In Chapter 1 of this book I argued that Kierkegaard's claim that his authorship should be understood as one devoted to the service of Christianity is defensible, and that this provides a valuable standpoint for reading that authorship. However, I also claimed that for Kierkegaard the primary problems that modern intellectuals have with Christian faith stem from a failure to understand the nature of human existence, and thus Kierkegaard saw the need to tackle once more the basic questions about existence. Christianity is itself a way of existing, and it is an answer to questions posed by human existence. Those who do not understand the questions will not grasp the significance of any purported answers to those questions. So, even though Kierkegaard's own motivation may have been in the service of Christianity, the descriptions Kierkegaard offers about the structure of human existence as well as the “spheres” of existence are of interest to those who do not share his Christian faith.

Much of what Kierkegaard has to say is therefore interesting to different people for different kinds of reasons. For example, his description of the natural religious life that I examined in the previous chapter will be interesting to people who want to understand the phenomenon of religiousness, regardless of their own religious standpoint. However, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus presents his own analysis of “Religiousness A” as part of a general quest to understand how it is possible for an individual to become a Christian and what this might mean.