Soren Kierkegaard

criticizing inwardness as the hiding place of hypocrisy. This also had the
effect of forcing him into a wide-ranging and sometimes problematic justi-
fication of his theological position vis-a`-vis Luther, who, after all, had
“made sheer inwardness his highest spiritual principle,” a principle that,
according to Kierkegaard, “can become exceedingly dangerous, so that we
could sink to the absolutely, positively lowest level of paganism.”
Kierkegaard’s quarrel with his Reformation colleague concerned the re-
lation between faith and works, and it therefore particularly left its mark in
a series of questions about the status of inwardness in a modern, secularized
world where Christianity was no longer a scandalous reversal of all bour-
geois values, but was invisibly concealed in the single individual—or more
likely, repealed in the many! “Luther invented the idea that Christianity
exists in order to provide reassurance,” a rebellious Kierkegaard wrote in
1854, when he also proposed his own unreassuring alternative: “If the New
Testament is to decide what it means to be a true Christian, it would... be
just as impossible to be a true Christian quietly as to fire a cannon quietly.”