Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship:
A New Perspective

by Vernard Eller

(continued)

PART II: THE DUNKERS AND THE DANE

VIII. Christ as Savior and Pattern

Jesus Christ was the foremost reality of S.K.’s faith and religious thought. Many scholars–at least among those of theological persuasion–have appreciated something of the centrality of that orientation; all too few have appreciated the uniqueness of S.K.’s Christological thought. His peculiar terms and concepts customarily have been picked up and treated without close examination, as though they already were understood–and that in accord with traditional modes of thought. Actually, however, S.K. was a pioneer in this field, offering a doctrine that is in many respects quite different and in some quite counter to customary Christology, although quite in line with the basic tenor of sectarian thought.

Traditional Christology inevitably has been marked by a profound dualism. This dualism takes many aspects, which can be indicated through a whole congeries of specific dualities; and these, in turn, can be arranged so that the left-hand terms are all obviously interrelated and the right-hand terms similarly. Thus they all stand as components of one general duality:

DIVINE NATURE	HUMAN NATURE
PERSON	WORK
SAVIOR	EXAMPLE AND/OR TEACHER
CHRIST OF FAITH	JESUS OF HISTORY
EXALTATION AND GLORY	HUMILIATION AND KENOSIS
IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE	INCOGNITO
PURE ATTRACTIVENESS	POSSIBILITY OF OFFENSE

Church theology traditionally has tended to stress the items of the first column to an extent somewhat detrimental to (although obviously not denying) those of the second. The exception to this rule is modern Liberalism, which concentrated on the first four items of the second column to the virtual exclusion of their first column counterparts. But interesting to note, regarding the last three items, it tended to stay with the first rather than moving to the second column.

A primary and most obvious characteristic of S.K.’s Christological thought is that, without at all denying the truths of the first column, he endeavored to bring particular emphasis to those of the second in the attempt to restore a proper balance. In doing this, as we shall see, S.K. was in accord with sectarianism. But S.K. did not stop with a balancing of emphasis; his unique contribution was to weld the elements of each pair together in such a way that one could not be defined without involving the other. He concentrated upon the necessary relationship between them rather than upon their disjuncture. His tool for doing this was, of course, his dialectic method, i.e. interpreting the paired elements as complementary truths either of which is completely true only as both are solidly conjoined.

One example will illustrate S.K.’s technique. It concerns the relation of the divine and the human in Christ, and it is something he did entirely in passing, without calling attention to what he had accomplished. Creedal theology, of course, handles the matter with a doctrine of two natures in one person. Undeniably, the point of the doctrine is that the two natures are united in one person. Yet nevertheless, the very positing of the two natures is an invitation to distinguish between them, to identify that which is divine in Christ as separate from that which is human. And to do this is inevitably to create the problem of balance and set the stage for one nature to be emphasized over the other–which is precisely what happened in Christian thought.

S.K., on the other hand, made no use of this creedal solution–but not because he was intent on deserting orthodoxy. He chose to be unorthodox in the interest of achieving a purer orthodoxy. He consistently referred to Christ under the term “the God-Man,” and he never allowed the slightest grounds for breaking that hyphen apart to examine the two halves independently. The God-Man is not some of God and some of Man; he is not two natures in union; there is no suggestion that either in his being or his actions there is that which can be identified as stemming from his deity as over against that which stems from his humanity. Precisely the significance of Christ’s humanity is that it is God who has assumed it; and precisely the significance of Christ’s deity is that it is revealed in human form. The two “natures” cannot get out of balance, because the concept has been so developed that it is impossible to describe either without affirming the other. More examples of a similar dialectic will appear on the pages to follow.

One of the very basic dualities of Christology is, certainly, that between Christ’s role as Savior and as Pattern, or Example. S.K. provided a terminology with which to handle the distinction: “contemporaneousness” refers essentially to a man’s approach to Christ as Savior, Nachfolge to him as Pattern. This distinction will be used to organize the discussion that follows. However, even here we shall discover that S.K., quite contrary to most theology, went a long way toward obliterating the distinction in practice. He did not simply identify the Savior with the Christ of Faith and the Pattern with the Jesus of History. Actually, “contemporaneousness” and Nachfolge come out as very similar spiritual economies directed toward one and the same object, the God-Man Jesus Christ. And thus, in the end, the difference between them is found to be one merely of thought, whereas in practice the two necessarily and inevitably go together with nothing to be gained by trying to separate them.

A. Contemporaneousness

[Contemporaneoasness] is the decisive thought! This thought is the central thought of my life. And I may say too with truth that I have had the honor of suffering for bringing this truth to light. Therefore I die gladly, with infinite gratitude to Governance that to me it was granted to be aware of this thought and to make others attentive to it. Not that I have discovered it. God forbid that I should be guity of such presumption. No, the discovery is an old one, it is that of the New Testament.1

S.K.’s conception of contemporaneousness with Christ is in no Sense a complicated or difficult one. Yet it seems not to occur to many commentators that, although there are a number of routes and methods by which a believer might achieve contemporaneousness, S.K. was intent upon one and only one of these. It is not sufficient to cite the word “contemporaneousness and then classify as Kierkegaardian anything and everything that might qualify under the term; a more thorough investigation is required to determine precisely with what (or who) it is that S.K. desires the believer to be contemporary and precisely how that contemporaneousness is to be attained.

But this investigation is not often enough made. For examp1e in an essay which was designed solely as a précis of S.K.’s Training in Christianity (his primary exposition of contemporaneousness), the reviewer fails to make a single statement which is clearly identifiable with S.K.’s doctrine and does make several which are quite contrary to it. He says, for instance: “The Christian is he who acknowledges Christ as a present reality.” And again: “[Christ] is a living reality, seen through the eyes of faith, contemporaneous with each generation. His reality is such that it transcends both time and space.”2

Now, of course, S.K. believed in the presence of the living Christ, but he never identified this presence as “contemporaneousness,” and this presence was not his particular concern in Training in Christianity. There is a great deal of difference between saying that Christ is contemporary with us and saying that we are to become contemporary with him–the difference in who moves to meet whom and where the meeting takes place. S.K. consistently talked in terms of the latter alternative, his reviewer consistently in terms of the former.

Because there are these alternatives, perhaps the best way to get at S.K.’s intention is by eliminating the possibilities he did not intend. However, first there must be an understanding of why the necessity of contemporaneousness, what the meeting is designed to accomplish.

A saving relationship to Jesus Christ is, of course, one special case of faith in general–or rather, the special case of faith. Thus, faith in Christ–which is the goal of contemporaneousness with him–can best be understood in the light of our earlier discussion of faith [see above. There faith was defined as den Enkelte’s absolute venture of his total life and self, the “leap” in which he cuts himself off from every earthly security, every human dependency, to float over 70,000 fathoms of water through trust in the God before whom he exists. This sort of venture is necessitated, is impelled, when den Enkelte encounters a claim to truth which, in the first place, is a matter of “infinite, personal passionate interest,” something which, for him, will make all the difference in the world whether it is true or false. In the second place, this matter is so paradoxical in nature that no amount of investigation, no amount of research, no amount of logic, no amount of reflection accomplishes one whit toward indicating whether the claim is indeed true or false. The problem is not that the claim is such as to prohibit investigation but that investigation invariably produces just as many “con’s” as pro’s,” for every proof that the claim is true an equally convincing proof that it cannot be true. One must choose (the matter is too crucial to let slide); one cannot compute an adjudication (the evidence is too ambiguous); therefore one can only venture absolutely, throwing himself upon God (which act is faith).

The situation that most completely fulfills this pattern is the event of Jesus Christ. He is The Paradox, the Absurd, and thus, at one and the same time, the Sign of Offense and the Object of Faith–indeed, he is the object of faith precisely because the possibility of becoming offended is always a very real one. The claim he both presents and represents is that this plain, ordinary, individual man (who thus obviously is not God) is in fact God. The claim dare not be ignored, for if it is true it does indeed make all the difference. If Jesus is in fact God, then to accept him is to accept God and, what is perhaps even more fateful, to reject him is to reject God. If Jesus is in fact God, to accept him is to find life, to reject him is to miss life and choose damnation. Clearly, if Jesus is in fact God, neutrality has been made impossible; to answer God’s address with a shrug amounts to the same thing as defiance and rebellion. One must choose.

One must choose, but the outcome of that choice cannot be calculated on a rational basis–whether scientific, historical, or philosophical. Ultimately, neither investigation nor reflection proves of any use in deciding the matter. However, this is not the same as saying that investigation and reflection are of no use whatsoever; S.K. has been badly misunderstood on this score. Reason and research do have a role, the real and necessary role of determining whether the claim is truly a paradox or not, whether there is indeed evidence both “pro” and “con.” Thus, regarding the claim “Napoleon was a man,” research can say, “This claim is not a paradox but an evident fact; all the evidence is ‘pro’; there was such a man and there is nothing to indicate that he was anything other than a man.” Conversely, regarding the claim “Plymouth Rock is God,” research can say, “This claim is not a paradox but an absurdity; all the evidence is ‘con’; the rock is a rock and there is nothing to suggest that it might also be God.” Finally, regarding the claim “Jesus Christ is God,” research can say, “This claim, indeed, is a true paradox; there is strong and convincing evidence both pro and con; Jesus is either what the claim says he is or else he is a fraud–either God-Man or madman, but which, no amount of study or thought will accomplish a whit to decide.”

Although research, stymied by contradictory evidence, cannot contribute to deciding the case, it does have an important role to play nonetheless. By separating the Absurd (i.e. the true Paradox) both from self-evident facts and from mere absurdities, research, as it were, holds the nose of den Enkelte right to the point where the venture must be made. Research is competent to elucidate (not settle) the claim, to marshal the “pro’s” and “con’s” involved in the historical situation itself. Research is competent to establish the source and locus of the paradox, to say that this claim is not simply an idea, a concept, a myth, a hypothesis, a proposition for discussion, but a hard, concrete, specific, and indissoluble lump in history–a fact that can he interpreted in either of two ways (either as a sign of offense or as an object of faith) but a solid fact for all that.4

Because paradox is the precondition of faith–indeed, it is the very occasion and context that produces faith and without which faith would be as impossible as unnecessary–because this is the case, for S.K., Christology must, above all, maintain the paradoxicality of Jesus Christ. And how is this to be done? Clearly, by welding the terms of the right-hand column solidly to their counterparts of the left-hand column in a dialectic that does not allow one to be defined without reference to the other; each “pro” must be tied inseparably to its “con.”

Thus S.K. proposed the term “God-Man,” a term which affirms Jesus’ divine humanity (or human deity) but without positing a human nature and a divine nature in such a way that one tends to gain predominance over the other.

Thus, regarding the exalted Christ as against the humiliated Jesus, S.K. protested against the de-emphasis of the second term:

Who is the Inviter [who said, “Come unto me … and I will give you rest”]? Jesus Christ. Which Jesus Christ? The Jesus Christ who sits in glory at the right hand of the Father? No. From the seat of His glory He has not spoken one word. Therefore it is Jesus Christ in His humiliation, in the state of humiliation, who spoke these words…. That He shall come in glory is to be expected, but it can be expected and believed only by one who has attached himself and continues to hold fast to Him as he actually existed…. What He said and taught, every word He has spoken, becomes eo ipso untrue when we make it appear as if it were Christ in glory who says it.5

With this emphasis S.K. desired to correct the imbalance he found in the church of his own day; but lest his own correction itself become an imbalance, he spoke also as follows:

[But] in case one could feel himself drawn to Christ and able to love Him only in His humiliation, in case such a man would refuse to hear anything about this exaltation when power and honor and glory are His–in case … he longs only for the spectacle of horror, to be with Him when He was scorned and persecuted–such a man’s vision also is confused, he knows not Christ, neither loves Him at all. For melancholy is no closer to Christianity than light mindedness, both are equally worldly, equally remote from Christianity, both equally in need of conversion.6

And what his position actually came to, then, was this:

Whether in lowliness or in exaltation, [Christ] is one and the same; … Christ is not divided, He is one and the same. The choice is not between lowliness and exaltation; no, the choice is Christ; but Christ is composite, though one and the same, He is the humble one and the exalted.7

Obviously, it is this character of being “composite though one and the same” that constitutes Christ’s paradoxicality; and the “pro” of his exaltation (which would indicate that he is the God-Man) is made ambiguous by the “con” of his humiliation (which would indicate that he is not).

Thus, too, S.K. was not about to let the Christ of Faith become detached from the Historical Jesus:

If Christianity is the historical truth, how then can it be the absolute? If it is the historical truth, it has happened at a certain time and place. If people say that it existed before it came into being and that it is like the harmonies [of which Leibniz spoke], then they are saying no more about it than any other idea, because it is also ‘without father, mother, and genealogy’ [Hebrews 7:3]. By insisting upon that, they enervate the essence of Christianity, because the historical is the essential point about it, whereas with other ideas the historical is the incidental.8

Thus, again, as regards Christ’s recognizability as over against his incognito, S.K. would have both factors in operation concurrently and in tension with one another. S.K. has not been well understood on this point, and in an effort to go him one better, thinkers of the modern “kerygma theology” school9 have ruined his initial insight. These theologians have picked up the truth of S.K.’s insistence upon Christ’s incognito and made it mean that the “deity” of the historical Jesus must be absolutely invisible and indiscernible. The paradox, then, comes about in this wise: The life, career, and person of the earthly, historical Jesus constitutes the “con”; nothing is to be seen here except what would indicate that Jesus is simply and solely a man. Later, after the historical Jesus has left the scene, the “pro” comes along in the form of the early church’s contention that this man was indeed God. But this was not S.K.’s position: in fact, he said: “The whole life of Christ on earth would have been mere play if He had been incognito to such a degree that He went through life totally unnoticed-and yet in a true sense He was incognito.”10

In order to make the facts meet the pattern of the kerygma-school it is necessary to eliminate anything in the historical Jesus that might be read as “proofs” or “signs” of his deity, for these would betray his incognito. And this is precisely the point of Bultmann’s demythologizing; any visible “super-naturalness,” any outward miracle, any mark that would betray deity must be understood as belonging to the early church’s affirmation of faith and by no means as a literal event concerning the historical Jesus. Whether or not it is legitimate to determine the historicity of an event through theological fiat, Bultmann’s motive is creditable, for if supernatural demonstrations such as miracles can be pointed to as proofs of Jesus’ deity, then the paradoxical precondition of faith has been destroyed.

S.K. would have agreed with Bultmann’s principle but not with his application of it, for S.K. denied that miracles actually can play the role that Bultmann fears they do. Indeed, S.K. insisted that miracles are meet for his purpose, that their very nature reflects the ambiguity, the pairing of “pro” and “con,” which truly heightens the paradox rather than destroying it. He pointed out that a miracle is understood as a miracle only by one who through an act of faith already has accepted the miracle–worker for what he claims to be. Otherwise, the so-called miracle is simply an inexplicable event which just as easily and just as logically can be explained as a fraud or delusion. For S.K., Jesus’ miracles are very much to the point; they are ambiguous witnesses that attract attention and then, quite the opposite of providing a proof, force one to make a decision regarding the paradoxical miracle-worker.11

S.K.’s position would seem to have the better of Bultmann’s at every point:

1. first, in making it unnecessary to demythologize before one can get at the gospel in Gospels;
2. second, in retaining the positive theological significance of miracle; and
3. third, in saving us from the rather awkward position of, in effect, prohibiting God from showing himself in the world because it would he “untheological” of him to do so.

