{"id":59933,"date":"2017-05-15T12:22:45","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T16:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=59933"},"modified":"2017-05-15T18:57:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T22:57:47","slug":"cc-elizabeth-palmer-on-stephen-backhouses-new-biography-kierkegaard-and-his-gifts-for-the-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=59933","title":{"rendered":"(CC) Elizabeth Palmer on Stephen Backhouse&#8217;s new biography&#8211;Kierkegaard and his gifts for the church"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Kierkegaard, born OTD in 1813, on why we conform, the individual vs. the crowd, and the minority&#39;s power <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/fAqSENFUyz\">https:\/\/t.co\/fAqSENFUyz<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/uKzxLRKN93\">pic.twitter.com\/uKzxLRKN93<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Brain Pickings (@brainpickings) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/brainpickings\/status\/860631212808962048\">May 5, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The second gift Kierkegaard gives the church is the withering power of his attacks on the established church in Denmark, including its dominant theology, its institutional structure, and its pastors. This stance is the focus of Kierkegaard\u2019s polemical writings in which he became enmeshed during the last years of his life. He was offended by a theology that turned Christianity into a form of philosophical Hegelianism (Kierkegaard\u2019s charge against the popular professor H. L. Martensen), by culturally and politically sanctioned church leaders (embodied for Kierkegaard by Bishop J. P. Mynster), and by anti-institutional populist forms of religion that made an idol of the masses (Kierkegaard\u2019s view of the pastor-educator Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig). As Kierkegaard saw it, these manifestations of bourgeois faith lured Danes away from Jesus\u2019 radical call to discipleship. Caught up in the crowd of a culturally sanctioned faith, Christians were saved from the offensive but necessary movement of throwing themselves as sinners on God\u2019s mercy.<\/p>\n<p>Although Christianity in 21st-century America is far from that of 19th-century Denmark, it is not only in Kierkegaard\u2019s day that pastors were guilty of preaching in a way that \u201ctones down, veils, suppresses, omits some of what is most decisively Christian\u201d (as Kierkegaard put it in an 1854 newspaper article following Mynster\u2019s death). Refusing on his deathbed to receive holy communion from a clergyman, Kierkegaard complained about a church that was beholden to the state, a church in which \u201cthe pastors are civil servants of the Crown.\u201d Today the co-opting of the church comes from other directions. Fear of numerical decline, nostalgia for the way things used to be, or adherence to a political agenda exerts its own pressure toward conformity and security.<\/p>\n<p>And clergy are not the only ones Kierkegaard faults. Pews as well as pulpits are filled with religious complacency:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The New Testament is very easy to understand. But we human beings are really a bunch of scheming swindlers; we pretend to be unable to understand it because we understand very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly at once. . . . I open the N.T. and read: \u201cIf you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come and follow me.\u201d Good God, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the pensioners, the whole race no less, would be almost beggars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.christiancentury.org\/review\/kierkegaard-and-his-gifts-church\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kierkegaard, born OTD in 1813, on why we conform, the individual vs. the crowd, and the minority&#39;s power https:\/\/t.co\/fAqSENFUyz pic.twitter.com\/uKzxLRKN93 &mdash; Brain Pickings (@brainpickings) May 5, 2017 The second gift Kierkegaard gives the church is the withering power of his<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=59933\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,186,451,117,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-church-history","category-denmark","category-philosophy","category-religion-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59933"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59951,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59933\/revisions\/59951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}