Learn from a woman

In the second of his Speeches on Religion, Schleiermacher describes the ‘natal hour of everything living in religion’ in terms of an erotically charged description of how the self originates in a deep and joyous unity with the infinite life of the cosmos. This passage, with its strong Platonic resonances, has been described as a ‘love scene’¹ and the same description could be applied perhaps even more literally to a scene that epitomizes Kierkegaard's understanding of redemption. This is a scene that he takes directly from Luke 7 and on which he comments in five of his discourses, several times under the heading ‘The Sinful Woman’. As so often, Kierkegaard's interpretation of Scripture involves inventive re-narration and sometimes startling applications and before turning to his treatment of this love scene it may therefore be appropriate to remind ourselves first of Luke's own account:

This sinful woman makes her first appearance in Kierkegaard's authorship in the second of the two discourses on ‘Love hides a multitude of sins’ from 1843, published on the same day as Fear and Trembling and Repetition. This discourse has, of course, received minimal attention compared with these two works, which perhaps makes it all the more necessary to cite a comment from an early journal entry of February 1839, long before the authorship began, that ‘Fear and Trembling (cf. Phil 2:12) is not the primus motor in the Christian life, for that is love; but it is what the balance is in a clock – it keeps the Christian life ticking’ (SKS17/KJN2: EE:25). As the title of the discourse suggests, love is addressed precisely as a counter to sin and to the self's sense of struggling under a ‘multitude of sins’. It is just this conflict of love and the multitude of sins that comes to expression in the figure of the sinful woman:

Kierkegaard introduces this story with a reference to a hymn by one of the great Danish hymn-writers of the Pietistic tradition, H. A. Brorson, quoting the line ‘through the darts of sin to the rest of paradise’. The implied image is that of the sinful soul, expelled from Eden, but attempting to fight its way back to the lost paradise of a life with God, undeterred by the arrows fired by Satan to prevent this happening. Yet Satan is powerless against those ‘pure spirits’ who contemptuously tread down worldly joys and are ready to be ‘kissed, adorned and torn from worldly pleasures’ by God. The accusatory glances of the Pharisees are thus Satanic arrows aimed at preventing her from rediscovering the God-relationship she had lost through sin, but, lost in ‘love's work’, she seems not to notice them. Kierkegaard continues:

The unwillingness of those who are lost ‘in the service of pleasure’ to weep over their sins is precisely what keeps them in the grip of their bad habits and wrong ways of life. Of course, in modern Western culture, weeping is seen as something characteristically feminine, and Kierkegaard senses that this particular sinner is somehow better placed to weep herself out of herself and into love's repose than many men. In a later discourse, he will connect this with what he sees as another female trait, the ability to keep silent. Of course, ‘weeping’ may often be noisy and disruptive, but what Kierkegaard emphasizes is that it is a form of expression that is without words.

In The Diary of the Seducer, as we have heard, Johannes the Seducer describes woman as being-for-another, by which, of course, he means that women exist in order to be enjoyed by seducers such as himself.³Kierkegaard himself seems to take this definition seriously, but in another sense, namely, that it is precisely because of her disposition to be-for-another that woman is better placed than a man to relate to God in the mode most appropriate to the God-relationship: love. Weeping, silence, and being-for-another, then, become the distinctively ‘female’ attributes that are needed if, starting from where we are, in the midst of ‘a multitude of sins’, we are to experience and express the love of God. This is how Kierkegaard puts it in an upbuilding discourse published on its own in 1850 and, again, dedicated to the sinful woman of Luke 7.

