Søren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom
IN THE closing days of his life, Søren Kierkegaard issued a blast at official Christendom from which she has never cleared herself. Even after a hundred years, priests, pastors and parishioners find his writings grounds for heated discussions and debates. It is only in recent years that his works have been translated into English. The reason for this delay is frankly admitted by priest Walter Lowrie, translator of Kierkegaard’s writings into English: “No one else has shown any zeal to make this trenchant attack known to the English-speaking world! I was not eager to do it,” said Lowrie. “No one has felt an urge to make it known . . . to the discomfiture of the Church.” Now that English translations are flooding the market, provoking comment in the English world, a review of this bold attack is most timely.
The Danish philosopher charged Christendom with open hypocrisy. He declared that Christendom’s “Christianity” was meaningless, existing in name only, while “we live a life of paganism.” Christendom has not ventured defiantly or revolted openly against Christianity. Oh no! Rather she has hypocritically and knavishly done away with Christianity by falsifying the definition of what is Christian. Christendom is playing Christianity, taking God for a fool. Christianity of the “New Testament” variety does not exist in her, he said. These are strong accusations. What moved him to take such a position?
Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 5, 1813. According to his father’s wish, Søren studied theology. However, during his student years he was not sure whether he should become a Christian or not. In fact, it was not clear to him what a Christian was. For more than ten years he compared Christendom with his studies of the Bible. During this time he claimed to be a pet and disguised himself behind several pseudonyms. Triviality, indifference, compromise, hypocrisy were disgusting things to him.
Kierkegaard appears to have accepted Christianity as the true religion without question. He expressed faith in the Bible as God’s Word. Even though Bible criticism was present, it did not seem to affect him. To argue for or against Christianity by means of external proofs was folly, as far as he was concerned. Men must have faith. To preach in such a way that salvation appears sure is to soft-pedal Christianity, he stated. In a sense it is making the narrow way appear broad and easy when in reality it is not. Christianity is to be lived for what it is, not for rewards and promotions.
What Kierkegaard observed in Christendom was not what he knew true Christianity to be. This became a disturbing factor in his life. He knew of priests and bishops who would not speak out for truth, even after it was called to their attention. His father’s priest, ruler of the Danish State Church as the Bishop of Zealand, Bishop Mynster, was a great disappointment to him.
On January 30, 1854, Bishop Mynster died. The highly esteemed theologian Professor Martensen conducted the funeral. In his sermon he praised Mynster as “a witness to the truth,” and as one of “the holy chain of witnesses to the truth.” This was too much for Kierkegaard. He sat down and wrote his protest, but he waited till Martensen had been elected as the bishop’s successor before launching his attack. Once his attack got under way, it took the nation by storm. He published a series of articles in the newspaper Fædrelandet and followed up with a periodical, which he called The Instant. In the space of a few months he accomplished an enormous work. It drained him of the last of his energy. He died shortly thereafter, November, 1855.
THE PROTEST
In his protest Kierkegaard asks, What is a witness to the truth? “A witness to the truth is a man who in poverty witnesses to the truth—in poverty, in lowliness, in abasement, and so is unappreciated, hated, abhorred, and then derided, insulted, mocked—his daily bread perhaps he did not always have, so poor was he, but the daily bread of persecution he was richly provided with every day. For him there was never promotion, except in an inverse sense, downward, step by step. A witness to the truth, one of the genuine witnesses to the truth, is a man who is scourged, maltreated, dragged from one prison to the other, and then at last—the last promotion, whereby he is admitted into the first class as defined by the Christian protocol, among the genuine witnesses to the truth—. . . then at last crucified, or beheaded, or burnt, or roasted on a gridiron, his lifeless body thrown by the executioner in an out-of-the-way place (thus a witness to the truth is buried), or burnt to ashes and cast to the four winds, so that every trace of the ‘filth’ (which the Apostle says he was) might be obliterated.”
Was Bishop Mynster such a witness? “Bishop Mynster’s preaching soft-pedals, slurs over, suppresses, omits something decisively Christian, something which appears to us men inopportune, which would make our life strenuous,” writes Kierkegaard. Instead of preaching repentance, he preached peace. He shied away from dissension and controversy. The bishop self-indulgently loved “peace,” the first requisite for enjoying this present life. Christianity calls for sacrifice, but the bishop was not about to sacrifice. Therefore, his preaching lacked something most decisively Christian.
Kierkegaard argued that it is not enough merely to lower the price to sell something, but one must have the product also. The bishop held out eternal blessednesses of Christianity at a very low cost, but they were not his to give. So what the people were buying from him was nothing but cheap talk and empty promises.
A CHRISTIAN LAND
Kierkegaard also attacked the popular conception that Denmark is a Christian land, that all are Christians. He directed the world’s attention to Jesus’ words at Matthew 7:13, 14. Here Jesus speaks of the road to life as being narrow and cramped “and few are the ones finding it.” To speak of all Denmark as being Christian means that the way is as broad as it possibly can be. In fact, it cannot be any broader, “since it is the way in which we all are walking,” said Kierkegaard. If this be true, then Jesus’ words are false. The human race is to be congratulated for having bettered itself by becoming Christianized even beyond what its Founder imagined. If this be the case, then the “New Testament” is no longer truth. But it is quite obvious such is not the case. Christendom has a long way to go before she can be Christian.