S.K. and Bultmann show a similar difference over the question of the historical Jesus’ verbal claims to deity. Bultmann rejects all of these, on critical grounds as a Bible scholar but also as a theologian, because such claims, again, would compromise the incognito. S.K., on the other hand, accepts and welcomes these verbal claims as support for his interpretation. On the face of it, a plain and direct statement to the effect “I am God” constitutes a rather clear betrayal of Jesus’ incognito–until one pauses to consider that the speaker is a mere man and therefore obviously not what be says he is. The speech is indeed all “pro,” but the speaker is all “con,” and thus that speech in the mouth of that speaker is paradoxical in the extreme.12

Clearly, “incognito” meant something different to S.K. than it does to Bultmann and others of the kerygma-school. For S.K., it did not mean that the historical Jesus must he denied any and every indicator that would suggest his deity but only that every such indicator be accompanied with a counter-indication which would have the effect of balancing the account and leaving the verdict wide open–yet all the more urgent because of the evidence that is building up. In short, the kerygma-school sees the historical Jesus as nothing but incognito; S.K. saw him as incognito so dialectically welded to immediate recognizableness as to form a most irritating and inescapable paradox.

S.K.’s position avoids some of the most glaring weaknesses of the kerygma-school. For if the case is, as this school maintains, that nothing paradoxical is to be found in the historical Jesus but that the paradox comes into being only when the early church claims deity for him, then there is no compelling reason why that claim should attach to Jesus of Nazareth and not to someone else, or to anyone else, or even to no one at all. Yes, because essentially the paradox lies not in the historical person but in the claim, that claim would be just as effective in evoking faith if it concerned a figure of the imagination instead of an actual historical man.

And further, if ultimately the kerygma itself is the only paradox, then any contributions on the part of reason and research are absolutely excluded; there is no way of investigating whether this is a true Absurd or merely an absurdity. Research regarding the historical Jesus cannot possibly be of help, because it is decreed beforehand that only “con” evidence will be admitted, that anything that might look like “pro” evidence cannot be credited to the historical Jesus but must he attributed to the early church’s kerygmatic claim. Thus, the kerygma-school does not possess a true Kierkegaardian paradox composed of pro-and-con evidence building up to an existential tension that compels one either to take offense or to make the venture of faith. It holds, rather, a mass of “con” evidence topped by a “pro” claim which brings with it absolutely no substantiation except the subjective power of “God’s Word.” But why this particular claim, coming as it were out of thin air, should be treated as the Absurd rather than merely an absurdity, no one is able to say. And what there is about a claim so lacking in solidity, in historical actuality and “presence,” that should attract a man’s attention, compel him to face up to it, and force him to decide one way or the other–again, no one is able to say. And yet–and yet Kierkegaard is the one who customarily gets accused of irrationality, subjectivism, and making faith into a wild and unmotivated leap in the dark.

Actually, S.K.’s dialectic Christology was deliberately polemic against several familiar types, of which kerygma-theology is only one. For instance, S.K. was strongly opposed to the traditional, creedal Christology which had held the field up until the development of scientific scholarship made possible “the quest of the historical Jesus.” S.K. was critical of the Pre-Quest Christology for making the tacit assumption that the New Testament, the ecumenical councils, and the whole tradition of the church had settled the matter of Jesus’ deity once for all, that the 1800 years since Christ had resolved any paradoxicality that may have been involved in his historical manifestation, and that, rather than making any decisive venture of faith, modern Christians had only to let themselves be carried on the tides of scripture, creed, and church.13

Even though S.K. lived and wrote before Liberalism’s “Old Quest” (the quest described in Schweitzer’s classic study) had reached its heyday, the major thrust of his polemic was directed against this movement. The Old Quest was dedicated to “going beyond faith,” to reaching Christianity via a sturdy bridge of scientific-historical evidence rather than a leap across a paradox. To this end the “truly historical” kernels of the Gospel tradition were threshed out of the chaff of “mere assertions of faith,” and Christian doctrine was to be reared precisely upon these findings, as logical deductions drawn from proven facts of history. Of course, in S.K.’s view, such an approach would destroy Christ’s incognito, his humiliation, his paradoxicality, his Person, and indeed the very possibility of faith and thus any true concept of Christianity.14

Then, within the memory–and indeed, the work–of men still living, Old-Quest Liberalism was challenged and conquered by so-called Neo-Orthodoxy, which, although quite varied in many respects, seems to have been pretty much of a mind as concerns its “No-Quest Christology.” S.K. has been looked to as one of the “fathers” of Neo-Orthodoxy, and it is true that these theologians used (and used properly) S.K.’s “anti-historicism” to break up Old-Quest Liberalism. They did not, however, use (or use properly) Kierkegaardian concepts in constructing their own positive Christology, for S.K. was anything but a kerygmatic Christologian.

We already have suggested something of the difference between S.K. and the No-Quest school but the matter can be made more pointed. Although writing even before the Old Quest had reached its height, S.K. seems to have anticipated kerygma theology and risen to counter it. His crucial statement in this regard opened with the words: “Christianity is not a doctrine.” But the fact of the matter is that the kerygma is precisely a doctrine and nothing else: in essence it is a proposition, a concept, an idea. Granted it is a proposition that has reference to an historical event; but when it is insisted that the content of that event is irrelevant, is not open to investigation, or, if investigated, is destined to produce only negative results–if this is the case, then the kerygma remains solely and exclusively a doctrine, and S.K.’s statement applies:

Christianity is not a doctrine. All the talk about offense in relation to Christianity as a doctrine is a misunderstanding, it is a device to mitigate the shock of offense at the scandal–as, for example, when one speaks of the offense of the doctrine of the God-Man and the doctrine of the Atonement. No, the offense is related either to Christ or to the fact of being oneself a Christian.15

A merely doctrinal paradox is not an adequate occasion for producing true faith. Such a paradox exists only on the intellectual, cognitive level, and here it can be argued away just as easily as it can be argued into being; an intellectual paradox can be resolved through intellectual gymnastics. And in actuality it can be disposed of even without this effort, simply by ignoring it. The common man is neither excited nor disturbed by a doctrinal
 paradox, this plaything of the theologians about which he could not care less. No, only a real, live, demanding Paradox with all its attention-catching “pro’s” and “con’s” is adequate to pull the existential tension to the point that energizes the venture of faith.

Offense has essentially to do with the composite term God and man, or with the God-Man, Speculation naturally had the notion that it ‘comprehended’ God-Man–this one can easily comprehend, for speculation and speculating about the God-Man leaves out temporal existence, contemporaneousness, and reality.16

By force of lecturing they [modern thinkers] have transformed the God-Man into that speculative unity of God and man sub specie aeterni, nianifested, that is to say, in the nullipresent medium of pure being, whereas in truth the God-Man is the unity of God and an individual man in an actual historical situation.17

Edit that last to read “speculative unity of God and man sub specie hypothesis” and “manifested in the nullipresent medium of existential self-understanding” and the statement becomes directly applicable to modern kerygma Christology without changing S.K.’s point in the slightest.

Clearly, S.K.’s basic and crucial Christological move was to tie the act of faith securely to a specific, objective historical event–not by that token making faith a simple, straight-line deduction from historical evidence (the evidence is too ambiguous for that) but certainly neither by de-historicizing the event into a mere kerygmatic postulate. He staked out his position in so many words:

Christianity exists before any Christian exists, it must exist in order that one may become a Christian, it contains the determinant by which one may test whether one has become a Christian, it maintains its objective subsistence apart from all believers, while at the same time it is the inwardness of the believer. In short, here there is no identity between the subjective and the objective. Though Christianity comes into the heart of never so many believers, every believer is conscious that it has not arisen in his heart, is conscious that the objective determinant of Christianity is not a reminiscence…. No, even if no one had perceived that God had revealed himself in a human form in Christ, he nevertheless has revealed himself. Hence it is that every contemporary (simply understood) has a responsibility if he does not perceive it.18

This one statement puts S.K. a pole away from modern existentialist theology. His position, for example, is the contrary of that of a Paul Tillich, who can say: “The believing reception of Jesus as the Christ, calls for equal emphasis. Without this reception the Christ would not have been the Christ.” And again, “Since the Christ is not the Christ without the church, he has become the Christ.”

A statement by Rudolf Bultmann, as another example, is also at a considerable remove from S.K.:19

This ‘once for all’ [of redemption in Christ] is not the uniqueness of an historical event but means that a particular historical event [which, by inference then, is not unique in and of itself], that is, Jesus Christ, is to be understood as the eschatological ‘once for all.’ As an eschatological event this ‘once for all’ is always present in the proclaimed word, not as a timeless truth, but as happening here and now…. The word of God is Word of God only as it happens here and now. The paradox is that the word which is always happening here and now is one and the same with the first word of the apostolic preaching crystallized in the Scriptures of the New Testament and delivered by men again and again.20

Bultmann may be the dominant figure of existentialist theology and S.K. may be known as the founder of existentialism, but their respective Christologies have very few points of contact. Bultmann’s “eschatological event,” his “event” which somehow becomes synonymous with “word,” is not at all what S.K. would have meant by “event.” 21 Bultmann’s paradox is not at all S.K.’s. And even Bultmann’s object of faith (the kerygmatic word) is not at all S.K.’s (the historical God-Man). And thus the problem of contemporaneousness is completely different for Bultmann than for S.K.

But if, with S.K., the Christ of Faith is in fact the Historical Jesus believed upon–rather than, with Bultmann, the Kerygmatic Word affirmed–then inevitably a valid and even necessary role has been opened for historical research and criticism. As passionately opposed as he was to the sort of historical research that proposed to make faith unnecessary, S.K. did not at all resist this other implication but did himself elucidate it. As early as the pseudonymous Philosophical Fragments (1844), S.K. made the following, very seminal statements:

The absolute fact is an historical fact, and as such it is the object of Faith. The historical aspect must indeed be accentuated, but not in such a way that it becomes decisive for the individual; … for a simple historical fact is not absolute, and has no power to force an absolute decision. [Thus is the Old Quest with its exclusive concentration on history disqualified.] But neither may the historical aspect of our fact be eliminated, for then we have only an eternal fact. [And thus is the No Quest with its exclusive concentration on the kerygma disqualified.]22

And again, he said: “As long as the Eternal and the historical are external to one another, the historical is merely an occasion.” In this one sentence is hidden the key to the history of Christological thought. In Pre-Quest Orthodoxy, the Eternal and the historical were thought of in substantial terms, a divine nature and a human nature. They were necessarily compartmentalized and thus essentially external to one another, and so inevitably the Eternal came to overshadow the historical as being obviously preeminent. Thus the historical did become merely an occasion. In Old-Quest Liberalism, the Eternal’s aspect of the case was virtually ignored and thus held external to the historical. Inevitably the quest of the historical Jesus failed to get anywhere, because it was studying merely the occasion. In No-Quest Neo-Orthodoxy, the Eternal and the historical were deliberately kept external to one another, and the historical consciously was treated as merely an occasion … for the kerygma of the Eternal. But as we repeat and complete S.K.’s statement, we see that he would have had none of these:

As long as the Eternal and the historical are external to one another, the historical is merely an occasion…. But the Paradox unites the contradictories and is the historical made Eternal, and the Eternal made historical…. Faith is not a form of knowledge;23 for all knowledge is either a knowledge of the Eternal, excluding the temporal and historical as indifferent [thus the abstract philosophizing of No-Quest existentialism], or it is pure historical knowledge [thus the critical researches of the Old Quest]. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the Eternal is the historical…. But the disciple is in Faith so related to his Teacher as to be eternally concerned [i.e. in an infinite, personal, passionate way] with [the Teacher’s] historical existence.24

By positing this Christology which insists on a dialectic of both objective event and subjective word, both history and faith, both research and venture, S.K. was pointing toward the latest school of Christology, the so-called New Quest.25 Indeed, the New Questers themselves have never outlined their program better or more succinctly than did Søren Kierkegnard a full century before the New Quest was as much as dreamed of:

The historicity of the redemption must be certain in the same sense as any other historical thing, but not more so, for otherwise the different spheres are confused…. The historical factual assumption necessary for the redemption must only be as certain as all other historical facts, but the passion of faith must decide the matter.26

Of course, S.K. did not perform the New Quest; he was not trained in biblical criticism, and indeed, the tools and methods now being used had not yet been discovered or developed. But be that as it may–and even though the New Questers have not taken their cue directly from S.K. but on their own are correcting the distortion that Bultmann imparted to the tradition which he derived from S.K.–nevertheless it is unimpeachable that Kierkegaard developed a theological rationale that explains and necessitates precisely the sort of historical quest that is going on today.

Indeed, it may well be that S.K. went further, that he can point the New Questers to their next step, to the implications that their work has for the preaching and teaching of the gospel. This he did in his doctrine of contemporaneousness.

By defining the object of faith as he did, by specifying that it is the historical Jesus believed upon, that the immediately recognizable elements in Christ always must be made ambiguous by his incognito, that offense always must be just as live and just as logical an alternative as faith–with this definition S.K. in effect already had determined the route that contemporaneousness must take.

“Contemporaneousness” is, of course, nothing more than the procedure by which den Enkelte meets the God-Man, confronts and is confronted by him in such a way that the venture of faith can take place. Actually, all worship, all ritual, all preaching, all theology is in one sense or another directed toward the achievement of contemporaneousness. However, S.K. held that there is only one mode of contemporaneousness which truly is appropriate and effective for the act of faith.

Plainly, all attempts at contemporaneousness can be classified into two major groups as regards the direction of the movement involved. Either Christ moves out of first century Palestine to become contemporary with den Enkelte, meeting him in the present time and situation; or else den Enkelte moves out of the present to become contemporary with Christ, meeting him in first century Palestine.27

Most approaches to contemporaneousness–and particularly the churchly ones–assume the first context: Christ comes to meet den Enkelte. However, given S.K.’s definition of the object of faith, this alternative poses some problems from the outset. For one thing, to what extent can the historical Jesus be moved out of his own locus and still be the historical Jesus? Were not his life, words, and actions closely enough related to the first century milieu that they must be seen against that background in order to be understood? And for another, the very fact that this Christ can move across the years to confront den Enkelte rather effectively eliminates any possibility of his being incognito; his very being here is positive proof that he is the God-Man and not a madman; there is no paradox in a contemporary Christ.

To get down to instances, then, the entire cultic apparatus of churchly worship obviously is designed to create contemporaneousness. Just as obviously, the meeting is thought of as taking place on the spot, i.e. in the church here and now. All of the symbolism, the liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music, and so forth-all point to the glorified, exalted Son of God; there is little if anything to remind one of the humble carpenter of first century Nazareth. Even the celebration of the eucharist is performed, not so as to remind or recreate before the congregation a meal eaten in an upper room in Jerusalem (this would he the dynamic of the opposite movement), but as a commemoration of the eternal Christ. Contemporaneousness with the Christ of the altar hardly will meet the conditions requisite for a Kierkegaardian venture of faith.

