Had my favorite Kierkegaard books at work - now that I can flip through them, a few thoughts that I think may well be relevant to the discussion:
“Just let this truth be said and heard: that ‘sensibleness’, whose opinion is tha the requireemnt must be modeled according to the people, and Christianity, whose position is that people must be remodeled according to the requireemnt, (or that in any case the unconditioned requirement must be unconditionally affirmed)… that these two, sensibleness and Christianity, cannot come to an understanding with each other.”
“Even if not one single person wants to accept it, Christianity remains unchanged; it does not yield a jot or tittle; if everyone were to accept it, not a jot or tittle may be changed.”
“What stands between Christianity and people in these sensible tims is that they have lost the conception of the unconditioned requirement, that they cannot get it into their heads why the requirement is the unconditioned… that the unconditioned has become for them the impractical, a foolishness, a ridiculousness, so that they, mutinously or conceitedly, reverse the relation, seek the fault in the requirement and themselves become the claimants who demand that the requirement be changed.”
“This is why we human beings, sly as always with regard to God and divine truth, have directed all our attention to understanding, to knowing. We make out as if the difficulty were there, and as if it would follow naturally that if we only understand the right it follows automatically that we do it. What a grievous misunderstanding or what a sly fabrication! … Also in our day there is talk about this, that Christianity is not to be expounded artificially, bombasticaly, but simply – and in the exchange of ideas they fight about it, they write books about it, it becomes a branch of scholarship all its own, and perhaps one even makes it into a livelihod and becomes a professor in the subject, omitting or forgetting that the real simplicity, the truly simple exposition of the esentially Christian is - to do it.”
"It is true that some people have doubted the Ascension. yes, but who has doubted? I wnder, have any of those doubted whose lives bore the marks of imitation? I wonder, have any of those doubted who had orsaken all to follow Christ/ I wonder, have any of those who doubted, were they marked by persecution (and when imitation is a given, this follows)? No, not one of them.
“My listener, along which way are you walking in this life? Remember something that I say to myself: It is not true of every narrow way that Christ is that way or that it leads to heaven.”
“If God’s Word for you is merely a doctrine, smething impersonal and objective, then it is no mirror. An objective doctrine cannot be called a mirror; it is just as impossible to look at yourself in an objective doctrine as to look at yourself in a wall.”
“Then when the parable ends and Christ says to the Pharisee, ‘Go and do likewise,’ you shall say to yourself, 'It is I to whom this is addressed–away at once!”
'i thereby also make sure that God’s Word cannot take hld of me because I do not place myself in any personal (subjective) relation to the Word, but on the contrary…change the Word into an impersonal something (the objective, an objective doctrine, etc.), to which I - both earnest and cultured! - relate myself objectively… No, no, no! When you read God’s Word, in everything you red, continually say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking, it is I about whom it is speaking—this is earnestness; precisely this is earnestness."
“To be alone with Holy Scripture! I dare not! If I open it–any passage–it traps me at once; it asks me (indeed, it is as if it were God himself who asked me): Have you done what you read there? And then, then–yes, then I am trapped. Then either straightway into action–or immediately a humbling admission.”
“One can defend oneself against God’s Word in a quite different way. Take Holy Scripture, lock your door–but then take ten dictionaries, twenty-five comentaries, then you can read it, just as calmly and coolly as you read newspaper advertising. If, a you sit there reading a passage, you happen, curiously enough, to get the idea: “Have I done this? Do I act according to this?”… then the danger is still not very great. “Look, perhaps there are several variations, and perhaps a new manuscript has just been found… and the prospect of new variations, and perhaps there are five interpreters with one opinion and seven with another and two wth a strange opinion and three who are wavering or have no opinion and I myself am not absolutely sure about the meaning of this passage…” Such a person does not get into the awkward position I am in: either to have to comply with the Word immediately or at least to be obliged to make a humbling confession. No, he is calm and says, ‘There is no problem as far as I am concerne; I certainly intend to comply–as soon as the discrepancies are ironed out and the interpreters agree fairly well.’ Aha! That certainly will not be for a long time yet. The man succeeded, however, in obscuring the fact that the error is in him, that it is he who has no desire to deny flesh and blood and to comply with God’s Word. What a tragic misuse of scholarship, that it is made so easy for people to deceive themselves!”
Seems rather notorious.