Kierkegaard by no means intends to say that men too should not weep, should not be silent, and should not focus their entire being on the need to find forgiveness. On the contrary, it is the burden of his religious writings that they should indeed do these things. Just as the sinful woman found repose weeping at the feet of the Saviour so too should all of us, men and women, do likewise. And if women, by virtue of their essential being-for-another are all the more exposed to the lure of comparison, that same essential disposition means that true devotion is also something we are to learn from a woman. Here too, however, her sorrow over her sin and her weeping is, very precisely, an expression of her weakness, of the fact that she is unable to do anything about it except sorrow over it and weep. As Kierkegaard puts it, ‘She is entirely aware that she herself can do nothing. Therefore she doesn't give herself up to the passion of self-accusation by her cries, as if that might have brought salvation closer or might make her more well-pleasing. She does not exaggerate and, in truth, no one is able to indict her on that account. No, she does nothing. She is silent. She weeps’ (SKS12, 269/WA, 155–6). Brushing aside the view that weeping is, after all, doing something, he insists that ‘she was entirely aware . . . entirely aware that she herself was able to do absolutely nothing with regard to finding forgiveness – and He, who, as she fully understood, was unconditionally able to do everything’ (SKS12, 269/WA, 156). The formal openness of consciousness to transcendence and the fundamental dependence of existence on God remain incomplete as long as the ‘knowledge’ to which they point us remains at the purely cognitive level. But now, we see, tears, silence, and passion may force a way where theory is at an impasse.

In discussing his theology of creation,⁴ we saw how Kierkegaard several times used the image of a tranquil sea as a kind of transparent and reflective mass without weight, ‘a nothingness’ into which divine image is able to sink down, penetrate, and be reflected back without distortion or obscuration. In this way it becomes an image for the ‘nothing’ out of which God is continuously bringing forth the created world. In the perfection of their creaturely existence, the lily and the bird purely and spontaneously reflect the divine creative will, but human beings have the possibility of choosing to be otherwise than they are created to be or not choosing themselves as they are created to be. In this regard they are un-determined and may choose the independence that robs them of the freedom to be found in dependence on God. When they anxiously succumb to the (illusory) lure of independence they lose their possibility of purely and transparently reflecting back the divine glory in worship and unqualified praise and therefore cease to be the image of God. Therefore, the turbulent soul must learn, once more, to become like the lilies and the birds, to be as nothing, and, in that nothingness, give itself over to adoring the one on whom it infinitely and absolutely depends. What Kierkegaard now offers in the image of the sinful woman is what the images of the sea or of the lily and the bird supply only metaphorically, namely, a picture of what it might mean for a human being, an adult, existing person, to become as nothing and thereby to enable a human ‘repetition’ of creation in, with, and under our participation in a quantitatively accumulative history of sin and in relation to a history of actual individual sin.⁵But, precisely because this is a matter of a human being's self-annihilation it is not simply a matter of, as it were, the physics of light: it is a matter of free self-giving and free receptivity – in a word, of love. The nothingness manifested in the figure of the weeping sinful woman is, at the same time, and yet more fundamentally, also an expression of a virtuous circle of love: of her total love for the Saviour and of his totally accepting love for her.

To speak of nothingness without also speaking of love would, for Kierkegaard, be to remain caught in abstraction. In this respect we may say that there is a fundamental difference in his approach to nothingness from that of, e.g., Sartre and Heidegger, despite his significance for the development of existential concepts of nothingness. The crucial issue for Kierkegaard is whether the interrelationship of selfhood, nothingness, and Being allow for the emergence of a virtuous circle of love begetting love. This, however, seems essentially alien to the Sartrean insistence on the primacy of individual freedom and to Heidegger's concern for nothingness as potentially revelatory of Being.⁶ Kierkegaardian nothingness is what we throw ourselves into in love; becoming as nothing is the possibility of becoming able to love. But this is not to be understood as if we had first to annihilate the self so as to be in a fit state to practise love: rather, ‘nothing’ is simply how we are when we love, when we love so much that we become forgetful of self. Loving is trusting ourselves in utter vulnerability to the one whom we love and whom we hope to be loved by. Loving is being-in-relationship without defences.