Also, creedal theology is designed to create contemporaneousness. However, it does not so much represent an attempt to understand the historical Jesus and/or the early church’s faith in him in terms of the first century situation (i.e., biblical theology) as to explain Christ in terms of the Greek thought forms that were contemporary at the time the creeds were formulated. Thus it represents another case of bringing Christ to us rather than the reverse. And again the consequence is that very little of the historical Jesus shows through, his incognito is explained away, and there is nothing in him that would offend anyone. Contemporaneousness with the Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon would not satisfy S.K.

Likewise, modern kerygmatic, existentialist theology is designed to create contemporaneousness, this indeed being its forte. If Christ’s primary locus is in eschatological event, in the word of proclamation, in symbol, then contemporaneousness is not a problem. Contemporary with us is the only possible way in which Christ can exist, and as Paul Tillich has as much as said, it is our acceptance of his contemporaneousness that brings him into being [see above]. But S.K. specifically denied that a paradoxical doctrine, or proposition, is a true paradox capable of occasioning true faith. Contemporaneousness with the Kerygmatic Word will not do.

A final mode within this first type of contemporaneousness holds particular interest because it involves a conscious attempt to do justice to the historical Jesus and not simply to the exalted or the proclaimed Christ. This “theology” was signalized in Charles Sheldon’s popular classic In His Steps and is characterized by the shibboleth “What would Jesus do?” The theory is that contemporaneousness is to be achieved as a wholesale transplant of the Palestinian rabbi into the twentieth century where he can then function as tutor and guide. This approach proves singularly ineffectual, because in the process of transplantation either the historical Jesus must be subtly transmuted into a twentieth century man or else he is so out of place as to be of no help at all. Contemporaneousness even with the historical Jesus, if the meeting must take place on our ground, hardly will meet S.K.’s conditions.

The other option is for us to become contemporary with Christ by going back to meet him in his own time and place. From the outset, this procedure shows more promise of satisfying the Kierkegaardian definition, and it is here S.K. will find his answer, although he will be far from approving every approach that comes under the category.

The old, Liberal “Quest of the Historical Jesus” was a sincere attempt to go back to first century Palestine and meet Jesus “as he really was.” However, because this research was informed by certain hidden assumptions regarding what evidence would be admitted and what interpretations allowed, the final results were somewhat less than satisfactory. In his account of that Quest, Albert Schweitzer pointed out time and again where and how this occurred. Far from either seeking or finding a paradox, these scholars were intent specifically to remove all problematic elements and present a humane and idealistic Jesus worthy of recognition as the founder and norm of an enlightened culture-religion for modern man. In effect, the Old Quest set out to erase from the Gospels precisely those features that S.K. valued, those that might make Jesus paradoxical and a sign of offense.

The popular counterpart of the Old Quest, which has not been as easily put down (precisely because it is popular and thus not susceptible to scholarly refutation), is what might be called the Sunday-school, or Hollywood, approach. In Sunday school, this takes the form of children dressing up in bathrobes and beards, building models of a Palestinian home, etc. In Hollywood, it costs a bit more money to do the same thing. There is something commendable about all this, the desire to join the disciples, go with them to meet the Master, and believe on him as they did. But in this well-intentioned procedure, one element is distorted in such a way that the entire enterprise becomes falsified. Because of Christ’s incognito, the first disciples could believe only after an agonizing struggle to surmount offense; they had to dare to accept Jesus as the God-Man under conditions in which this interpretation of the matter was by no means self-evident. Biblical movies present no such problem, for here the historical [sic] Jesus is surrounded with an aura of light, wears a pure white robe, speaks through an echo chamber with harps in the background, looks like a Greek god (if not a Hebrew one), and hardly would have the audacity to say, “Blessed is he who is not offended in me!”

Any mode of contemporaneousness that proposes to overlook the incognito and possibility of offense achieves at most a pseudo-contemporaneity:

Most people now living in Christendom live, we may be sure, in the vain persuasion that, had they lived contemporary with Christ, they would at once have known and recognized Him in spite of his unrecognizableness. They are quite unconscious that they thereby betray the fact that … this notion of theirs, notwithstanding that it is certainly meant as praise of Christ, is really blasphemy.29

If the glory had been directly visible, so that everybody as a matter of course could see it, then it is false that Christ humbled Himself and took upon Him the form of a servant; it is superfluous to give warning against being offended, for how in the world could anybody be offended by glory attired in glory!30

The fact of the matter is that S.K. branded as inadmissible the very approaches to Jesus that are most prominent in churchly teaching and worship.31

Contemporaneousness in S.K.’s sense of the term is a conscious effort of the imagination by which den Enkelte overleaps the entire 1900-year tradition which the church has established regarding its faith and, free of inherited presuppositions, meets the historical Jesus, sees him with the eyes not simply of the first Christians but of the first eyewitnesses (crucifiers as well as disciples), and there, in the painful tension of that dilemma; makes his own choice as to whether Jesus is the God-Man who has an absolute claim to his life or a madman who should be avoided at all costs.

Of course, S.K. believed that there is also a living Lord who meets the believer in the present, but this movement takes place only posterior to and consequent upon the venture of faith; this presence is discernible only to the believer and is not itself the occasion which produces faith. S.K. consistently used the term “contemporaneousness” in reference to the first movement and not to the second. His intention, certainly, was not to prohibit or even inhibit the second but to establish the priority and absolute necessity of the first.

With this distinction in mind, even a cursory examination of Training in Christianity makes S.K.’s point unmistakable. Much of that book, indeed, is given over to a frankly imaginative reconstruction of how different contemporaries might have spoken about Jesus. And although the following quotations represent an attempt to cite the most compact and crucial statements of S.K.’s thesis, they are at the same time typical–completely typical–of his entire Christological approach:

The past is not reality–for me: only the contemporary is reality for me. What thou dost live contemporaneous with is reality–for thee. And thus every man can be contemporary only with the age in which he lives–and then with one thing more: with Christ’s life on earth.32

But so long as there is a believer, such a one must, in order to become such, have been, and as a believer must continue to be, just as contemporary with [Christ’s] presence on earth as were those [first] contemporaries. This contemporaneousness is the condition of faith, and more closely defined it is faith. O Lord Jesus Christ, would that we also might he contemporary with Thee, see Thee in Thy true form and in the actual environment in which Thou didst walk here on earth; not in the form in which an empty and meaningless tradition, or a thoughtless and superstitious, or a gossipy historical tradition, has deformed Thee.33

The principal concern now is to be able to clear the ground, get rid of the eighteen hundred years, so that the Christian fact takes place now, as if it happened today…. This contemporaneousness, however, is to be understood as having the same significance that it had for people who lived at the same time that Christ was living…. However, the contemporaneousness here in question is not he contemporaneousness of an apostle, but is merely the contemporaneousness which everyone who lived in Christ’s time had, the possibility in the tension of contemporaneousness of being offended, or of grasping faith.34

The clear implication is that the preaching, teaching, and worship of the church should be directed toward helping den Enkelte to make his own experiment in contemporaneousness. It was S.K.’s conviction, based on his own quite uncritical (i.e. not scientific-scholarly) reading of the Gospels, that anyone who tried such a “contemporary-reading” would meet the same Jesus that he had. The New-Quest research of our own day has the effect of confirming S.K.’s conviction. The Kierkegaardian picture of the Paradox will bear the full weight of the closest sort of scientific-historical scrutiny, because the New Quest, too, establishes the historical Jesus of Nazareth as having been a real, live, ordinary man (and thus obviously not God) who nevertheless spoke such a message, presumed such an authority, and acted in such a style as would indicate that he considered himself in possession of divine prerogatives. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that the New Quest allows (or even compels) the scholar and theologian to read the Gospels in the same terms that S.K. was sure the common man could and would if sophisticated scholarship and church tradition left him alone.

Needless to say, neither the Brethren nor sectaries in general ever have produced the sort of Christological thought that would match S.K.’s. Nevertheless, in an intuitive way they did have a “feel” for the historical Jesus, for his humiliation and incognito, for the possibility of offense–a feel which, it must he said, is not nearly as strong in the churchly tradition. S.K. himself realized that the simple, unlearned believer would understand contemporaneousness better than would the intellectual. In analyzing the case of Adler, the pastor who, after taking a rural parish, became spiritually deranged, S.K. suggested, half seriously, that perhaps the thing with which Adler could not cope was the meeting of true Christians:

Magister Adler becomes a priest in the country, and so is brought into contact and into responsible relation with simple and ordinary people who, lacking a knowledge of Hegel, have, as perhaps men in the country still have, a serious though meager Christian instruction, so that, unacquainted with every volatilization of it, they simply believe in the Christian doctrine and have it before them as a present reality. For simple, believing men so deal with Christianity that they do not hold it historically at a distance of eighteen hundred years, still less fantastically at a mythical distance.35

The early Brethren fit S.K.’s description precisely. Mack Senior, for example, said:

There is a time of humiliation and a time of exaltation. The Lord Jesus first appeared very humbly and lowly in this world in humble and willing submission to the will of His Father. The second time, however, He will appear in great power and glory as an exalted Christ. All souls who desire to be with Him in His exaltedness must certainly first accept Him as a humbled Christ. They must confess Him before men in all His commandments, and not be ashamed of them. In this way they will become humble in the humble commandments, and then finally they shall be exalted in due season. It will be impossible otherwise. For this reason, the church of the Lord has always been lowly and despised in this world. It has always been considered as filth.36

And Mack Junior came even closer to formulating a concept of contemporaneousness when, in speaking against infant baptism, he said:

What did it avail a poor man in Israel in former times, when he could only hear of a fiery serpent, which was erected for his healing. He had to see the serpent; yes, he himself had to look at it, and not another for him; thus also it must not remain with the witnesses in this important matter; if we want to be thoroughly healed from our deep injury, then we must see Jesus crucified ourselves.37

It would not be accurate to say that the Brethren held S.K.’s doctrine of contemporaneousness; it would, however, be accurate to suggest that they would have welcomed the interpretation had they been exposed to it. They did not, as did S.K., talk about contemporaneousness with Christ; they did, rather often, talk as if they were contemporaneous with Christ. Their mode of observing the Lord’s Supper points toward contemporaneity. So do their “low” forms of worship and church architecture. So does the very simplicity of their demeanor and way of life. And so, particularly, does their central emphasis on Nachfolge (which is our next topic).

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In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.

1. Attack upon “Christendom,” 242.

2. The review of S.K.’s Training in Christianity, in Masterpieces of Christian Literature in Summary Form, ed. Frank N. Magill (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 721.

4. The pattern of thought presented here can be traced in S.K. by reference to the following condensed statements: (a) Dru Journals, 871 (1849); (b) the journal entries quoted in A Kierkegaard Critique, 182-86; (c) Dru Journals, 1044 (1850); and (d) Rohde Journals, 201 (1849).

5. Training in Christianity, (Pt. I), 26-27. Cf. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:343 (1854).

6. “Lifted Up On High …” (Pt. III, Reflection 1) in Training in Christianity, 154.

7. “Lifted Up On High …” (Pt. III, Reflection 2) in ibid., 160.

8. Papirer, 4:C:35, quoted by Ronald Grimsley, “Kierkegaard and Leibniz” in The Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (July-Sep. 1965), 395.

9. By “kerygma theology” we intend those who would locate the essential paradox and the object of faith not primarily in the historical Jesus himself but in the early church’s proclamation about him, i.e. in the kerygma. This description would cover such otherwise diverse thinkers as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and many others.

10. Point of View, 16.

11. See Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), 98-99, for S.K.’s discussion. I have had it in mind as certain that it was S.K. who presented the perfect illustration of this point of view, but I cannot locate the citation. However, if S.K. did not, he should have pointed out that even the ultimate miracle, the resurrection of Christ, was not received as a self evident demonstration that Jesus was the God-Man. Certainly, to those who had made the venture of faith the resurrection became a “proof”–but only a proof alter the fact, i.e. after the fact of faith itself, if such in any sense can be called a “proof.” But it was, indeed, one of the very Gospels (Matthew) which suggested that the empty tomb could he read as a case of theft and fraud just as well as a case of resurrection and that, in fact, some of the first witnesses–namely the soldiers guarding the tomb, who were just as close to the event and just as competent observers as any of the “believers”–chose the alternative of offense rather than faith. The empty tomb, although the sort of occurrence to attract attention and compel a decision one way or the other, involves just as much of “con” as it does of “pro,” and it becomes a witness to Jesus’ deity only to one who, through the venture of faith, already has chosen to be convinced that Jesus was One whom God would resurrect.

12. For S.K.’s exposition, see Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), 134ff. In this case, critical scholarship since S.K.’s time has made it at least problematical whether the historical Jesus actually did make any verbal claims regarding his own deity. This finding would have the effect of canceling this particular aspect of S.K.’s argument–although not by that token his argument as a whole. However, the most recent scholarship, i.e., post-Bultmannian scholarship, seems to be circling back, as it were, to undergird S.K. in a stronger way than he himself envisioned. The best of contemporary scholarship holds that, whether or not Jesus made any verbal claim for himself, his entire ministry and message was in fact an acted claim to more than human authority. And if this be so, it puts the Kierkegaardian paradox on an even more fundamental level, for now Jesus becomes not simply a man (and thus not God) who says that he is God but rather a man (and thus not God) who acts as though he were God.

13. Regarding this aspect of S.K.’s argument, see particularly Training in Christianity, (Pt. I), 28ff.

14. S.K.’s attack upon scientifically derived (i.e. historically and/or philosophically derived) Christianity is so pervasive as to be difficult to cite; in effect, the whole of Philosophical Fragments, Postscript, and Training in Christianity, deals directly or indirectly with this issue.

It should be noted, too, that all of S.K.’s fulminations against “history” as an enemy of faith are directed toward this one sort of historiography which sets out to “go beyond faith.” But there is nothing in S.K.’s thought that would outlaw or denigrate historical study per se, and as we shall see, he did specifically intend and make room for historiography of a proper sort.

15. Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), 106-9.

16. Ibid., 83-84.

17. Ibid., 123.

18. The Book on Adler, 168-69.

19. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, (Chicago: Un. of Chicago Press, 1957), 2:99 and 2:154 respectively; cf. 135 and 180.

20. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), 82.

21. Undoubtedly the German language has helped to make possible this discrepancy. For S.K., “event” and/or “history” implied something wholly within the objective sphere, something that happened as it actually happened and was what it was–whether it was believed upon or even known about The event, of course, becomes effective in my life only as I receive and interpret it through faith, but my faith does not change the objective “happenedness” of the event either one way or another. “Event” is simply and solely an affirmation of Historischlichkeit. Existentialism, on the other hand, has had the effect of subtly transposing “event” out of the objective sphere and into the subjective. History is thought of not primarily in terms of its Historischlichkeit (its happenedness) but of its Geschichtlichkeit (its meaningfulness). The reality of an event as “history” is tested, not by investigation as to whether it actually occurred out there, but by what the thought of it does to me in here. Thus “event” (what happened at that place at that time) becomes “eschatological event” (what happens to me here in this time), and “event” (happenedness) even becomes “word” (meaning), and the distinction between objective, outward action and subjective, inward reaction is completely obliterated.

