Soren Kierkegaard

I wager it’s the latter.” Kierkegaard felt pushed aside, rejected, and humili-
ated, so there was a certain predictability to his evaluation of Martensen’s
treatise on dogmatics. Here is one of Kierkegaard’s first reactions: “While
the whole of existence is disintegrating, while everyone can see that all
this about millions of Christians is make-believe, that it is more likely that
Christianity has disappeared from the earth—Martensen sits there and puts
together a system of dogmatics.” And the system itself is nothing to brag
about: “It is really ridiculous! Now we have had this talk of system and
scientific scholarship, and scientific scholarship, et cetera—so finally the
Systemcomes. GreatGod andFather!My mostpopular pieceismore rigor-
ous in its conceptual definitions, and my pseudonym Joh. Climacus is seven
times more rigorous in his conceptual definitions.”
Kierkegaard’s contempt for his old tutor, who had tried to drum the
principles of dogmatics into his head ten years earlier, knew almost no
bounds: “The essential thinker always states an issue in its most extreme
form; this is precisely what is brilliant, and only a few can follow him in
this. Then the professor comes and takes the ‘paradox’ away. A great many
people, almost the entire multitude, can understand him, and so people
think that now the truth has become truer!... Every essential thinker can
only view the professor comically. The professor is what Leporello is in
relation to Don Giovanni.” At one moment theDogmaticsmakes a show of
too much scientific scholarship, at the next moment this same scientific
scholarship makes a show of its absence: “Martensen does not have one
single category. There is no more scientific scholarship in hisDogmatics
than in Mynster’s sermons”; indeed, “the only scientific scholarship I have
detected is that it is divided up into §§s.” In his memoirs Martensen repaid
Kierkegaard’s doubt about his scholarly abilities with the following remarks
about Kierkegaard: “I also assume that he was unsuited to do scholarly com-
bat in theology, because he was suited only to fight in quasi-poetic, humor-
ous circumstances, in which he could make use of playful discourse and
flank attacks. He did not have the gift for instructive and dogmatic dis-
course, which explains why he continually polemicizes against ‘the assistant
professors,’ whom he loathed.”
Even though Kierkegaard had a very well-developed sensitivity to even
the least blemish in Martensen’s argument, it was not so much the details
as the disparity between the lifestyle of the dogmatist, on the one hand, and
his dogmatics, on the other, that made the ink in Kierkegaard’s pen boil
over. Andthe explanationof this isquite obvious: “Christianityeverywhere
tends toward the actual, toward being made into the actual, which is the
only medium to which it is truly related....Martensen... also talks of
how Christianity must be a life, an actual life—and now the reassurances