The Anarchē of Spirit^247through “this fundamental idea in Christianity, that which makes
it what it is: transformation of the will”.^32 The struggle of wills
with God is not, however, a struggle against a God who stands “in
the external, palpable sense [as] a power who, face to face with
me, asserts his rights.” Rather, the God-relationship is such that
the divine will is revealed in the Word of God—a disempowered
Word which one is free and responsible to read as one wills, which
one is free even to reject. As the Word which is spoken or read,
“God is not an external, palpable power who bangs the table in
front of me when I want to alter his will and says: No, stop! No,
in this sense it is almost as if he did not exist. It is left up to me”.^33
The individual is left free to respond to the Word, according to the
autonomy of human subjectivity. God withdraws, almost to the
point of non-existence.
Christendom, however, betrays such a vision of Christianity
by transposing its concern from the sphere of the Will and “into
the sphere of the intellectual” where it sublimates the subjective
struggles of the will into intellectual strivings with doctrine. While
Christendom supposes itself to have raised Christianity to the os-
tensibly objective sphere of the intellect, it chooses to forget that it
is ultimately towards the change of will “where Christianity aims
its deadly blow. But Christendom deftly dodges the blow—and
transposes everything into intellectuality”.^34 Within the sphere of
intellectuality, the existential freedom of the single individual as
subjective Spirit becomes absorbed within the speculative ideal of
objective Spirit, which Christendom’s intellectuals have inherited
from the Hegelian dream of viewing all providence sub species
aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). Christendom, as the de-
lusion of State Christianity, thereby betrays the New Testament
concern with the subjective freedom of the self before God by
“elevating” Spirit to the rarefied realm of intellect and objectivity.
Mindful of the extent to which Kierkegaard was aghast at the
excesses of the revolutionary mob, I wish now to move towards
a constructive reading of Kierkegaard in relation to his contem-
porary, Proudhon—a reading which elicits a potential spirit of
anarchy, or perhaps more aptly an anarchism of Spirit within
Kierkegaard’s writings. Christian anarchism, as Eller would have
it, is concerned with “theonomy” rather than “autonomy”: the