Soren Kierkegaard

Son—that we know no more of true Christianity than does an unbelieving
Jew. But, far from frightening us, it should rather make us happy to be
mocked for the sake of Christ.” The next issue ofThe Momentdid not make
direct mention of Grundtvig, but there was a passage about those who are
false in their honesty, those who merely pay lip service, which might have
been a little greeting to the Vartov congregation. Whatever Kierkegaard
had intended, Grundtvig felt stung by it, and in hisElementary Christian
Teachingshe made it clear how wounded he had been at Kierkegaard’s accu-
sation of being “the worst of all of them in the den of thieves.” In a sermon
delivered on September 16, Grundtvig resumed his criticisms of Kierke-
gaard’s campaign: “And as they become increasingly clever and skillful in
their arts, these slanderers of Our Lord Jesus Christ will impart the appear-
ance of truth to their slander by misusing and distorting the Christians’ own
Holy Scripture, the so-called ‘New Testament,’ by lumping together even
the most earnest and upright Christians with all the thousands and millions
who are lured or threatened into getting themselves baptized and who call
themselves Christians, who of course possess only the empty name.” By
now, Kierkegaard was no longer merely one of “the slanderers of Jesus
Christ,” he was an accomplice of “the Father of Lies and the Prince of
Darkness, the Standard-Bearer of Death, who of course pretends to be the
Angel of Light, who confuses his adherents with the appearance of clarity
and with all sorts of brilliant delusions, but nevertheless kills everything
human in them, leading them to the outer darkness, where there is weeping
and gnashing of teeth.”
Grundtvig’s rejection here reached its zenith—it was certainly difficult to
get any more extreme than this! His subsequent sermons contained occa-
sional allusions to articles that had appeared inThe Moment, but no more
than that. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s campaign made a powerful impression
on Grundtvig, as can be seen in hisElementary Christian Teachings, the first
portions of which were written while Kierkegaard’s rage was at its wildest.
This is clear, for example, in the section titled “The Christianity of the New
Testament,” where Grundtvig wrote about a “remarkable hairsplitter,” who
presupposes “thepossibletruth of Christianity.” But, as Grundtvig argued,
“if one does not want to be compelled to grant that the hair splitter is
right, one will have to begin by oneself abandoning the backwards way of
thinking, according to whichthe book, ‘the New Testament,’ is supposedly
the true source ofChristianity, itsfoundation,oritsrule of faith. Because this
is the decisive point for the hairsplitter as the judge of Christianity and the
tormentor of pastors, who must either prove his own arguments wrong or
stand as the manifestenemyanddenierofChristianity.”