Kierkegaard himself seems aware that some of the moves he is making here may seem unusual in a Protestant perspective. And this is not just a matter of his apparently prioritizing love over faith⁷: it is also a matter of whether he construes love as, in some way, meritorious with regard to the human God-relationship. In a further discourse on Luke 7:47, ‘One who is forgiven little loves little’, he considers the possible implication that it is in fact how we human beings love that determines whether or not we get forgiveness. His response is as follows:

This might not satisfy a staunch defender of the Augsburg Confession. Even though Kierkegaard may not want to regard ‘love’ as a ‘work’ but as manifesting a sense of gratitude and joy at forgiveness received, the capacity to receive forgiveness seems in some way to be conditioned or at least strengthened by a willingness to love. The one who is not willing to open his or her heart in love will not be able to receive the forgiveness that is offered. The theme of ‘appropriation’ runs through Kierkegaard's entire authorship, emphasizing that it is not enough to believe in the ‘correct’ doctrines but these doctrines must become a reality in the believer's heart and life: they must be lived, subjectively, passionately, and existentially. In order to appropriate the truth in the right way we must realize that our own lives and our existence itself are at stake in how we respond to the gift that God is offering. Of course, Kierkegaard too insists – and uses the sinful woman of Luke 7 to illustrate – that in relation to God we can do nothing, nothing but sit and weep. But aren't sitting and weeping, in their way, a kind of preparation? Isn't it actually rather hard work to become as nothing? As in Brorson's hymn, it seems to require us to fight our way against fearsome opposition – and images of struggle and warfare also play an important role in many discourses.⁸ However, because it is love we are talking about, what is important is precisely a relationship. Faith is neither something we simply have nor even something that God simply gives us. Faith arises in the context of a God-relationship and, for Kierkegaard, what makes it possible for faith to arise is, in the end, love.

If Kierkegaard's emphasis on the necessity of love on the part of the human being who is to receive forgiveness might draw suspicious looks from some sections of the Protestant world, he is also somewhat un-Protestant in his emphasis on the sacrament as a means of making concrete the possibility of our encountering this love and as the site at which the atonement is most effectively and even non-metaphorically communicated. In a further discourse on 1 Peter 4:8 he makes the following remarkable statement:

The believer who comes to the altar and receives the sacrament of forgiveness receives Christ himself and there, at the foot of the altar, essentially repeats the sinful woman's ‘action’ in sitting, weeping, and doing nothing but lose herself in hope and confidence in his love.

However, Kierkegaard is consistent not only with Protestant but with the broad stream of Christian dogmatics and iconography in giving a certain precedence to what is effected in and by Christ's death and this too is treated in his discussion of the sinful woman. Having over several pages eloquently portrayed her silent humility, sitting at the feet of the Saviour, weeping, and washing his feet with her hair, Kierkegaard adds that we now have a comfort that even she didn't have. Of course, it is natural to think how fortunate she was to actually hear Jesus himself, in the flesh, speak these words of forgiveness. How much more convincing, we might think, than when they are spoken by a priest or evangelist! But, Kierkegaard asks ‘when is it easiest to believe it and when is the comfort greatest: when the lover says “I will do it” or when he has done it?’ (SKS12, 272/WA, 159). What does he mean? Simply this: that for Christians the ultimate assurance of forgiveness rests in the belief that Christ died for our sins and that it is in his death that our redemption from sin is definitively secured. Unlike the woman, therefore, we have the assurance not only that Christ, in his lifetime, spoke of the forgiveness of sins but that he was also prepared to go the whole way and also to die for us. As he continues, ‘it is only when he has done it that doubt is impossible, as impossible as can possibly be, and it is only when Christ has been sacrificed as the atoning sacrifice that there is a comfort that makes it impossible to doubt the forgiveness of sins, as impossible as can possibly be, for it is a comfort that is only given those who believe’ (SKS12, 272/WA, 159–60). Here, Kierkegaard invokes a conventional Christian and perhaps especially Protestant rhetoric of atoning sacrifice, redemption, and faith – but note that the whole situation is set up precisely as a kind of love-scene and it is no coincidence that the analogy he draws in making this point (namely, that we have a comfort she didn't have) is the analogy of lovers' promises. Furthermore, the entire movement of his thought at this point is that, although he also uses the traditional atonement imagery of Christ making satisfaction for the sins of the world by means of his death,⁹ he nuances this in a manner quite distinct from that of classical versions of the Anselmian doctrine, not least that of Luther. For Kierkegaard, there is no question of the obedience of the Son placating the wrath of the offended Father. Rather, what we see in the Son is precisely the love of the Father, reaching out to and re-creating human beings in the divine image – doing so in love, through love, and for the sake of love.¹⁰

