Soren Kierkegaard

Not only was it quite impressive to be compared to Luther, it was also
flattering to have the comparison made by Rudelbach, and Kierkegaard
made no secret of this fact when he responded with an article that appeared
inFædrelandeton January 31, 1851, under the heading “Occasioned by
a Remark by Dr. Rudelbach concerning Myself.” “Dr. R. possesses an
astonishing degree of erudition; from what I have heard, he is quite likely
the most learned man in Denmark,” Kierkegaard wrote, describing himself
as “a poor wretch with respect to learning and ‘scholarship’, who knows
enough arithmetic for domestic purposes.” This might be called higher-
order flirtation. Kierkegaard did admit that he was indeed a “hater of habit-
ual Christianity,” but habitual Christianity could assume various forms:
“And if there were no other choice, if the only choice was between this
sort of habitual Christianity—a worldly capriciousness that lives carefree,
imagining that it is Christian, perhaps without even having any impression
of what Christianity is—and the sort of habitual Christianity found among
sectarians, the awakened, the hyper-orthodox, the party-liners: If things
were as bad as this, I would unconditionally choose the former.”
Therefore,ifitwere amatterofthechurch’semancipation fromthestate,
Kierkegaard was definitely not interested, because he had never “fought for
the emancipation of ‘the Church’ any more than for the emancipation of
the Greenland trade, women, Jews, or for emancipation of any other sort.”
For Kierkegaard it was very important to separate his cause clearly from all
external institutions and organizations; his cause was internalization, not
externalization: “To the best of the abilities granted me, I have worked
diligently and honestly, and with more than a little sacrifice, for making
Christianity a matter of inward appropriation, both for myself and for other
people, to the extent that they are receptive. But precisely because I under-
stood from the very beginning that Christianity is inwardness, and that my
specific task was to make Christianity a matter of inward appropriation—
for this very reason, I have taken care, with an almost overly conscientious
scrupulousness, to ensure that no passage, not a sentence, not a line, not a
word,not asyllable, nota letterhas beenincluded thattends inthe direction
of suggesting changes in external arrangements.”
This little army of synonyms that Kierkegaard mustered to reinforce his
point was accompanied by the promise of a “reward to the person who can
point out, in all these many books, one single proposal that tends in the
direction of changes in external arrangements, or merely anything that
might resemble an allusion to such a proposal, even to the most nearsighted
person who looked at it from a distance.” These exhaustive assurances,
which run the risk of defeating their own purpose, betray the ambivalence
that was in fact present in Kierkegaard’s reply to Rudelbach. This was an