22. Philosophical Fragments, 125.

23. S.K. is not meaning to say that faith excludes knowledge or is without cognitive content. He is saying that faith must be more than knowledge, or that faith is an entirely unique sort of knowledge which cannot be classified with any of our usual forms of knowledge.

24. Philosophical Fragments, 75-76 [italics mine–V.E.].

25. More than coincidence may be involved in the fact that the one leading theologian of the No-Quest period who has welcomed the New Quest and appropriated its basic position as his own is the same theologian whom we earlier named as the one with the best understanding of S.K., namely Emil Brunner (see his Dogmatics, 3:178ff.).

Our terminology here already may be becoming inadequate, for a split is showing up within the New Quest itself. Eduard Shweizer, for instance, would identify neither himself nor Günther Bornkamm (whose Jesus of Nazareth usually is considered the “firstfruits” of New Quest research) as being New Questers but would reserve that term for a group who, in his opinion, have only slightly modified the Bultmannian No-Quest position without actually moving out of it. If his analysis is correct, then we mean to identify S.K. with those non-Bultmannians who go even beyond the New Quest.

26. Dru Journals, 602 (1846) [italics mine–V.E.].

27. A third alternative–which may be an accurate picture of classical mysticism–is that both parties move and meet in a realm of the spirit where there is nothing in the way of time, space, location, or even concrete awareness of the persons involved. Obviously, S.K. would have had nothing to do with such a scheme.

29. Training in Christianity, (Pt II), 327-28.

30. Ibid., (Pt. I), 60.

31. Christian Discourses, (Pt III, Discourse 1), 181-82; (Pt. IV, Discourse 1), 266-67; and (Pt IV, Discourse 4), 284-86.

32. Training in Christianity, (Pt. I), 67.

33. Ibid., (Pt. I), 9.

34. The Book on Adler, 62-63. Cf. Training in Christianity, (Pt. 1), 40 and 43.

35. The Book on Adler, 147.

36. Mack Senior, Rights and Ordinances, in Durnbaugh, Origins, 394. Saner Junior made much the same point in his “Forward with Respect to Courts” in the Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calendar for 1760, 19.

37. Mack Junior, Apology, 20. Mack Junior also wrote a poem on the crucifixion in which, as it were unconsciously, he constantly slipped back into terms of contemporaneousness, as though he were an eyewitness–and a guilty witness–at Calvary. And the way in which this is done would indicate that it was more Mack’s religious instincts than his poetic sensibilities that were responsible. (See Heckman, op.cit., 100ff.)

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b. Nachfolge/Efterfølgelse/Imitation

“Imitation,” “the following of Christ,”
this precisely is the point
where the human race winces, here it is principally
that the difficulty lies,
here is where the question really is decided
whether one will accept Christianity or not.1

Christianity is not a doctrine.
It is a belief, and corresponding to it,
a well-defined way of existence,
an imitation.2

For the proof of Christianity really consists in “following.”3

Efterføgelse is the Danish and Kierkegaardian term that is the precise equivalent of Nachfolge, the German and Brethren term. These have no such precise equivalent in English. They are often translated “discipleship,” but this can suggest merely the adherence to a master’s teachings or an acceptance of his philosophy, whereas, as S.K. put it, “To be a follower means that thy life has as great a likeness to His as it is possible for a man’s life to have.”4 “Imitation” is perhaps the preferable translation–if one guards against the tinge of artificiality the word conveys and against the hint of works-righteousness that traditionally has accompanied imitatio Christi.

Nachfolge is certainly one of the major themes of all classic Protestant sectarianism and might well be claimed as the central theme of eighteenth century Brethrenism–being, of course, very closely related to the theme of obedience/fruit bearing. More Brethren authors could be quoted at greater length concerning Nachfolge than any other motif we have treated. But rather than amassing evidence we will cite only the one best presentation, this a poem by Sauer Junior. (Its structure is such as to merit its being printed as poetry even though the translation is not metrical.)

That which to our frivolous eyes
 	Appears as something to be valued,
That is--as beautiful as it may be--
 	Directly counter to Christ.
Christ was the friend of the poor;
 	We Christians are their enemies.
 
He hated honor;
 	We give it heed.
He did not love riches;
 	We are bound to them.
He sought only to suffer;
 	We seek to avoid it.
 
He was despised, laughed at;
 	We would be esteemed.
He was as a little child;
 	We would be quickly grown.
He was the people's laughingstock
 	And stood not on the throne.
 
He hated lust and pleasure;
 	We love both of them
He lived in anxiety and need;
 	We relish the bread of pleasure.
He was blamed for his conduct;
 	We would be approved
 
He would be loving;	
 	We love only ourselves.
He considered it reasonable that we should follow him;
We live in self-will.
"Deny yourself," he said;
None of us does that.
 
"Each one shall constrain himself";
We are opposed to constraint.
No one recognizes
Works of love in these times.
At present, only God and no one else
Would love and never compel.
 
We love what is high;
He loved what is lowly here.
He would teach us humility;
We will not listen.
He sought hardship;
It makes us wail and cry.
 
He noticed the forsaken;
We notice the elevated.
He approached the poor;
We climb high.
He is full of goodness and love;
We follow our inclinations.
 
He suffered many blows,
in this was no man like him.
He would have us poor in spirit;
We seek great gifts.
One should be in the Spirit alone
And not according to nature.
 
Through such opposition,
Where the devil's power is so great,
Jesus' life and teachings now
Become wholly despised.5

At least one striking difference between Brethren Nachfolge and that of early twentieth century Liberalism becomes evident here. With the Brethren there was no tendency to read Jesus as the attractive exemplar of the humane ideals and graces that culture-religion exalts. Quite the opposite; the Brethren found in Jesus the possibility of offense and precisely those attributes that the natural man naturally despises. Thus in Sauer’s poem there is implied an idea which S.K. was to make specific, namely, that the following of Christ–far from displacing, or substituting for, faith in him as Savior and Redeemer–serves to make it abundantly clear that one must have a Savior. Without the help of the Savior, the call to discipleship is as infeasible in prospect as impossible in achievement.

Kierkegaard could be quoted at even greater length regarding Nachfolge than could the Brethren–simply because he wrote more. The emphasis was just as central with him as with them–although S.K. undoubtedly had more “central emphases” than did the Brethren. And for him, Nachfolge meant essentially the same thing it meant for the Brethren:

To follow Christ, then, means denying one’s self, and hence it means walking the same way as Christ walked in the humble form of a servant–needy, forsaken, mocked, not loving worldliness and not loved by the worldly minded.6

This is what Nachfolge means, and this–S.K. was certain–is what is demanded of every Christian.7

But rather than simply multiplying the sort of quotations that did constitute several discourses and could be used to fill a volume, we present one very pertinent statement–pertinent because in it S.K. set his doctrine in its historical perspective, differentiating it clearly from earlier forms of “imitation”:

However great [the Middle Ages’] errors may have been, its conception of Christianity has a decisive superiority over that of our time. The Middle Ages conceived of Christianity with a view to action, life, the transformation of personal existence. This is its valuable side. It is another matter that there were some singular actions they especially emphasized, that they could think that fasting for its own sake was Christianity, and so too going into a monastery, bestowing everything upon the poor, not to speak of what we can hardly refer to without smiling, such as flagellation, crawling on the knees, standing upon one leg, etc., as if this were the true imitation of Christ. This was error…. What was worse than the first error did not fail to make its appearance, that they got the idea of meritoriousness, thought that they acquired merit before God by their good works. And the situation became worse than this: they even thought that by good works one might acquire merit to such a degree that it accrued not only to his advantage, but that like a capitalist or bondsman one might let it accrue to the advantage of others. And it became worse, it became a regular business…. Then Luther came forward. But let us not forget that for all this Luther did not do away with the following of Christ, nor with voluntary imitation, as the effeminate coterie is so fain to make us believe…. The erroneous path from which Luther turned off was exaggeration with respect to works. And quite rightly, he was not at fault: a man is justified solely and only by faith…. But already the next generation slackened; it did not turn in horror from exaggeration in respect to works (of which Luther had had personal experience) into the path of faith. No, they transformed the Lutheran passion into a doctrine, and with this they diminished also the vital power of faith…. When the monastery is the misleading thing, faith must he introduced; when the ‘professor’ is the misleading thing, imitation must be introduced…. The “disciple” is the standard: imitation and Christ as the Pattern must be introduced.8

It is manifestly false to call S.K. a Catholic on the basis of his doctrine of Nachfolge to equate (or for that matter, even liken) his view with that of monastic imitation. Rather, the position for which S.K. here set the stage is a doctrine of Nachfolge which is thoroughly Protestant in character–indeed, without which Protestantism cannot even remain true to its own normative principles. And if the possibility of a truly Protestant Nachfolge was a real one for S.K., then it was equally real for the entire tradition of classic Protestant sectarianism. S.K. and the Brethren were at one in their demand for a Nachfolge in respect to Christ that would not threaten faith in respect to Christ. S.K.–because he was capable of doing so–went far beyond the Brethren in formulating the theological bases for such a position.

It comes as no surprise to discover that the technique S.K. used for relating Christ the Pattern to Christ the Savior was dialectic; he did so consciously:

I must take good care, or rather God will take good care for me, that I am not led astray by concentrating too one-sidedly on Christ as our pattern. The related term through which it becomes dialectical is Christ as gift, as He who bestows Himself upon us (to call to mind Luther’s regular classification).9

In a sense, S.K. already had cleared the site for his dialectic. In traditional theology, faith is directed primarily toward the Christ of Faith, concerns primarily the divine nature; Nachfolge, on the other hand, (if considered at all) is directed primarily toward the historical Jesus, concerns primarily the human nature. In this situation, then, the relating of faith and Nachfolge faces the complication of the two being oriented toward two somewhat different objects. S.K. did not have this problem; his one object was the God-Man. As we have seen, S.K. consistently used “contemporaneousness” to denote den Enkelte’s approach to the God-Man to the end of believing upon him through faith; “Nachfolge,” on the other hand, denotes the approach to Him for purposes of imitation. Yet, in practice, both are identical approaches made to the one God-Man, i.e. imaginative efforts to see and hear Jesus Christ as he was during his life on earth. As S.K. set the terms, then, it is not necessary for either den Enkelte or the God-Man to change roles when their relationship alternates from that of “grace bestowed upon faith” to that of “instruction enjoined for Nachfolge.”

The first movement of the dialectic, as S.K. explicated it, consists of such a stringent interpretation of the demand for Nachfolge that one is, in effect, “chased” to grace:

What is written in the Epistle to the Galatians 2, 19, “I through the law have died to the law, ” corresponds exactly to the explanation I am accustomed to give of our relation to the “Model.” First one must realize that the model is a crushing demand. But thereupon the model, Christ, transforms itself into grace and mercy, and tries to take hold of you in order to bear you up. But so it is that through the Model you have died to the model.10

By becoming contemporaneous with Christ your pattern, you discover that you never equal Him, not even in what you term your best moments…. Hence it follows that you learn to flee with profit to faith and grace…. Thus Christ as our example is He who most severely and endlessly judges–and at the same time is the One who has pity on you.11

Thus far S.K. has been in complete accord with much of so-called neo-orthodox ethics; but S.K. was not content to stop at this point, as Neo-Orthodoxy is inclined to do. Here is Nachfolge, but in a peculiarly truncated form: there is a demand for discipleship but never any hope of accomplishing it–indeed, it was never the Demander’s intention that there should be accomplishment, his interest being simply to humiliate the individual into a realization of his need for grace. S.K. saw this implication and proceeded to correct it; the following is one of his most important statements:

Which is it? Is God’s meaning, in Christianity, simply to humble man through the model (that is to say putting before us the ideal) and to console him with ‘Grace,’ but in such a way that through Christianity there is expressed the fact that between God and man there is no relationship, that man must express his thankfulness like a dog to man, so that adoration becomes more and more true, and more and more pleasing to God, as it becomes less and less possible for man to imagine that he could be like the model? … Is that the meaning of Christianity? Or is it the very reverse, that God’s will is to express that he desires to be in relation with man, and therefore desires the thanks and the adoration which is in spirit and in truth: imitation. The latter is certainly the meaning of Christianity. But the former is a cunning invention of us men (although it may have its better side) in order to escape from the real relation to God?12

S.K. would not be as quick to talk about an “impossible ideal” as is Reinhold Niebuhr, nor would he be as ready to insist that an impossible ideal is truly “relevant.”

So S.K. did not stop with just half a dialectic, with a Nachfolge that only moves the individual into grace and leaves him fixed at that point. He inserted a countermovement from grace to Nachfolge which would have the effect of sustaining the alternation. Imitation, he saw, proceeds from grace as well as leads to it:

The true imitation is not produced by preaching on the theme: Thou shalt imitate Christ; but as a result of preaching about how much Christ has done for me. If a man grasps and feels that truly and profoundly then imitation will follow naturally.13

Also, this “post-faith” Nachfolge is itself enabled and empowered by grace; it is the Savior who makes it possible for den Enkelte to follow the Pattern:

It is not enough to say that Christ is the model and we only need imitate Him. In the first place, I need His assistance in order to be like Him; and in the second place, inasmuch as He is the Savior and the Redeemer of humanity, I assuredly cannot imitate Him.14

And the case is that Nachfolge protects faith no less than faith empowers Nachfolge. It is not that faith is the be all and end all, with Nachfolge as an optional supplement. In a brief but pregnant phrase S.K. said that “human honesty [is] evinced by imitation.”15 A person’s willingness to follow the Pattern is the proof and test of the reality of his faith in the Savior; Nachfolge, far from being the enemy of faith or a substitute for it, is precisely that which preserves faith’s purity and prevents it from being misused by hypocrisy and carelessness.

Thus the God-Man’s functions as Redeemer and Pattern are integrated in a most powerful dialectic, which dialectic was given very eloquent expression in the invocatory prayer with which S.K. opened his most important discourse on Nachfolge:

Help us all and every one, Thou who art both willing and able to help, Thou who art both the Pattern and the Redeemer, and again both the Redeemer and the Pattern, so that when the striver sinks under the Pattern, then the Redeemer raises him up again, but at the same instant Thou art the Pattern, to keep him continually striving. Thou, our Redeemer, by Thy blessed suffering and death, hast made satisfaction for all and for everything; no eternal blessedness can be or shall be earned by desert–it has been deserved. Yet Thou didst leave behind Thee the trace of Thy footsteps, Thou the holy pattern of the human race and of each individual in it, so that, saved by Thy redemption, they might every instant have confidence and boldness to will to strive to follow Thee.16

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In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.

1. “Christ as Example” (Discourse 2) in Judge For Yourselves!, 197.

2. Papirer, 10:3:A:454 (1850), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 172.

3. “Christ Is the Way” (Discourse 2) in For Self Examination, 88.

4. Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), 108.

5. Sauer Junior (presumably), a poem without title, appearing as an independent feature in the Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Calendar for 1766, p.24 [my trans.–VE.].

6. “The Joyfulness of Following Christ” (Discourse I) in The Gospel of Suffering, 12.

7. “Lifted Up On High …” (Pt. III, Reflection 6) in Training in Christianity, 231-36.

