Soren Kierkegaard

ment whatever. Today I expect to have dinner with Count Knuth and a
little circle of friends.”
Kierkegaard would not only have been amused by Martensen’s easy tran-
sition from his ecclesiastical complaints to the aristocratic society he ex-
pected that evening, but he would also have taken delight in the fact that
here, indeed, was theadmissionhe had been seeking. Martensen had con-
firmed with his own eyes what Kierkegaard had criticized so volubly: The
situation in the church was miserable, the State Church was open to criti-
cism, and the major part of the clergy was not worth defending. It was to
Martensen’s credit that he acknowledged that this was how things were;
that he did not say so publicly made hypocrisy of his silence.
While Gude sat in idyllic surroundings on the island of Lolland, reading
the bishop’s letters, the March 22 issue ofFædrelandetappeared, containing
Kierkegaard’s concrete advice about what Martensen ought to do: “First
and foremost, and on the grandest possible scale, there must be a stop to all
the official—well-intentioned—untruth which (with the best of intentions)
conjures up and sustains the illusion that what is being preached is Christian-
ity, the Christianity of the New Testament....Thematter must be turned
this way: Away, away from all hallucinations, out with the truth, out with
it—We are not capable of being Christians in the New Testament sense.”
Four days later, on March 26, Kierkegaard picked up where he had left off:
“The religious situation of the country is: Christianity...does not exist at
all, which certainly just about everyone can see as well as I can. We have,
if you will, a full complement of bishops, deans, pastors. Learned, excep-
tionally learned, talented, gifted, well-meaning in the human sense, they all
declaim—well, very well, exceptionally well, or fairly well, indifferently,
poorly—but not one of them is in the character of the Christianity of the
New Testament, and is not even in the character of striving in the direction
of the Christianity of the New Testament.” Martensen would hardly have
agreed with Kierkegaard’s conclusions, but the two men could most likely
have agreed on the premises.
The conversation could not be continued, however, and two days later,
on March 28, yet another fragmentation bomb fell very close to the episco-
pal residence. “A Thesis—Just One Single Thesis. O, Luther, you had
ninety-five theses. How frightful! And yet in a more profound sense, the
more theses, the less frightful. This matter is far more frightful: There is
only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at
all. There is nothing here to reform. What matters here is to shed some light
on a Christian criminal offense that has persisted for centuries, practiced
(somewhat innocently or guiltily) by millions, whereby, while saying they
were perfecting Christianity, people have shrewdly attempted, little by lit-