The Living Room

• In the living-room that the battle must be fought, lest the religious conflict degenerate into a parade of the guard once a week;
• In the living room must the battle be fought, not fantastically in the church, so that the clergyman is fighting windmills and the spectators watch the show;
• Tn the living room the battle must be fought, for the victory consists precisely in the living-room becoming a sanctuary.¹

So wrote Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) even before he started his series of essays against the Institutionial Church of his day that came to be called his “Attack on Christindom.”.²

Excerpts from some of those essays appear below.

To Behave like Christians

The Danish Lutheran church where Kierkegaard lived was run by the state and based on the following premises:

• All subjects of the state were required to be Christians, and
• laws were enacted to force all the subjects of the state behave like Christians.

Kierkegaard saw the church-state alliance as bankrupt. It could only succeed in creating a highly distorted form of Christianity that put committed believers in the same category as those who were simply Christians “by birth.” Kierkegaard contrasted the Danish state church of his day with the Christianity that he saw in the New Testament itself.

The state-run church has long since been disestablished the USA , but many aspects remain. Among the latest to be abandoned were the “blue laws” that prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays.

Kierkegaard’s Legacy

Kierkegaard is often regarded as a philosopher–even the founder of modern existentialism. This is not a description that he would have accepted, and it annoyed him that some were applying his work outside of the realm of Christian theology. It is better to view Kierkegaard as a brilliant theologian with a deep conviction that the Christian life must exceed the very highest level of secular, human decency–and to exceed it by a margin that could only be described as a leap into a “religious” stage. That is, the Christian must become a “knight of faith.” Kierkegaard saw this transformation to be work of God, but required a conscious effort of preparation by the would-be disciple as he progressed through the stage of becoming aware of sin.

This brought Kierkegaard completely out of the rationalist sphere of Kant and other philosophers. Because most of Kierkegaard’s readers had not made that transition, they could not grasp many of his ideas–to them he would be an “existentialist.” Therefore he was regarded as one who had been given the mission of “making Christianity difficult”–a description that he gladly accepted for himself.

Was Kierkegaard a house church theologian? Dr. Vernard Eller clearly places him in that tradition.⁹ Kierkegaard’s writings on the radical nature of true discipleship have been widely cited by house church theologians.

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1. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments
    by Johannes Climacus (pseud.), trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton Un. Press, 1941), 415-416, cited in Eller, 308 ↩︎
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon “Christendom”
    (Walter Lowrie, tr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944.) J. L. González, A History of Christian Thought ↩︎
3. The Fatherland,
    3/31/1855. Lowrie, 39 ↩︎
4.  3/21/1855. Lowrie, 27. ↩︎
5.  3/30/1855. Lowrie, 35. ↩︎
6.  4/27/1855. Lowrie, 46-47. ↩︎
7.  Kierkegaard’s journals, “The Sort of Person they Call a Christian.” Lowrie, 205 ↩︎
8. Kierkegaard’s Diary, ed. Peter P. Rohde, trans. Gerda M. Anderson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 141 (1848), cited by Eller, 308.) ↩︎
9. Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), 3:364-374. Vernard Eller, Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship: A New Perspective
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). ↩︎