it seems safe to say that Kierkegaard’s relation to the church will remain a topic of debate. At the same time, however, the church endures as an important category in Kierkegaard’s authorship, one to which he devoted both direct and indirect attention. For that reason, it would be inadequate to neglect the church in a volume such as this one, even if limited space dictates that it will be a smaller section than its predecessors.
As with the other themes explored thus far, Kierkegaard principally thinks of the church in terms of its significance for existential authenticity or, more specifically, in terms of its potential to facilitate or to encumber individual upbuilding. Indeed, it is striking that Kierkegaard argued that the church is a community that presupposes personal commitment and, with it, the goal of personal edification. As he puts it in an 1835 journal entry, “With regard to the Church [Kirken], the subjectivity that I think must come first…is already exemplary in this fact—that the most objective part of the creed begins in this way: “I believe.” In 1851, Kierkegaard returned to this point by way of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530), noting that its articles describe the church as “the Communion of Saints” (de Helliges Samfund), but that this tendency “in the direction of the existential” has been underemphasized in relation to doctrinal teaching and sacramental administration. According to Kierkegaard, this is an essential omission, since the very heart of Christian life involves the believer’s decision to follow Christ. Consequently, a church that lacks this existential urgency “is really paganism.”
For Kierkegaard, then, the church should not be thought of as a thing unto itself; it is not a public that exists apart from the individuals who compose it, lest “Christians go on holiday behind this abstraction [Abstraktum].” On the contrary, to belong to the church signifies either that one follows Christ or that one is striving constantly to follow Christ. Thus the task of the one who would write about the church is to spur the church’s members to pursue Christian holiness—a task that Kierkegaard epitomizes in the two texts included in this section.
The first selection, “Watch Your Step When You Go to the House of the Lord,” is taken from Christian Discourses—a four-part volume, published in April 1848, in which Kierkegaard ponders (rather than pronounces on) various aspects of the Christian life. In particular, “Watch Your Step” opens the third section of Christian Discourses, which is entitled “Thoughts That Wound from Behind—for Upbuilding.” But what, exactly, does it mean to “wound from behind”? According to Kierkegaard, this phrase indicates the irony latent in various biblical texts, whereby an ostensibly ordinary pericope directs a critical question at the reader. As he puts it, “In the following discourses, the text is to be chosen in this way—that it looks like a gospel, and is that too, but then comes the sting.” Thus there is a “satirical” (Satiriske) element in Scripture, which underlines the discrepancy between what is expected of Christians and what most persons erroneously assume, thereby exposing the deception and falsehood of Christendom. To become aware of this irony is to experience “an assault of thoughts,” though its pain is the precondition for personal renewal or “upbuilding.”
“Watch Your Step” is an excellent example of this strategy. Its title is taken from Ecclesiastes 5:1, which warns persons to be careful about making empty sacrifices in “the house of God.” And yet, Kierkegaard begins, most people in Christendom assume that time in God’s house, amid “the beauty of the [ecclesial] surroundings,” is supposed to be soothing and self-gratifying. Here, then, is “the sting”: it is a blessing to spend time in church, but not because it gives one a pleasant feeling; rather, the blessing comes from a terrifying encounter with the living God, since in this encounter one faces the truth of God’s majesty and of the human being’s frailty. Hence, those who would invite persons to enter the church are responsible for making sure that they do not enter under false pretenses. The dialectical tension between blessing and terror must always be maintained, for it is the very nature of Christian faith.
The second piece in this section again comes from the pen of Anti-Climacus. More specifically, it is the fifth of seven “expositions” (Udviklinger) of John 12:32—an exegetical series that constitutes the third and final part of Practice in Christianity. Accordingly, Anti-Climacus names this third part “From on High He Will Draw All to Himself,” and, as a unit, it deals with “the relation between [Christ’s] lowliness and his loftiness,” not only with regard to Christ himself, but also with regard to those who claim to be followers of Christ. Indeed, the fifth exposition, which is otherwise untitled, hones in on what Jesus’s life of hardship and suffering means for the church. Many people, especially those in Christendom, assume that to be a Christian no longer involves self-denial and persecution, since the church has become an established part of Western culture. And yet, Anti-Climacus argues, the church can never lose sight of its mission to imitate Christ in the world and thus to imitate him in humble service to God and to humanity. Of course, this is scarcely the first (or the last) time Kierkegaard would invoke the theme of imitatio Christi. What distinguishes this piece is that Kierkegaard relates the imitatio motif to the doctrinal categories of the “militant church” (the pilgrim church on earth) and the “triumphant church” (the church in heaven), thereby implying that his thought is indeed compatible with traditional ecclesiology.
And yet, if this approach is distinctive, it should not be surprising. Kierkegaard never claimed to be an innovator as a Christian theologian. His task, as has been seen, was to stimulate upbuilding so as to elicit an encounter with the challenging yet loving Christ of the New Testament. As he once put it, “I want to apply the Christian demand, imitation [Efterfølgelsen], in all its infinity, in order to press in the direction of grace.”