Soren Kierkegaard

“externality” has been abandoned and people have consigned “being a
Christian to inwardness,” which means that “a universal ‘paid in full’ has
been given and received for all of us. It is settled. We are all Christians, in
exactly the same sense that we are all human beings.”
Anti-Climacus gives detailed consideration to how inwardness could be
unmasked as nothing but the empty posturings of a pretended piety; to this
end, he assembles entire catalogs of usable tactics and then settles on a rela-
tively simple model: “Ought it not be possible to break this secrecy and
make things somewhat manifest without presuming to become the Knower
of Hearts [that is, God; see Acts 15:8]? Yes, indeed! How, then? Quite
simply by letting a person, speaking only for himself, confess Christ in the
midst of Christendom. He does not judge a single person, far from it; but
many people will be made manifest by the way in which they judge him.”
If we ignore that fact that this entire business is not as easily done as we
might think at first glance, the maneuver is dependent on a rather direct
communication that is supposed to reveal indirectly the presence of the
truth—or more likely—of untruth in “Christendom.” And if we object
that,afterall,this“confessingofChrist”hastakenplaceSundayafterSunday
ever since Christianity was introduced into the country, then we have
missed the point. For to confess Christ is in fact identical with being an
“imitator, though not the sort of decorated, elegant imitator who brings
profit to the firm, presenting Christ as someone who suffered many, many
centuries ago. No, to be an imitator is to make your life as like his as a
human life can be.” Therefore what the times need is not a Mynster, a
Martensen, a Grundtvig, or any of the other ecclesiastical shopkeepers. On
the contrary, they need a “witness, an informer, a spy, or whatever you
want to call him, a person who in unconditional obedience and—in accor-
dance with unconditional obedience, by being persecuted, by suffering, by
dying—keeps the established order in suspense.”
We do not need to read the fine print in this job description to see that
the person who fits the advertisement is a martyr. And if any doubts remain,
the text provides additional information: “Everything that furnishes the
standard of measure for unconditionality iseo ipsothe sacrifice.” So there
ought not be any further doubt aboutthat. Things become more doubtful,
of course, if we think a bit more about this advertisement, because even
though Anti-Climacus’s idea is quite cunning, it is also marred by one little
speck: The only way it can be put into practice is in real life—and with
death as its consequence.
The problem is not only who is to be executed; it is also uncertain who
will be the executioner. This is made clear in this fragment of dialogue:
“‘How unreasonable,’ I hear someone say, ‘how unreasonable, it is of course