8. “Christ as Example” (Discourse 2) in Judge For Yourselves!, 201, 202, 205, and 207.

9. Papirer, 10:1:A:246 (1849), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 160-61.

10. Papirer, 10:2:A:170 (1849), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 179.

11. Papirer, 11:A:153 (1848), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 113-14. Cf. “But How Can the Burden Be Light …” (Discourse 2) in The Gospel of Suffering, 22.

12. Dru Journals, 1272 (1852). Cf.,Smith Journals, 11:1:A:27 (1854).

13. Dru Journals, 1150 (1850).

14. Papirer, 10:1:A:132 (1849), quoted in Dupre, op.cit., 176.

15. Attack upon “Christendom,” 147.

16. “Christ as Example” (Discourse 2) in Judge For Yourselves!, 161.

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c. Scandal and Suffering

When one first begins to reflect upon Christianity it must certainly have been an occasion of scandal to one before one enters upon it…. That is why one is sickened by all the chatter of fussy go-betweens about Christ being the greatest hero, etc., etc.1

For, to say it short and sharp: this is the very definite utterance of the New Testament, that Christianity, and the fact that one is truly a Christian must be in the highest degree an “offense”‘ to the” natural man, that he must regard Christianity as the highest treason and the true’ Christian as the’ most scurvy traitor against humanity.2

One may learn more profoundly and more reliably what the highest is by considering suffering than by observing achievements, where so much that is distracting is present.3

The situation is this: the more thou hast to do with God, and the more He loves thee, the more wilt thou become, humanly speaking, unhappy for this life, the more thou wilt have to suffer in this life.4

The themes (or moods) of scandal and suffering that pervade both the Brethren and the Kierkegaardian literature are undoubtedly to be understood as derivatives of the concept of following Christ who is the possibility of offense–this coupled with the doctrine of nonconformity to the world. But however derived, the sectarian parallel is unmistakable.

Regarding the scandal of Christianity, the first document of Brethrenism, the open letter inviting participation in the inaugural baptism, stated:

For the world, however, Christ and His disciples are a stumbling block and an annoyance, and it takes offense at the Word on which they are founded.5

The preface to the first Brethren hymnal, compiled in Germany, referred to the fact that the Christian must be willing to bear “the shame of Jesus with the people of God.”6 And Mack Senior answered one of the Radical Pietist queries with these words:

[Christ] does not say that men will flock to his gospel by the thousands in such miserable times as these are, unfortunately, when love has grown cold in many hearts. Indeed, even the well-meaning souls do not come very willingly to the discipleship of Jesus, where all must be denied if Christ is to be followed rightly. 7

Although there would he no point in doing so, we could document this sense of scandal for the remaining eighty years of our period just as extensively as we have done for the first twelve. The Brethren well understood that Christianity appears scandalous to the eyes of natural man.

The theme was, if anything, even stronger in S.K. The whole of Part II of Training in Christianity is a detailed study of the sources of offense that are inherent in Christ and Christianity, and the notes echo throughout S.K.’s religious works. He could put the matter into the strongest language possible:

Everywhere where these words [i.e. Christ’s warning about being offended] do not resound, or at least wherever the statement of Christianity is not at every point permeated by this thought-there Christianity is blasphemy.8

But the most pertinent aspect of S.K.’s thought on this subject was the emphasis that present-day acceptance of Christianity is actually an aggravation of the scandal and not a mitigation of it:

But although by taking away the possibility of offense men have gotten the whole world Christianized, the curious thing always occurs–the world is offended by the real Christian. Here comes the offense, the possibility of which is after all inseparable from Christianity. Only the confusion is more distressing than ever, for at one time the world was offended by Christianity–that was the intention; but now the world imagines that it is Christian, that it has made Christianity its own without detecting anything of the possibility of offense–and then it is offended by the real Christian.9

S.K. never wrote anything more sectarian in tone than these words which many of the classical sectaries could have documented out of their own experience.

A close concomitant of Christianity as scandal is the suffering the Christian must endure for his faith; and early Brethrenism was just as completely pervaded with this theme as with the former. The anonymous Brethren tract Ein Geringer Schein gave major attention to the theme of Christian suffering and related it in an interesting way. The tract points out that Christ’s baptism–and so ours–was threefold: (i) by water; (2) by the Spirit (symbolized in the dove); and (3) by suffering (symbolized in the cross). Christ called his suffering a baptism and predicted the same for his disciples, which they experienced in due course. The first Christians fulfilled this baptism with actual martyrdoms;

but those who have not come to an outward martyr’s crown even so have here carried the death of Jesus in their bodies and are also, through an inner martyrdom, sharing in a crucifixion of their lusts through the baptism of blood.10

And a poem by Mack Junior pointed up an important aspect of the Brethren emphasis:

And what is the difference, if one learns
 	Out of bitterness to make sweetness
And on the cross's beam
 	To laugh with weeping eyes!
Thus the spirit will be strengthened,
 	And the soul acquire,
Through Him who died for it,
 	That which the whole world does not note.
 	
 
When grief makes us ill,
 	Let us earnestly think
That He who guides all things
 	Will also guide our hearts
That through His grace we may
 	Endure in grief
And wisely learn to sow
 	The noble seed of tears.
 
We have while here
 	No other joy for which to hope
Until our tribulations
 	Reach their proper goal
When we are reconciled with God
 	Through the death of His Son,
See our misery demolished,
 	And are trained to love correctly.11

It should be noted that an emphasis on Christian suffering does not necessarily imply morbidity or joylessness; indeed, it is precisely through suffering that one overcomes the world, and this is a source of tremendous satisfaction and hope.

There probably is no author in Christian history who has written on the theme of suffering more extensively, more profoundly, and with more feeling than Søren Kierkegaard. He wrote one series of seven discourses under the title The Gospel of Suffering (originally part of a larger collection) and another series of seven entitled “Exultant Notes in the Conflict of Suffering” (Part II of Christian Discourses); and by collecting scattered discourses on the theme, one or two more such series could be compiled. Major discussions regarding the relation of suffering to religion and Christianity put in their appearance far back in the pseudonymous literature,12 and almost every major work thereafter at least touches upon the subject. Beyond doubt, S.K.’s personal temperament and the fact that he was himself an authentic sufferer go far in explaining the presence and extent of this emphasis; but at the same time, it was an inherent and natural part of his total religious perspective, just as with the Brethren.

Suffering is an inevitable concomitant of Christianity, made so by the very nature of the gospel and of the world:

What is the Christianity of the New Testament? It is the suffering truth. In this mediocre, miserable, sinful, evil, ungodly world (this is the Christian doctrine) the truth must suffer, Christianity is the suffering truth because it is the truth and is in the world.13

At times S.K. did direct his attention to how the Christian should meet suffering in general, but primarily he was concerned to preserve Christian suffering as a distinct–and indeed, unique-category:

The decisive mark of Christian suffering is the fact that it is voluntary, and that it is the possibility of offense for the sufferer.14 To suffer in likeness with Christ does not mean to encounter the unavoidable with patience, but it means to suffer ill at the hands of men because as a Christian or by being a Christian one desires and strives after the Good, so that one could avoid the suffering by ceasing to will the Good.15

And thus S.K. was particularly incensed against the sort of preaching that is quick to credit the patient endurance of every affliction and inconvenience as being Christian suffering.

Although the point has not been well heeded by his critics, S.K. was at some pains to make it clear that his doctrine of suffering did not imply melancholy (S.K.’s own melancholy was a personal accident which he strove to overcome, not a theological conviction he strove to defend). He was ready–with the Brethren–to follow the biblical injunctions to “Count it all joy …” (Jas. 1:2) and “Rejoice and be exceeding glad …” (Mt. 5:12). As the melancholy Kierkegaard himself said:

After all, Christianity is not a melancholy thing, on the contrary it is so glad a thing that it is glad tidings to all melancholy men; only the frivolous and the defiant can make it gloomy.”16

How these seemingly contrary propositions regarding Christianity as suffering and as joy are to be reconciled, S.K. answered with a very effective figure of speech:

In reality the star is situated high in the heavens, and it is no less high for the fact that seen in the ocean it seems to be below the earth. Likewise, to be a true Christian is the highest exaltation, although as reflected in this world it must appear the deepest humiliation. Humiliation is therefore in a certain sense exaltation As soon as you eliminate the world, the turbid element which confuses the reflection, that is, as soon as the Christian dies, he is exalted on high, where he already was before, though it could not be perceived here on earth.17

In emphasizing suffering to the extent he did, it was inevitable that S.K. would run a great risk, namely the temptation to value suffering in and of itself, for its own sake. Although often accused of doing just this, the charge is not justified–except, as we shall see, during the very last, “black cloud” period of his life. Actually, S.K. himself saw the danger and took pains to avoid it:

 One must never desire suffering. No, you have only to remain in the condition of praying for happiness on earth. You must certainly dare, for to dare (for the truth, etc.) is Christianity…. But if suffering cannot be, humanly speaking and understood, avoided, and you nevertheless understand yourself before God in being obliged and willing to dare: yet suffering itself must never be the telos, you must not dare in order to suffer, for that is presumptuous, and is to tempt God. To expose yourself to suffering for the sake of suffering is a presumptuous personal impertinence and forwardness towards God, as though you were challenging God to a contest. But when it is for the cause–even though you see that suffering is humanly speaking unavoidable, just go on and dare. Do not dare for the sake of suffering, but you dare in order not to betray the cause.18

This journal entry is dated 1852, which is quite late in S.K.’s career, following the close of the authorship proper and antedating only Attack upon “Christendom.”
 And it would seem to be the case that anything S.K. said about suffering up until this time–no matter how strongly he may have insisted upon its inevitability in the Christian life, its propriety in the Christian life, and even its value as an indicator that one’s actions are indeed Christian–anything he said could yet be reconciled with the above statement. However, after this time, within a period hardly longer than a year preceding his death, along with the hints of misanthropy which we have already noted there is evidence (although only scattered
 evidence) that S.K. was succumbing to the very temptation he had countered so effectively as late as 1852. We quote but one frightening instance:

When one is able to endure the isolation involved in being a single individual, without the mitigation of any intermediate terms, without the alleviation of any illusion, alone in the endless world and the endless world of men–out of a million men 999,999 will lose their senses before they attain this isolation–alone before the face of God–then the fact of loving God and being loved by God will appear to him so blessed that for sheer happiness he must say: O, my God, now I have but one wish, one prayer, one desire, one passion, that I may experience suffering, become hated, persecuted, mocked, spit upon, put to death.19

“Now cracks a noble heart!” What agony of soul S.K. must have been enduring at this writing and what was its portent regarding the progress of his life and thought, we know not. The statement is not at all typical, even of his last years, and is completely contradictory to the Kierkegaard we have seen heretofore. Here he perverted den Enkelte into a solitary atom, denied the equality of all men before God (if it be that only one in a million can endure the relationship), and actually prayed for suffering. It is, of course, not this Kierkegaard who was sectarian; that, rather, was the one who held Christian suffering in dialectical balance with “the joy that was set before him.”

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In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.

1. Dru Journals, 105 (1837). Note particularly this date; these words were written by a university student, six years before he opened his authorship.

2. “To Become Sober” (Discourse 1) in Judge For Yourselves!, 154. These words come toward the close of S.K.’s career, 1852.

3. Purity of Heart, 149.

4. Attack upon “Christendom,” 189.

5. “First Eight Brethren to Palatine Pietists” (1708), in Durnbaugh, Origins, 118.

6. Preface to Geistreiches Gesang-Buch (1720), in ibid., 407-8.

7. Mack Senior, Basic Questions (1713), in ibid., answer to Question 10, 330.

8. The Sickness unto Death, 259.

9. Works of Love, 193-94.

10. Ein Geringer Schein, 6-9 [my trans.–V.E.].

11. Mack Junior, a poem concerning suicide, in Heckman, op.cit., stanzas 30-32, 152-55 [I have amended the translation–V.E.]. Cf. the poem by Sauer Junior in Brumbaugh, op.cit., 434ff.

12. See, for example, Stages of Life’s Way, 415ff., and Postscript, 390ff.

13. Attack upon “Christendom,” 268.

14. Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), 111.

15. “Lifted Up On High” (Pt III, Reflection 3) in ibid., 173.

16. “I Have Heartily Desired …” (Pt IV, Discourse I) in Christian Discourses, 262.

17. “Lifted Up On High” (Pt. III, Reflection 4) in Training in Christianity, 196. Cf. “The Joyfulness of Following Christ” (Discourse I) in The Gospel of Suffering, 6.

18. Dru Journals, 1270 (1852).

19. Dru Journals, 1336 (1854). Cf. Rohde Journals, 238 (July 1855).

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d. Restitution of the Early Church

Christianity was an imposing figure when it stepped vigorously forth into the world and spoke its opinion, but from the moment it tried to set bounds through the pope or wanted to throw the Bible, or later the creed, at the people’s head, it became like an old man who thinks that he has lived long enough in the world and wants to retire.1

Most studies of sectarianism (particularly those of Reformation Anabaptism) tend to read the ideal of restoring the early church as being a central if not the central motif of the sectarian perspective. There is a great deal of truth in this analysis but also a suggestion that is somewhat misleading. At least in S.K. and the Brethren, there was no tendency to idealize, value, or emulate the early church for its own sake, just because it was the early church and thus entitled to some sort of special authority. Rather, with both S.K. and the Brethren, the primary foci were, as we have seen, obedience, Nachfolge, and, as we shall see, adherence to the New Testament. However, because the early church was obedient to God, did follow Christ, and did adhere to the New Testament (which last is hardly surprising inasmuch as it also formulated the New Testament)—but because the early church did then things and was as it was, it is only right and proper that it be looked to as something of an ideal.

Thus, in point of fact, the concept of restitution is derived from these other emphases rather than being an independent (let alone “the central”) principle in and of itself. In order to keep this relationship clear, we have chosen to treat restitution as an appendage of Nachfolge.

Neither S.K. nor the Brethren spoke at any length regarding restitution per se; in passing, they did make a great number of references to the faith and life of the early Christians, which by implication make it quite clear that restitution would be an accurate description of what they desired for modern Christianity.

By all odds the most significant statement on the subject from Brethren literature is by Mack Senior. One of the queries put to him by his Radical Pietist opponents was: “On which point, then, can the undoubted divinity of your new church be recognized before all others in the whole world?” To which Mack replied:

We have neither a new church nor any new laws. We only want to remain in simplicity and true faith in the original church which Jesus founded through His blood. We wish to obey the commandment which was in the beginning. We do not demand that undoubted divinity be recognized in our church fellowship. Rather, we would wish that undoubted divinity might indeed be recognized in Christ himself, and then in the church at Jerusalem. If this and its divinity in teaching, words, and commandments were to be acknowledged, then it could be determined whether a church has this divine teaching in it or not. If this is realized, then we think that it would be sufficient to recognize a church before all other churches in the whole world, if she is subject, as a true wife to her husband Christ, to His commands, yes, if it still strives to be even more submissive. Whoever has not known Christ in the divinity of His commandments will hardly recognize His church even if the twelve apostles were serving as its bishops and teachers.2 [Cf. Mac Junior as quoted above.]