Kierkegaard continues: “What we have before us is not Christianity but a prodigious illusion, and the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be disposed of.” This led him to an attack on the machinery of baby baptism, confirmation and the idea that all respectable adults must marry and rear their children as Christians instead of teaching them to become Christians. In one of his articles he stated that Christendom “is from generation to generation a society of non-Christians.” In another he blasted Protestantism. “Protestantism, Christianly considered,” he said, “is quite simply an untruth, a piece of dishonesty, which falsifies the teaching, the word-view, the life-view of Christianity, just as soon as it is regarded as a principle for Christianity, not as a remedy [corrective] at a given time and place.” He called Christendom “the betrayal of Christianity; a ‘Christian world’ is . . . apostasy from Christianity.”
Note that his attack is against Christendom, not against the church. “We have, if you will, a complete crew of bishops, deans, and priests; learned men, eminently learned, talented, gifted, humanly well-meaning; they all declaim—doing it well, very well, eminently well, or tolerably well, or badly—but not one of them is in the character of the Christianity of the New Testament.” “And this in my opinion is the falsification of which official Christianity is guilty: it does not frankly and unreservedly make known the Christian requirement—perhaps because it is afraid people would shudder to see at what a distance from it we are living, without being able to claim that in the remotest way our life might be called an effort in the direction of fulfilling the requirement.”
Christianity does not march to the tune of “Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along.” Christianity is “incendiarism.” Christ himself says, “‘I am come to set fire on the earth,’ and it is already burning, yea, and it is doubtless becoming a consuming conflagration, best likened to a forest fire, for it is ‘Christendom’ that is set on fire. And it is the prolixities which have to go, the prodigiously prolix illusion fostered by the (well-meant or knavish) introduction of scientific learning into the Christian field.” “The official worship of God (with the claim of being the Christianity of the New Testament) is, Christianly, a counterfeit, a forgery.” This forgery is so deeply ingrained that doubtless there even are priests who believe that Christendom is the Christianity of the apostles’ day, when in truth it has become exactly the opposite.
Kierkegaard declared that men in long robes have deluded women and children into thinking that Christ spoke favorably of themselves as teachers. Official Christianity no more resembles Christianity of Jesus’ day than a square resembles a circle; “and what we call a teacher in Christianity (a priest) no more resembles what the New Testament understands by a teacher in Christianity, no more resembles it than a chest of drawers resembles a dancer, has no more relation to what the New Testament understands by a teacher’s task than a chest of drawers has to dancing.”
Kierkegaard closed his attack by saying: “Whoever thou art, whatever in other respects thy life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part (if ordinarily thou dost) in the public worship of God, as it now is (with the claim that it is the Christianity of the New Testament), thou hast constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: thou dost not take part in treating God as a fool by calling that the Christianity of the New Testament which is not the Christianity of the New Testament.” “This has to be said; so be it now said.”
A RELIGIOUS FUNERAL
In October, 1855, Kierkegaard tumbled into the street, was rushed to a hospital and a month later he died. He would not see a priest and would not receive the Lord’s supper. Despite this fact and his blistering attack exposing Christendom, he still received a church funeral. Why did religious men bother to give him a church funeral, the type he denounced to be revoltingly hypocritical? Perhaps Kierkegaard anticipated the same to happen to him. Because in The Instant he wrote of a freethinker, a man who plainly declared official Christianity to be a lie: “If he dies . . . and leaves behind him so much that the man of God (the priest), the undertaker man, and several other men, could each get his share—then all his protests are of no use, he is a Christian and is buried as a Christian—to that degree it is certain that we all are Christians. If he leaves nothing (for a little is no help: the priest, who as a Christian is always easily contented, is content with little if there is no more), but if he leaves literally nothing—that would be the only case in which his protests might be taken into account.”
Kierkegaard could not be classed as a freethinker and the Church was far from pleased with his writings, but he got a church funeral anyway. Why this gesture toward an unwelcome soul? The best guess is that Kierkegaard had a little money left over, enough to satisfy the priest, the undertaker, and to defray the costs of a so-called Christian burial. And, too, it is in keeping with the hypocrisy of Christendom.
THE EFFECT OF HIS ATTACK
Kierkegaard was not out to upset the Church organization or to form a new religion. Apparently he was not interested in doctrine. His attack was directed, not against the teachings of the clergy, but against their not practicing what they preached. As powerful as his attack was, it for the most part fell on deaf ears. People looked upon it with indifference. They regarded his attack as morbid. Writers spoke of him as manio-depressive and said that his principles were far from spotless. The translator of his book, Walter Lowrie, writes: “I did not need the satire of Kierkegaard to suggest to my mind the doubt whether it can rightly be called a ‘Christian land.’ I note that in our last census 48 per cent of the population preferred to say that they were Christians; but it is sure that many, nobody knows how many, made this answer only because they could think of no other religion to name; and the leaders of all the Christian groups reckon that, alas, hardly half that number have any connection whatever with any Church. It is well understood, too, that in intellectual circles the percentage of professing Christians is far smaller. It is a curious coincidence that in ‘atheistic’ Russia exactly 48 per cent reported themselves in the last census as ‘believers.’ But we must understand that this figure is a minimum, seeing that in Russia it is inconvenient, if not perilous, to call oneself a Christian. Having just now returned from Mexico I am impressed by the fact that in this state which is politically non-Christian 98 per cent would profess themselves Christians. I do not need Kierkegaard to tell me that it is a muddled world in which we live.”
Doubtless, people need more than to be told they are wrong. They must be helped and directed in the right way. This can be done only by the spirit of the Almighty under the leadership of Jesus Christ.