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even in spite of any implicit protestations to the contrary? Even
when—perhaps precisely when—writing more “directly” about
that which is avowedly most sacred to him, Kierkegaard con-
fesses himself to be “without authority”^20 before his solitary
readers.^21 Yet while his texts permit, even at times reward, high
degrees of hermeneutical freedom, I am also mindful of interpret-
ing Kierkegaard’s writings within the orbit of what he avowed to
be most central to his authorship: namely, the task of becoming
a Christian in Christendom. As such, I read Kierkegaard as ad-
dressing the hermeneutic question of what is meant, or required,
in becoming oneself as an individual before God; yet subjected to
the illusory heteronomy of a State-Church which behaves as if it
possessed the keys to the kingdom of heaven. What is required,
according to Kierkegaard’s prophetic and Socratic discourse, is
to disillusion oneself of this theatrical heteronomy, to become an
individual “self before God”, to become “Spirit” within—yet not
subject to—Christendom’s rule of “Spiritlessness”. Only in this is
one enabled to resist Christendom’s subtle and insidious opiate
against the very task of personally realising selfhood as individu-
alised Spirit.
I also remain mindful that I may stretch Kierkegaard’s arc of
essential concern beyond that with which he himself would have
been entirely comfortable. In pressing this horizon, I do not wish
to invoke the already self-renounced authority of “Kierkegaard”
by speaking in his name nor imposing views upon him which do
injustice to his own autonomy. In light of this caveat, it is not
my contention, for example, to reprise Vernard Eller’s impas-
sioned vision of Kierkegaard as an anarchist per se. I imagine
that Kierkegaard himself would have been uneasy, on a num-
ber of levels, about being proposed as providing leadership for
a twentieth-century “Neo-Sectarianism,” or “Kierkegaardian
Sectarianism.” Nonetheless, I empathise with Eller’s diagnosis that
“Not the creedal system of a Barth nor the philosophic-theologi-
cal system of a Tillich, but the free and unstructured approach of
a Kierkegaard is the only method appropriate to radical disciple-
ship.”^22 However, while I esteem Eller’s prophetic tonality and his
emphasis upon the “infinite qualitative difference” between the
human and the divine, my suspicion is that Kierkegaard himself