Ultimately there is but one source and test of any church’s authority, legitimacy, or value. This, of course, has nothing to do with its size, worldly power, or reputation. But neither has it to do with the antiquity of its tradition, the continuity of its government with the apostles, the “orthodoxy” of its dogma, or anything of the sort. Indeed, the ground of a church’s validity is such that even having the apostles as its bishops and teachers would carry no weight; and certainly it follows that the honor and respect given the early church is not occasioned by who its leaders may have been. There is one test of a church: whether “she is subject as a true wife to her husband Christ” and is striving “to be even more submissive:” Mack certainly implied–if not specifically granted–that the early church came closer to meeting that test than has any other church. However, the Brethren ideal should not be stated simply as a desire to restore the early church but as the desire to restore the sort of Christian obedience to which the early church gave demonstration. In short, the early church is not itself the goal but the prime example pointing toward the goal.

S.K. did not use such terms as “restitution” (nor did the Brethren). However, he did say enough to alert Hermann Diem to the possibility that some readers might think that S.K. advocated something of the sort. Diem himself, however, resists such an interpretation: Diem quotes S.K.: “This 1800 years of Christian history must be swept aside!” and then comments:

But we must carefully consider in what sense Kierkegaard means this. He does not wish to put the clock back in Christian history, and hence his demand has nothing to do with all those attempts to go back to an earlier stage of Christian development, primitive Christianity for example, in order to set over against modern Christianity as an ideal or critical criterion a type of Christianity which has not yet become involved in the complications of history and has developed no dogmatic positions. Kierkegaard is by no means such an unhistorical thinker. His concern is not to replace a later stage of history by an earlier on; but to insist on the presuppositions underlying the situation of contemporaneity with Christ, in which these historical differences–that cannot and ought not to be removed–lose their relevance for faith.3

But Diem’s explanation will not do. He has taken a partial truth, which actually is a caricature of true sectarianism, and by disassociating S.K. from it, feels that he has satisfied the question of restitution altogether.

It is true, of course, that S.K. did not propose simply “to put the clock back in Christian history” or “to replace a later stage of history by an earlier one.” Certainly not S.K., but none of the leading classical sectaries either, were such “unhistorical thinkers,” such naive and unrealistic thinkers as to believe that restitution could be accomplished simply by closing one’s eyes to the present and living solely in the past. Not this easily can S.K. be divorced from “all those attempts to go back”; and rather than having “nothing to do” with them, S.K.’s demand has everything to do with them. For the sophisticated interpretation given in Diem’s concluding sentence simply is not adequate as exegesis of a radical demand like:

Oh, that there were someone (like the heathen who burnt the libraries of Alexandria) able to get these eighteen centuries out of the way–if no one can do that, then Christianity is abolished.4

But the actual distance between S.K. and Diem’s interpretation of him becomes apparent when we realize that the factors out of church history which Diem is sure S.K. would have insisted on preserving (thus making it impossible that he truly desired the elimination of the 1800 years) are precisely those that S.K. wanted to eliminate by cancelling out the 1800 years. Diem names it as a defect of primitive Christianity that it had not yet “become involved in the complications of history.” But that all depends upon how one understands “the complications of history.” S.K. read the matter thus:

 Witnesses for the truth [i.e. the early Christians] … did not live on the doctrine, along with a family [as do modern clerics], but lived and died for the doctrine. Thereby Christianity became a power, the power which mastered and transformed the world. Thus it was served for wellnigh three hundred years; thereby Christianity became ‘the power’ in the world…. Alas, by this time there had already begun the retrogression, the illusion; instead of transforming the world, they began to transform Christianity. Worldly shrewdness hit upon the idea of turning the life of these witnesses, their sufferings, their blood, of turning it into money, or into honor and prestige.5

The period of the church which Diem accuses of not being involved in history S.K. understood as the period when the church actually was a power transforming the world. S.K. saw true involvement to be the church’s standing out against the world, transforming it by acting as a fixed point against which the turbinations of history could be broken up. Apparently, what Diem understands as involvement in history is the church’s getting into the worldly power struggle as one institution among others–precisely that which Sic. characterized as the world in process of transforming Christianity. Rather plainly, Diem and S.K. are talking past one another, and there is here no grounds for denying S.K. a doctrine of restitution.

The second defect Diem identifies in the early church is that it had “developed no dogmatic positions.” But S.K. said:

And verily the eighteen centuries, which have not contributed an iota to prove the truth of Christianity [and if the purpose of dogma is not absolutely to “prove,” it is certainly to “explain” or “make rationally comprehensible” the truth of Christianity], have on the contrary contributed with steadily increasing power to do away with Christianity. It is by no means true, as one might consistently suppose when one acclaims the proof of the eighteen centuries, that now in the nineteenth century people are far more thoroughly convinced of the truth of Christianity than they were in the first and second generations–it is rather true (though it certainly sounds rather like a satire on the worshippers and adorers of this proof) that just in proportion as the proof supposedly has increased in cogency … fewer and fewer persons are convinced.6 [Cf. S.K.’s words quoted above and above.

Diem, plainly enough, wants nothing to do with a restitutionist ideal, but he has not made the case that S.K. was of the same mind.

There is good evidence that S.K. died in 1855 and stopped writing about the same time, but when one reads statements like the following he has cause to wonder.

Once New Testament Christianity was reduced to the simply historical, and men imagined next that Christianity was perfectible, it was a quite straightforward discovery that there were various epochs. The epoch of the Son was New Testament Christianity, and now the epoch of the Spirit is at hand. No, no: Christianity in the New estament is Christianity. And Christianity is life’s examination…. In Christian terms there is absolutely no meaning in speaking of progress from generation to generation. Every generation begins at the beginning, the examination is the same.7 We laugh when we see a man looking for his spectacles when they are on his nose.

But the striving of “Christendom” is in its way even more ridiculous.

The truth about the Christian ideal is that it has existed, Christ has lived, the Model has been given. And this ideal is related to the single person [den Enkelte].Only as a single person can there be any talk of striving for it. And if the single person is to strive for it he must as a matter of course turn in the direction of the existence of the ideal, he must turn back to it, if he really is to strive for it. Christendom has turned the matter thus: the ideal for being a Christian is a goal lying infinitely distant in the future, and this is what we must strive for. So Christendom turns its back on the true ideal, which has existed, and (in the name of striving for it) strives away from it.8

It is possible that S.K. did not have in mind Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton of the death-of-God school or even Harvey Cox, J. A. T. Robinson, and such conservatives among the “new theologians,” but if he did, his words would not need to be changed in the slightest. For S.K. has spotted what is the basic presupposition of all our “radical theology” so-called, namely, that the course of the world (which, unfortunately, S.K. was so ill-advised as to characterize as “the constant advance of nonsense” [see above]) has in our day produced a man come of age who, in turn, requires a new, twentieth century Christianity (or at least a new essence of Christianity).

For the sake of honesty it should be kept very plain that, even though S.K. shows a critical temper, an iconoclasm, a religionlessness, that sounds quite similar to what we are hearing today, nevertheless the entire course and movement of his religious thought is oriented in a direction diametrically opposed to that of our present-day radicals. No matter how much they choose to quote him, they have some obligation to recognize this fact.

And strictly speaking, if the word “radical” is to retain any connection with its etymological derivation, then it is S.K.’s theology that deserves the adjective and not this other. “Radical” means “to drive toward the root, to go back to origins.” This precisely is the principle delineated by S.K. in the statements above and precisely the opposite of a theology that is avant-garde, “far out,” and driving toward the periphery.

It should be noted that S.K.’s insistence that only den Enkelte can make this radical effort does in no way preclude the idea of a Geimeinde; obviously a caravan can move only by its members making their individual movements. But S.K.’s point is that this caravan, these individuals, move according to the daily instructions they receive from the head-quarters located in the first-century revelation and not by taking a vote as to where the company thinks they might like to go next.

S.K.’s statements make it rather apparent that he did in fact desire a situation which with accuracy could be typified as restitution, the ideal of a church ready to “go it alone” with just the New Testament and without the “help” of 1800 years of creed, dogma, tradition, and theology. There would seem to be no convincing reason why we should not read S.K.’s “elimination of the 1800 years,” his references to “the Christianity of the New Testament and the primitive age”10 and to testing modern Christianity “by the measure of primitive Christianity,”11 as meaning essentially what classic Protestant sectarianism has meant by “restitution of the early church.”

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In Dru�s and in Rohde�s selections from Kierkegaard�s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.

1. Dru Journals, 31 (1835). Most of S.K.’s statements in this vein come from the “post-authorship” attacker of Christendom; this one comes from the “pre-authorship” university student.

2. Mack Senior, Basic Questions, in Durnbaugh, Origins, Question 38 and its answer, 341-2.

3. Diem, Dialectic, 106-7.

4. Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), p.144. Cf. Rohde Journals, 173 (1848). Cf. Smith Journals, 11:1:A:22:234, and 11:2:A:371 (all 1854).

5. “To Become Sober” (Discourse I) in Judge For Yourselves!, 144.

6. Training in Christianity, (Pt. II), pp. 143-44.

7. Smith Journals, 11:2:A:38 (1854).

8. Smith Journals, 11:3:B:197 (1854).

10. Attack upon “Christendom,” 183.

11. Ibid.

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IX. The Chrstian’s Book

Was l not in the right,
and am I not, in saying
that first and foremost everything
must be done to make it perfectly
definite what is required in the
New Testament for being a Christian?1

To be alone with the Holy Scriptures!
I dare not! When I turn up a passage in it,
whatever comes to hand-it catches me instantly,
it questions me
(indeed it is as if it were God Himself that questioned me),
“Has! thou done what thou readest there?”2

A point on which Kierkegaard and the Brethren show as much affinity as anywhere is their view and use of the Bible. An accurate and very useful study regarding S.K.’s position already has been made–this as the preface to the Minear-Morimoto Index, Kierkegaard and the Bible.3 Rather than attempting to duplicate this work of one who is recognized both as a Bible scholar and an authority on S.K., we will confine ourselves to the comparison with sectarianism. However, much of what Minear has to say is germane to our topic. He establishes the central role that Scripture played in S.K.’s life and thought, saying:

It is safe to assert that the Scriptures exerted a more continuous, a more creative, a more profound constraint upon his nimble thoughts, than did any other book or any comparable group of books…. In short, no area of S.K.’s life or work was exempt from the repeated impact of that Scripture through which God had chosen to speak to him.4

Indeed, Niels Thulstrup–who may well qualify as the foremost Kierkegaard authority of our time–has pushed this emphasis so far as to maintain that the orientation of S.K.’s thought toward the New Testament was so complete that his writings can be understood, analyzed, and criticized only against the biblical background–rather than according to the customary norms of philosophical or theological methodology.5

The truth of Thulstrup’s assertion does not make itself evident upon the first reading of S.K. For one thing, he was not given to the citation of proof texts or to constant appeals to scriptural authority. For another, the pseudonymous literature vastly complicates the picture, for here the biblical bases of S.K.’s thought were deliberately suppressed; material written by non-Christian pseudonyms for the benefit of “non-Christian Christians” could hardly afford to show its true colors. Nevertheless, as a great deal of our previous discussion has indicated, even the pseudonymous ideas (such as den Enkelte, the leap of faith, subjectivity, etc.), when traced through to their denouement, become quite recognizable as New Testament concepts–which undoubtedly is where S.K. originally got them and what he had in mind all along. And by far the greater part of his religious works–all of the discourses and such–are expositions of scripture texts. To be sure, they do not represent critical, scientific exegesis, but they are expositions of scripture for all that. Indeed, a review of the topics we have lifted up in this study, done with the New Testament (and particularly the Gospels) in mind, would make the orientation of Kierkegaardian thought quite evident.

Further, Minear makes a rather surprising judgment regarding the quality of S.K.’s use of the Bible:

He was a particularly gifted interpreter of the Bible. In fact, we do not hesitate to predict that corning generations will increasingly reckon with him not so much as a philosopher, as a poet, as a theologian, or as a rebel agains Christendom, but as an expositor of Scripture.6 Neither Fundamentalists nor scientific historicists are likely to make much sense of Kierkegaard’s methods of exposition. No longer, however, are these two schools of historiography the dominant ones. Everywhere one may detect signs of a spreading revolt, not only against Protestant bibliolatry but also against the idolatries implicit in rationalism and historicism. And wherever this revolt is found, there will also be found the hermeneutical influence of this Danish layman.7

Minear maintains that S.K. has an important contribution to make regarding biblical studies; we will maintain that this contribution is essentially that of sectarianism.

In the first place, S.K. was very insistent that the New Testament constitutes the norm and definition of Christianity. Not the creeds, catechisms, or symbols; not the tradition of the church; not the theological formulations of either the past or the present; not personal experience or one’s own understanding of existence; not the demands of the age; but the New Testament is the norm and definition. In the Attack, the phrase S.K. used as a technical term to denote the ideal and goal for which he strove was “the Christianity of the New Testament.” In the very first item of that Attack he suggested putting “the New Testament alongside Mynster’s sermons”;8 and his programmatic statement appealed to the same norm [see this quoted above]. Elsewhere he said, “Christianity (that is, the Christianity of the New Testament–and everything else is not Christianity, least of all by calling itself such).10 He spoke of his “unaltered conviction that the Christianity of the New Testament is Christianity, the other [i.e. the modern version] being a knavish trick.”11 And, very bluntly: “The New Testament indeed settles what Christianity is, leaving it to eternity to pass judgment upon us. In fact the priest is bound by an oath upon the New Testament–so it is not possible to regard that as Christianity which men like best and prefer to call Christianity”12 [Cf. S.K. quoted above].

Indeed, S.K. held this thought so passionately that he could describe the nature and course of his own authorship as a case in which the “poet suddenly transformed himself, threw away the guitar, if I may speak thus, [and] brought out a book which is called The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”13

It would not be inaccurate to epitomize S.K.’s entire career as an attempt to apply the New Testament norm to the Christianity of his day.

At first blush this might seem to be simply a restatement of the Reformation principle of the return to scripture. It is that, but it is more than that; it is–as all sectarianism is–a Reformation principle somewhat more radically interpreted and applied than the churchly tradition would do. Thus, on the pages that follow, as we discover how S.K. approached the Bible and what he understood it to be, it will become clear that his return to scripture was not simply that of Protestantism but even more specifically it was that of Protestant sectarianism.