Love, then, is the ‘primus motor’, that both moves Christ to come to us as the agent of forgiveness and that also moves us to seek and be able to receive forgiveness. The pivotal role of love is perhaps especially clear in one of the very last discourses, in which Kierkegaard envisages the situation of those who go up to the altar and yet seem to receive no consolation from the act of communion. In attempting to speak encouragingly even to these, Kierkegaard takes note of use of the present tense in the saying ‘One who is forgiven little, loves little’. He writes:

The moment in which we begin to love is the moment when forgiveness becomes possible and, in the very specific context of the Friday communion service, this meant (to use an expression we have heard Kierkegaard use of his authorship as a whole) coming to rest ‘at the foot of the altar’, that is ready, open, and prepared to receive Christ in the form of the sacramental bread and wine, letting his body ‘literally’ cover our sin:

All of this is focused for Kierkegaard on the very particular, concrete, existential need of the self. As for Schleiermacher, it is not a question of atonement making good some defect in human nature, since the human subject is no longer conceived of as determined by any general ‘nature’. Rather, atonement is what brings about the possibility of the individual entering into a relationship of love with his or her creator through a concrete encounter with the person of the Redeemer, Jesus Christ – above all, as we have been seeing, in the sacrament of communion. As such the issue is not the classical Protestant issue of ‘righteousness’, conceived in forensic terms, but of an open and dynamic relationship in which love takes priority over justice. What the event of forgiveness effects is therefore not primarily acquittal from the just condemnation of a righteous divine judge but the healing and integration of the self. To recur to the definition of Spirit given at the beginning of The Sickness unto Death, the Kierkegaardian self is a complex of internal relationships that is grounded in what he there calls, ‘the power that posits it’, namely, God (SKS11, 129–30/SUD, 13–14). When the self falls away from this God-relationship or ceases to be aware of how it depends on it, it becomes vulnerable to multiple internal fissures and the polarities that define it start to fall apart. This process of disintegration leads to it ultimately becoming incapable of willing to be a self at all. Such despair and such sin amount to a fundamental self-hatred. And it is precisely this self-hatred that the love of God – our love for God and knowing ourselves to be loved by God – is directed to overcoming. In a searing passage in one of the late discourses, Kierkegaard very unusually writes in the first person and addresses himself not to his readers but to Christ and, in doing so, reveals both the depths of his own self-hatred and yet also his faith in the love of Christ as able to overwhelm him and to protect him from himself and his otherwise insuperable self-loathing:

Here we are reminded again of the accusing glances that the Pharisees direct at the sinful woman as she made her way towards Christ. Only what Kierkegaard now makes even clearer than in the first discourse in which she made her appearance is that these accusatory glances essentially originate in our own self-judgement and self-hatred. Therefore the first effect of love is simply what Paul Tillich called the ‘courage to accept acceptance’ and, on that basis, to find the courage to be who we really are and, as such, to be made ready and capable for the work we have to do in the world.¹² It is in relation to this that we are to understand the conclusion of The Sickness unto Death, that the most extreme form of despair is precisely to despair of the possibility of the forgiveness of sins, that is, to despair of the possibility of ever truly being able to accept oneself for what and as one is.

The Saviour

I have taken Kierkegaard's treatment of the sinful woman of Luke 7 as paradigmatic for his doctrine of redemption and I have described it as, in its way, a love scene. A love scene, of course, must involve at least two persons – or, perhaps, when it is a matter of erotic love, ideally two persons. In any case, this is true also of Kierkegaard's interpretation of Luke 7 as an icon of saving love. Even if it at first seems as if it is the woman who is most in focus – as the one we are to learn from – what we learn from her is, of course, to turn our gaze, like hers, to the Saviour himself. In terms of traditional devotional imagery (by no means unfamiliar to Kierkegaard), if she is and we are to become the beloved, who, then, is the lover?

