"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

of the Church and staked the attainment of Christianity so high as
to drive all existing forms of it ad absurdum.

In his IndФvelse i Christendom "Preparation for a Christian Life"
and the somber Til SelvprФvelse "For a Self-Examation"
Kierkegaard returns to the attack with a powerful re-examination
of the whole question as to how far modern Christianity
corresponds to that of the Founder. Simply, but with grandiose
power, he works out in concrete instances the conception of
"contemporaneousness" gained in the "Final Postscript"; at the
same time demonstrating to all who have eyes to see, the
axiomatic connection between the doctrine of Propitiation and
Christ's life in debasement; that Christianity consists in absolutely
dying to the world; and that the Christianity which does not live up
to this is but a travesty on Christianity. We may think what we
Please about this counsel of perfection, and judge what we may
about the rather arbitrary choice of Scripture passages on which
Kierkegaard builds: no serious reader, no sincere Christian can
escape the searching of heart sure to follow this tremendous
arraignment of humanity false to its divine leader. There is nothing
more impressive in all modern literature than the gallery of
"opinions" voiced by those arrayed against Christ when on earth
and now as to what constitutes the "offense."

Kierkegaard had hesitated a long time before publishing the
"Preparation for a Christian Life." Authority-loving as he was, he
shrank from antagonizing the Church, as it was bound to do; and
more especially, from giving offense to its primate, the venerable
Bishop Mynster who had been his father's friend and spiritual
adviser, to whom he had himself always looked up with admiring
reverence, and whose sermons he had been in the habit of reading
at all times. Also, to be sure, he was restrained by the thought that
by publishing his book he would render Christianity well-night
unattainable to the weak and the simple and the afflicted who
certainly were in need of the consolations of Christianity without
any additional sufferings interposed and surely no reader of his
devotional works can be in doubt that he was the most
tender-hearted of men. In earlier, stronger times, he imagines, he
would have been made a martyr for his opinions; but was he
entitled to become a blood-witness he who realized more keenly
than any one that he himself was not a Christian in the strictest
sense? In his "Two Religious Treatises" he debates the question:
"Is it permissible for a man to let himself be killed for the truth?";
which is answered in the negative in "About the Difference
between a Genius and an Apostle" which consists in the Apostle's
speaking with authority. However, should not the truth be the most
important consideration? His journal during that time offers
abundant proof of the absolute earnestness with which he struggled
over the question.