At the outset it should be noted that S.K. consistently spoke of “the New Testament,” not “the Bible.” The distinction is significant. S.K., of course made use of both Testaments; witness, for example, his preoccupation with the figures of Abraham and Job. But there was a difference. The Old Testament provided material for contemplation and edification, but S.K. did not credit it with the binding and definitive authority that he did the New. He never derived commandments or norms from the Old, although he found them in abundance in the New. At one point early in his career S.K. gave voice to the distinction; his practice would indicate that he held this opinion throughout:

That’s the difficulty of it, that one has both the Old and the New Testament; for the Old Testament has entirely different categories. For what would the New Testament say to a faith which thinks it should get things quite to its liking in the world, in the temporal, instead of letting this go and grasping the eternal? Hence the inconstancy of the clerical address, according as the Old or the New Testament is transparent in it.14

The Brethren position coincided with that of S.K. both as regards the normativeness of the New Testament and the fact that it is the New Testament that is normative. Indeed, Brethren adherence to the idea was conspicuous enough that the colonial historian Robert Proud was led to mention it:

[The Brethren] have a great esteem for the New Testament, valuing it higher than the other books; and when they are asked about the articles of their faith, they say they know of no others but what are contained in this book; and therefore can give none.15

With the Brethren, as with S.K., reference was customarily made to “the New Testament” rather than to “the Bible”–although also, as with S.K., the early Brethren did in no way reject or neglect the Old Testament as a help toward understanding the New. The anonymous Brethren tract Ein Geringer Schein became quite specific. In explaining (for the benefit of benighted Quakers who had challenged Brethren practice) why the command of baptism is binding while that of circumcision is not, the text about the law and the prophets being until John is quoted, and it is prescribed that, since the coming of Christ, only his commands have normative status.16 Later, in a rather lengthy passage, the point is strongly emphasized that “if anyone receives a spirit which inwardly persuades him of being the Spirit of God,” and if this spirit “does not remind him of all that which Jesus of Nazareth taught to his disciples 1700 years before,” it is manifestly a lying spirit. Indeed, by the single test of obedience to the New Testament teachings of Christ one can determine whether he truly believes and truly possesses the Spirit of God.17

A further principle has here become evident: it is not simply the New Testament that is normative, but within the New Testament, the teachings of Jesus become the ultimate authority for the Christian life. Mack Senior stated this unequivocally in one of the earliest Brethren documents, his letter to Count Charles August, dated 1711:

The sinner shall repent and believe in the Lord Jesus and should be baptized in water upon his confession of faith. He should then seek to carry out everything Jesus has commanded and publicly bequeathed in His Testament. If we are doing wrong herein, against the revealed word of the Holy Scriptures, be it in teaching, way of life, or conduct, we would gladly receive instruction. If, however, no one can prove this on the basis of Holy Scriptures, and yet persecute us despite this, we would gladly suffer and bear it for the sake of the teachings of Jesus Christ.18

No one has made a tally of the biblical references in early Brethren literature, but the impression certainly is that Brethren usage conformed to Brethren theory, i.e. there was a tendency to focus on the Gospels, on the teachings of Jesus, and even more pointedly, on the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, one present-day Brethren historian avows that the “clearest” characteristic of primitive Brethrenism is its emphasis on the Sermon;19 but whether “clearest” or not, it is plain that the Brethren reading of scripture was of this order.

A tally has been made of the scriptures exposited and cited by S.K., and even a cursory scanning of the Minear-Morimoto Index is most revealing. Clearly, S.K. valued and used the Gospels more than the Epistles;20 the Synoptics seem to get more attention than John; among the Synoptics it is quite evident that Matthew (the “teaching” Gospel) is strongly favored; and most unmistakable of all is the fact that the Sermon on the Mount attracted S.K.’s attention and comments more than any other comparable passage of scripture–with the possible exception of what S.K. once called his favorite passage, the first chapter of James.21

This coincidence between S.K. and the Brethren is, of course, more than just “coincidence”; it is the natural consequence of their emphasis on contemporaneousness and Nachfolge, on religion as life rather than doctrine. S.K., at least, was well aware that he read scripture from a somewhat different angle than did traditional churchly Protestantism; he commented on the fact a number of times:

Luther’s doctrine is not merely a reversion to primitive Christianity but a modification of Christianity. He drags St. Paul one-sidedly to the fore and uses the Gospels less. He himself supplies the best refutation of his own biblical theory; he rejects the Epistle of St. James, and why? Because it does not belong to the Canon? No, he does not deny that; but on dogmatic grounds, and consequently his starting point is above the Bible.22

It is easy to see that Luther’s preaching of Christianity distorts the Christian standpoint. He concerned himself one-sidedly with the Apostle Paul and then goes so far (and this often happens) as to use the Apostle retrospectively as the norm for testing the Gospels; if he does not find Paul’s doctrine in the Gospels then he concludes, “Ergo

 this is no Gospel.” Luther seems to have been completely blind to the fact that the true situation is that the Apostle has already degenerated by comparison with the Gospel. And this misguided attitude which Luther adopted then continued in Protestantism, which made of Luther the absolute criterion.23

Whether S.K. knew that the Pauline epistles were written before the Gospels is not clear; doubtlessly the Brethren did not know this. But nevertheless, the knowledge would not have changed the case, because the intent of S.K. and the Brethren was not primarily the scholarly one of getting back to the most primitive sources but the doctrinal one of re-establishing the historical Jesus both as the Savior who is the ground of faith and as the Pattern who is the ground of Nachfolge.

And a point which we have made time and again needs to be reiterated here. This appeal from Paul to Jesus sounds suspiciously like the Liberalism of the Old-Quest period; however, with both the Brethren and S.K., the context, motivation, and results of the move were entirely different. It is not with the sectaries as with the Liberals an attempt to escape, or even to de-emphasize, the deity of Christ, his unique role in atonement for and redemption from sin. Both S.K. and the Brethren understood what post-Liberal scholarship has demonstrated, that the Gospels are every bit as kerygmatically oriented as are the writings of Paul. The distinction is, then, that Liberalism wanted to flee the Pauline kerygma by having recourse to a merely historical Jesus of the Gospels (as though the Gospels knew anything of a merely historical Jesus); S.K. and sectarianism, on the other hand, wanted to keep the kerygma firmly grounded in the historical Jesus who was not only the source and object of the proclamation but the pattern of the Christian life as well.

In fact, even though S.K. spoke of the Apostle’s “degeneration,” his quarrel was not so much with Paul as with what the church has tended to make of Paul:

In particular, the purely natural historical truth of things is overlooked. Thus it is forgotten that the Apostle is a person engaged in existence, who with flashes of insight flings out a few words of comfort in order to keep a Christian community going. At first people transformed the Apostle’s hastily-written letters into something fantastic, God knows what. Now they are distorted in a doctrinal sense. In reality they are impulsive. When everything is at stake, and when each day it is a question of winning new converts or of maintaining the faith of those who are already won, there is no time for fantastic speculations or doctrinal applications. People forget Paul the man over the shreds of manuscript which he dashed off and which are now treated in a most un-Pauline way.24

At this point, S.K.’s opinion of which scriptures are most important leads directly into his hermeneutical theory on how scripture is to be read. S.K.’s main thrust-in which the Brethren concurred completely-was that the Bible is not intended to be read objectively (impersonally) as a sourcebook either of dogma or of history but subjectively (personally) as God’s guidance and instruction for den Enkelte. It is this aspect of his thought which S.K. presented so clearly and compactly in one discourse, “How to Derive True Benediction from Beholding Oneself in the Mirror of the Word,”25 and which Paul Minear so well discusses. We need indicate only the main outline of the view.

S.K. was passionately concerned to resist the tendency to “make God’s Word something impersonal, objective, a doctrine–whereas instead it is as God’s voice thou shouldst hear it.”26 Or as he elsewhere so bitingly put it: “People treat the Scriptures so scientifically that they might quite as well be anonymous writings [rather than God’s word to them].”27 The alternative, then, is this:

The divine authority of the Gospel speaks not to one man about another man, not to you, the reader, about me, or to me about you–no, when the Gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about us men, you and me.28

In his core discourse, S.K. brought this entire line of thought to its climax in a most impressive figure of speech, likening the scriptures to a love letter from God.29

He pursued the analogy at some length, noting a number of implications, such as how the lover will want to he alone with the letter rather than calling in others to help interpret it and how he will focus not simply upon the text of the communication but upon the one whom it communicates. However, one of S.K.’s points merits our particular attention. He assumed that in the letter the beloved had made a request or expressed a desire. In such case, S.K. pointed out, a true lover will not be inclined to ponder and puzzle and worry over the wording, uncertain as to whether he completely understands, afraid that he might do more than the beloved had in mind. Rather, the impulse of his love will he to strive for an immediate, uninhibited obedience that is much more afraid of showing reluctance than inaccuracy. As S.K. put it:

When thou readest God’s Word, it is not the obscure passages which impose a duty upon thee [to investigate and consult until they be deciphered], but that which thou understandest; and with that thou must instantly comply.30

S.K.’s view has much in common with that of modern existentialist, kerygma theology (which is in large part derived from him), but there are also significant differences. The emphasis on the Word as a living communication directed to me, concerning my existence, to be appropriated by me–this is similar. However, modern theology understands that Word almost exclusively as a word about Christ (the kerygma) which I need only accept; lacking is the Kierkegaardian emphasis on the word of Christ which I am called upon to obey. The Brethren view, on the other hand, was so completely in agreement with S.K.’s that if the two were exchanged the deception would be difficult to detect. Mack Senior, for example, said: “A faithful child of God looks only to his heavenly Father, and believes and follows Him in His revealed Word, because he is certain of and believes that God and His spoken Word are completely one.”31 And Michael Frantz observed that, for Christians, the word is “cherished as a seed from God planted in their hearts.”32

The most impressive Brethren statement, however, we quote at length–precisely because the parallel with S.K. is so striking. The section of the anonymous Ein Geringer Schein which deals with scripture opens thus:

Holy Scripture is a letter from God which he, through the working of his eternal Spirit, has caused to be written to the human race.

That which stands written in the New Testament is directed particularly to all those who have hope of becoming inheritors of the good which in the New Testament is bequeathed to the children of the new-testamental covenant. Now whoever is such a one, he has grounds for seeing the New Testament as a letter from the eternal God written to him; and all other books, writings, letters, and opinions–and particularly his own ideas–draw him further and further away from God’s letter. And as is the case among us, that a person’s testament becomes fixed through the death of him who made it–so that we know that this is the whole of his last will and that afterwards nothing more can be added to it (Heb. 9:17)–thus Christ also, through his death, has fixed and sealed the New Testament.

Therefore it is urgently required of Christendom that all the words of Christ and his Spirit come to be so read, considered, and believed that they be carried with groanings in prayer to God; that they be received and appropriated in true contrition of heart; that the whole New Testament be written by the finger of God on the heart of the reader until his entire life becomes a living letter from God in which all men can read the commands of Christ (2 Cor. 3:3). It is not enough for a person to see the New Testament as a book where, indeed, the truth stands written, yet, nevertheless, one which does not greatly apply to us or does not commit us to the practice of the commands of Christ.33

Whoever wrote Em Geringer Schein might well be identified as Kierkegaard redivivus (or more accurately, predivivus).

If the Bible is primarily a personal communication in which God instructs den Enkelte, then the use to which den Enkelte must put scripture is as a test, or measure, of his own life. S.K. was insistent on this score and centered on the idea by using the mirror analogy from Jas. 1:22-25:

If thou dost assume an impersonal (objective) relationship to God’s Word, there can be no question of beholding thyself in a mirror; for to look in a mirror surely implies a personality, an ego; a wall can be seen in a mirror but cannot see itself or behold itself in the mirror. No, in reading God’s Word thou must continually say to thyself, “It is to me this is addressed, it is about me it speaks.”34

It is only too easy to understand the requirements contained in God’s Word–“give all thy goods to the poor,” “when a man smites thee upon the right cheek, turn to him also the left,” “when a man takes away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also, ” “rejoice always,” “count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, ” etc…. No poor wretch of the most limited intelligence can truly say that he is unable to understand the requirement–but flesh and blood are reluctant to understand and be obliged to do accordingly.35

The Brethren affirmed this view as strongly as did S.K. In this case it was Michael Frantz who anticipated Kierkegaard even to using the mirror analogy:

A mirror is thy word so beautiful
 	Wherein I truly can see myself--
Whether I proceed according to Jesus--
 	Which cannot be seen in the same way in things of the world.
Thy word, Lord Jesus, is a scales
 	With which I truly weigh myself
As to whether I am disposed toward thee
 	To do thy will in all things.36

And elsewhere he suggested that “in the mirror of what Christ has taught one sees whether he is a new man or old.”37

A final observation is in place regarding the Brethren-Kierkegaardian approach to scripture. Both the Dunkers and the Dane were inclined to be quite uncritical (in a scholarly sense) in their reading of the Bible. For the Brethren–as simple, unlettered believers living in the eighteenth century–there was, of course, no alternative; the science of biblical criticism bad not yet developed. With S.K., however, it had to be deliberate; he lived late enough and knew enough that we would expect him to show much more critical sophistication than he does.

However, even though both S.K. and the Brethren accorded scripture the highest sort of authority, and even though both read it uncritically, yet their position was very far from being literalistic, legalistic bibliolatry. Indeed, the Brethren may well have had a somewhat freer and more “liberal” view of scripture than did most of their eighteenth century churchly compeers. For one thing, the very fact that both S.K. and the Brethren could and would grant a higher degree of authority to the New Testament than to the Old; and within the New Testament, to the Gospels; and within the Gospels, to the commands of Jesus–this is demonstration enough that they were not fettered to a “dead-level” concept of inspiration that sees every letter of the Bible as equally and infallibly God’s word.Also, their antipathy to impersonal, objective theologizing as much as outlaws fundamentalistic, or even scholarly, “proof-texting” (which is about as highly objectivizing a procedure as one could devise) [In this regard, see S.K.’s statement quoted above].

Then, too, by positing the reading of scripture as being personal communion with God and thus opening up a vital role for the guiding and enlightening work of the Spirit, both S.K. and the Brethren again far transcended a narrow literalism. For the Brethren, these implications became most apparent in Mack Junior’s open letter on feetwashing, where he developed a total view that eventuated in statements such as:

Scripture must be understood and looked upon with a spiritual eye of love and calmness…. True wisdom and her lovers must be minded as James teaches and says, “But the wisdom from above is in the first place pure; and then peace-loving, considerate, and open to reason. ” … Therefore the Scriptures call for spiritual eyes, mind, and understanding. Otherwise, through literalistic interpretation, if a person without true illumination were to try to hold fast to the letter in one place, he would have to disregard and act contrary to it in another place, and thus we would have nothing but trouble and division. Therefore, dear brethren, let us watch and be careful. And above all preserve love, for then we will preserve light…. Then our good God, who is love purely and impartially, can and will add by degrees whatever may be lacking in this or that knowledge of the truth. [See the full text above].

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In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.

1. Attack upon “Christendom,” 25.

2. “… The Mirror of the Word” (Discourse I) in For Self Examination, 56.

3. Minear and Morimoto, op.cit., 3-13. We are assuming that Minear was the one primarily responsible for the preface itself.

4. Ibid., 6.

5. Niels Thulstrup, “The Complex of Problems Called ‘Kierkegaard,’” in Critique, 295. Cf. John Wild, “The Rebirth of the Divine,” in Christianity and Existentialism, 159, 165.

6. Minear and Morimoto, op.cit., 7-8.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. Attack upon “Christendom,” 5.

10. Ibid., 29.

11. Ibid., 162.

12. Ibid., 32.

13. Ibid., 118.

14. Papirer, 4:A:143 (1843), quoted in the translator’s introduction to Repetition, xli.

15. Robert Proud, op.cit., quoted in Brumbaugh, op.cit., 524.

16. Ein Geringer Schein,, 18-19.

17. Ibid., 27-28 [my trans.–V.E.]

18. Mack Senior, a letter to Count Charles August (1711), in Durnbaugh, Origins, 163. The letter is an apology and plea for tolerance addressed to the Count, who had expelled Mack and the other Brethren from his territory.

19. Mallott, op.cit., 15.

20. S.K.’s appeal to the Gospels, on the face of it, might seem to coincide with the general movement of nineteenth century theology, with its Quest of the Historical Jesus and all. However, there was a decided difference in orientation which makes any correlation very problematical. Most certainly, S.K. did not use the New Testament as a source hook for dogmatic definitions (in any case, this interest inevitably centers in the Pauline materials rather than the Gospels). But just as certainly, S.K. did not use the New Testament as source material for a scientific-critical study designed to explain the origin and rise of Christianity as a historical phenomenon which consequently had evolved into a nineteenth century religion. S.K. showed no interest at all in this “objective” problem of New Testament research nor in the scientific methods of exegesis it employed. The pages that follow will make it clear that S.K. did not read the Gospels in order to formulate Søren Kierkegaard’s opinion of Jesus of Nazareth but to discover Jesus’ opinion of Søren Kierkegaard. This personalized, devotional, life-centered approach is essentially sectarian-pietistic rather than nineteenth century historical-critical.

21. Dru Journals, 1225 (1851).

22. Dru Journals, 1008 (1849). Luther could have spared himself at least some of S.K.’s wrath if he had picked any book other than James to call “straw”; but seriously, the completely different evaluation that Luther and S.K. put upon that epistle stands as a very accurate symbol of the difference between churchly and sectarian Protestantism.

23. Papirer, 11:1:A:572 (1854), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 177. Cf. Rohde Journals, 223, and Attack upon “Christendom,” 282-83, note.

24. Papirer, 10:2:A:548 (1850), quoted in Diem, Dialectic, 274-75. Our study has come full circle. We used Deissmann’s statement about Paul to introduce a thesis concerning S.K. The compliment is here returned as S.K. supports Deissmann’s thesis.

25. This is Discourse I in For Self Examination, 33ff.

26. Ibid., 64.

27. The Book on Adler, 27.

28. Works of Love, 31; cf. 103-04.

29. “… The Mirror of the Word” (Discourse I) in For Self Examination, 51ff.

30. Ibid., 54.

31. Mack Senior, Rights and Ordinances, in Durnbaugh, Origins, 383.

32. Michael Frantz, op.cit., 36.

33. Ein Geringer Schein,, 1-2 [my trans.–V.E.].

34. “… The Mirror of the Word” (Discourse I) in For Self Examination, 68.

35. Ibid., 59. S.K.’s examples of Christian requirements are as revealing as the point to which he was speaking.

36. Michael Frantz, op.cit., stanzas 65-66 [my trans.–V.E.].

37. Ibid., stanza 321.

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PART III: THE OPENING CONCLUSION

What Shall We Do With S.K.?

The central nerve of my work as an author
really lies in the fact
that I was essentially religious
when I wrote Either/Or.1

Whatever of true Christianity
is to be found in the course of the centuries
must be found in the sects and their like.2

The central and omnipresent orientation of Søren Kierkegaard’s life-work was religious existence; he was not essentially a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, a social critic, or a literatus, but a teacher of Christianity (actually, a pastor, or shepherd of souls). And the perspective from which Søren Kierkegaard viewed Christianity was a radical discipleship essentially one with the concept of classic Protestant sectarianism. This has been our thesis, and we have endeavored to give it demonstration.

But more: the anomaly of the situation is that after the historical period of classic Protestant sectarianism was as good as completed, there then appeared on the scene its greatest exponent, its shrewdest analyst, its most able apologist, its best presenter. None of the recognized leaders of the sectarian tradition even begin to match S.K.’s profundity or breadth of understanding regarding the basic nature and dynamic of Protestant sectarianism. By rights, S.K. should have lived along with Luther and Calvin, at the beginning of his tradition and not at its conclusion.

But the role of being one “untimely born,” one for whom “the times are out of joint,” was ever Kierkegaard’s. In an early letter written to his boyhood friend Emil Boesen at the time when S.K. was breaking through into an intimate and personal commitment to the Christian faith, he said, “The more I think about our motto: ‘A church stands in the distance,’ the more I too feel the truth of what you once noted, that it has come considerably closer–but more than an auditor I cannot become just yet.”3

In truth, this motto–dating no one knows how early from S.K.’s student days–is the story of his life and work. A church stands in the distance. A symbol of Christianity dominated his horizon; even when S.K. seemed to be looking at aesthetics, at philosophy, at the world–still the shadow of that spire fell across everything within his field of vision, for a church stands in the distance. But a church stands in the distance. Although the journey of his life, the course of his authorship, was that of coming considerably closer,” nevertheless, more than an “auditor” he could not become just yet. And S.K.’s just yet” never came in this life. Ever approaching, never arriving–a church stands in the distance.

There never lived a more fervent Protestant than Søren Kierkegaard; yet, precisely because of his fervency, because he was a Protestant’s Protestant, he could never be happy in Protestantism; in fact, he felt impelled, in the name of Christianity, to mount an attack upon Christendom. But likewise, as a sectary born after the age of sectarianism, and as a melancholy genius, one of mankind’s ugly ducklings, where was he to find the Gemeinde which he described but never knew? Where, in the nineteenth century, was the sort of church he sought? A church stands in the distance, but it has no door for Søren Kierkegaard.

A church stands in the distance, and S.K.’s very name reflects the symbol, for, in Danish, the word Kirkegaard means “churchyard,” the complex of parsonage, cemetery, etc., that surrounds the church proper. S.K.’s ancestors had adopted this surname because, as poverty-stricken peasants, they were living in the manse of a church parish which was too small and weak to merit a resident minister.4 And traditionally, this is about where S.K. and sectarianism belong–in the churchyard. Too authentically Christian to be absolutely excluded, too radical to be comfortably included, churchly Protestantism has tended to relegate its sectarian brethren (including S.K.) to the churchyard–whether to the cemetery where the dead are put away, or to the parsonage where the leadership of the church lives, we will not venture to say. But a man named “churchyard,” before whom a church stands, yet always with him on the outside–this is S.K. the Sectary.

But if this be Kierkegaard, what shall we do with him? What is the ultimate significance of this study? What, if anything, does it portend for Kierkegaard studies and for the uses to which Kierkegaardian ideas and influences are put? In short, what difference does it make whether S.K. was a sectary or not?

For one thing, to achieve a more accurate identification of his religious perspective cannot but lead to more accurate interpretations of his thought. For example, getting him into the correct context immediately clears up some problems which have plagued Kierkegaard studies: how it could be that he was neither a typical Protestant nor a typical Catholic and yet not some sort of ungainly hybrid; and how his attack upon Christendom could be understood as honestly and sincerely radical and yet not ultimately intended for the destruction of the church.

But if our thesis is correct, its implications reach far beyond “Kierkegaard studies.” If he was as we have described him, if the central motifs of his thought were as we have described them, then it is clear that, no matter how influential in how many fields S.K. has been for modern thought (and, in our judgment, by far the greater part of that influence has been for the good), nevertheless S.K. has not yet been recognized in the witness he personally was most concerned to make. S.K. knew that his work was for the future, saying, “Should it prove that the present age will not understand me very well then, I belong to history, knowing assuredly that I shall find a place there and what place it will be.”5

But if our thesis is correct, that time and place are not yet. Certainly there can be no complaint about the extent of honor and attention he has received in our day, but whether the world actually has heard what he was intent to say is another matter. If our thesis is correct–then look again at the Contents with its list of the themes and motifs that identify S.K.’s understanding of radical discipleship. Few of these are ideas with which the name Kierkegaard is associated today, few are ideas that figure strongly in Christian thought today. What the world has yet heard is only the prelude of the Kierkegaardian witness.

If our thesis is correct, and if S.K. were allowed to speak his own piece in his own way, the result would be what we might call “Neo-Sectarianism,” or “Kierkegaardian Sectarianism.” If it was appropriate for the Reformation of the sixteenth century to have a radical, sectarian wing, perhaps Neo-Reformation thought of the twentieth century could do with the same sort of adjunct. S.K. would be the man to give it leadership.

What form a Neo-sectarian movement might take would be hard to say. Clearly, it would consist of a new emphasis upon the major insights of classic sectarianism, mediated through the writings of Kierkegaard, and applied to the contemporary scene. It definitely would not result in theological systems to compete with those of Neo-Reformation thought. Just as classic sectarianism accepted and assumed the major premises of Protestant doctrine and constructed upon this base not simply a different variety of theological elaboration but the radical definition of a way of life, so could Neo-Sectarianism start with the basic insights of Neo-Reformation thought and proceed in its own unique direction. Not the creedal system of a Barth nor the philosophic-theological system of a Tillich, but the free and unstructured approach of a Kierkegaard is the only method appropriate to radical discipleship.

In this day of ecumenical freedom and dialogue, Neo-Sectarianism probably would not be forced into founding new denominations, as earlier was the case. Today the churches are much more open to inner renewal and change than they were in the time of Menno Simons, Alexander Mack, or even Søren Kierkegaard. Those churches that are descended from the classic sects would have a contribution to make, but there is no reason why a Kierkegaardian Sectarianism would have to center in them. There is, indeed, some cause to believe that these churches might not be adequate for such a role; their new-found “acceptance” within the ecumenical order has had the psychological effect of making them eager to merit this trust by proving that they can be “churches” along with the best of them. In many respects their present drift is toward the evading of their heritage and not the recovery of it.

Neo-Sectarianism, if true to its Kierkegaardian as well as its Radical-Reformation heritage, would have to he a very broadly based, multi-voiced and multi-centered, grass-roots movement of the infiltrating and leaven-working sort. Organization, formalism, and institutionalism, of course, would be completely antithetical to its genius.

There are some indications that modern Christendom may be ready for a move toward radical discipleship; there are some situations opening the way for such a witness; there is current among us some thinking to which such a witness could relate. For one thing, Kierkegaard scholarship itself seems to be tending toward a more sectarian-like interpretation of S.K. And the name Kierkegaard now enjoys sufficient authority and prestige that his “sponsorship” would provide entrée for Neo-Sectarian emphases. S.K. would be listened to where Menno Simons and Alexander Mack would not.

In the second place, sectarian studies (particularly those of the Radical Reformation) have progressed to the point that there are now available the materials and analyses which make possible a much better understanding, a much fairer and more accurate picture of the true nature of sectarianism, than ever has been the case before.

Further, the modern ecumenical movement with its atmosphere of mutuality, of being willing to listen and learn from all traditions that make up the body of Christ–this affords many new opportunities for sectarian ideas to get a hearing. Neo-Sectarianism could speak from within the councils of the church in a way that was completely forbidden to the classic sects.

As the Reformation provided the only proper theological seed-bed in which classic Protestant sectarianism could germinate and grow, so might Neo-Reformation thought provide a ground for Neo-Sectarianism in a way that no other modern theology could. The relationship would be more than coincidental, for through his influences in the formulation of Neo-Reformation thought, S.K. already has been preparing the soil for his sectarian planting. Enough hints have been given earlier to indicate our judgment that the theology of Emil Brunner (already impregnated with Kierkegaard) is best suited to the purpose, but many of the current theological phases are to the point.

Closely related, of course, is the rather new and growing interest in Bible study which is penetrating even to the lay level. A faith as strongly Bible-centered as sectarianism craves precisely such an atmosphere; and Paul Minear’s prediction about S.K. coming to the fore as a Bible teacher simply underlines the possibilities for Neo-Sectarianism. In this regard, we commented earlier upon how the New Quest of the Historical Jesus seems to be putting scholarly support under the Kierkegaard-sectarian Christology, thus preparing the way for new emphases upon contemporaneousness and Nachfolge. Neo-Sectarianism could help to direct and apply these developments.

Clearly, one of the major movements in the church today is the search for a new role for the laity. An emphasis upon radical discipleship, with a Kierkegaardian doctrine of the equality of all men before God and a sectarian doctrine of Christians who are neither clergy nor lay, could help ensure that this trend eventuates in something more than a few rather meaningless concessions on the part of the clergy.

Psychology is singing the praises of the therapeutic value of small-, in-group experience. Churches are experimenting with the techniques. Neo-Sectarianism could make a great contribution by elucidating the nature and practice of religious Gemeinschaft.

It may be that in this moment when man has it in his power to create a push-button Armageddon and in his will to risk such–it may be that the time has come when a sectarian doctrine of gyration-braking nonresistance (and not simply a political doctrine of direct nonviolent action) would be heard and understood. At least, Neo-Sectarianism could make the effort.

Then, too, some ideas are appearing in the forefront of theological discussion which would seem to point rather directly toward a Kierkegaardian view of radical discipleship. These concepts are being built up from suggestions–bare suggestions–which emanated from the prison cell of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although not presenting nearly as consistent a picture as S.K., Bonhoeffer also showed some rather striking sectarian tendencies. Neo-Sectarianism could have a voice in the follow-through. The original German title of Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship was simply Nachfolge, a book which John Macquarrie rightly calls “reminiscent of Kierkegaard.”6

This is not the Bonhoefferian theme which currently is drawing theological interest; perhaps it should be.

But the Bonhoefferian “hints” now getting all the attention are two. One is that the world is entering a “post-Christian era:” If this means (as it seems to have meant for Bonhoeffer) that the church and the world have decided to make their relationship honest, that both the church and the world are beginning to recognize what always has been the case, that the state is not Christian in any real sense of the term, that culture forms no real support for Christianity, that the world actually does not need the sanction of the church in playing its role nor does the church need the support of the state to play its–if this is what a “post-Christian era” means, a world declaring itself free from Christian presuppositions, then Neo-Sectarianism is made to order for the situation. Sectarianism never has operated on any other premise, never desired any other premise, but that the era is post-Christian, or rather, that it never has been Christian. Sectarianism is precisely that version of Christianity designed to work and witness in the context of an indifferent and even inimical culture. Perhaps it could be of help now.

Bonhoeffer’s second hint deals with “secular, or religionless Christianity.” If this suggests a brand of Christianity that centers not in a churchly institution, not in rites and rituals confined within churchly walls, not in Sabbath days and holy days set aside for religion, but rather a Christianity that centers in life, in a person’s everyday mode of existence, in the way one treats his neighbors and associates, in the livingroom where (S.K. said) the battle must be fought–if this is “secular Christianity,” then, again, Neo-Sectarianism might make a valuable contribution. If, on the other hand, “secular Christianity” suggests what some people are taking it to suggest, namely the obliteration of the distinction between Christianity and worldliness, the writing of clever theologies that are “Godless” yet somehow “Christian,” the preaching of slick sermons based on sick novels, the presentation of a faith so sophisticated as to be invisible–if this is what “secular Christianity” suggests, well then, perhaps Neo-Sectarianism is needed to save Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his followers. In more ways than one, the world may be ripe for Kierkegaard’s view of radical discipleship.

A church stands in the distance. Kierkegaard never arrived there in his lifetime; his day did not come. He did not really expect it to, although within himself he was confident that sometime it would. With God’s help, ours could be that day.

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Copyright (c) 1968