In the first instance he is what Johannes Climacus calls ‘the god’ and, as such ‘the absolute paradox’. As Climacus insists many times, he means by this precisely that believers believe this particular individual human being to be immediately identical – one person – with the god. And even though their very names signify that Kierkegaard regarded Climacus and Anti-Climacus as occupying significantly different positions in relation to Christianity, they seem to be in essential agreement on this point too. As Anti-Climacus puts it, ‘blessed is the one who is not offended by him, who believes that Jesus Christ lived here on earth and that he was who he said he was, the lowly man, yet also God, the only-begotten of the Father’ (SKS12, 87/PT, 76). For Anti-Climacus as for Climacus this statement is made in the knowledge that there is an ‘infinite yawning difference between God and human beings’ (SKS12, 74/PT, 63), which is precisely what makes the statement that this ‘lowly man’ is ‘also God’ potentially offensive – and offence emerges as a major theme of Anti-Climacus's Practice in Christianity. Where Climacus speaks of the paradox, Anti-Climacus for his part invokes the ‘sign of contradiction’ as an equally dramatic figure for how Christ overturns all human concepts.

We have already seen how such claims are polemically positioned in relation to both conservative and radical versions of speculative theology and what Kierkegaard from early on saw as the ‘volatilization’ of the concrete individual personality of the Redeemer in favour of the ‘idea’ of the God-man. They have also been at the centre of a great deal of secondary literature, not least the attempt to make sense (or not) of the kind of claims that seem to be involved in Kierkegaard's insistence on paradox and on the immediate identification of God with a single human individual. Is Kierkegaard speaking rhetorically here in order to remind us that God is above rather than against reason?¹³ Or is Kierkegaardian faith the out-and-out irrationalism that many of his critics (and some supporters) have taken it to be? I do not wish to address such questions at any great length here, partly because they have been so extensively covered elsewhere, but also because the course of this study has brought us to the point at which it may be more fruitful to focus on another aspect of what Kierkegaard says about Christ, namely, about how his human life was fitting for one whose task was not just to convey the message of divine love but to make present the power and reality of that love in and to human lives. Of course, these tasks cannot ultimately de divided, insofar as what chiefly qualifies Christ to do this is, in Kierkegaard's view, that he is indeed God, i.e., God incarnate. The love he communicates to those who, like the sinful woman, are willing to receive it in love is the love of God, nothing less, and, as such, the love that is also manifest in our being made as creatures in constant receipt of every good and perfect gift from the creator. Creation and redemption do not reveal two different gods or two different loves, but one God and one love. His being God is the ontological ground of his redeeming work, i.e., it is a work that only God could do. Once more the parable of the King and the poor maiden seems apposite.

This identification is, for Kierkegaard, beyond proof. It cannot be demonstrated, only believed. Yet, at the same time, what we can learn from the lilies and the birds about the goodness of creaturely existence, what we know of our own failure to be how we were made to be and our consequent need of re-creation, and also what Scripture shows us of the life of Christ converge in such a way as to suggest that who Christ was in the Incarnation is appropriate to one who speaks and is the Word of divine love. That is to say, despite the unfathomable paradox of his divine being, and despite his transcendence over every theoretical schema, he lived as one who was love would have to live. This claim seems to bring Kierkegaard into the sphere of that most nineteenth-century of all theological undertakings, the quest for the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, it seems, Kierkegaard exemplified from the beginning what later theological generations would call the ‘flight from history’. Philosophical Fragments, for example, urges the irrelevance of historical research, since what is solely important about the Redeemer is that he is ‘the god’. Whilst a historical point of departure may be necessary insofar as redemption must be related to historically existing human beings, it is only a point of departure. If it is otherwise, then ‘that teacher is not the god, but only a Socrates’ (SKS4, 261/PF, 58). But ‘in a more concrete sense, the historical is indifferent’ (SKS4, 262/PF, 59). As he puts it in the concluding chapter of Fragments, ‘Even if the contemporary generation left behind nothing but these words: “We have believed that in the year such and such the God showed himself in the lowly form of a servant, lived and taught amongst us, and then died” – it would be more than enough’ (SKS4, 300/PF 104).

Apart from questions as to whether this is in fact sufficient for all that Christian faith has classically wanted to say of Christ, Fragments itself scarcely seems to hold too rigorously to such a self-denying ordinance. In the preceding chapter, where he is discussing the situation of the disciple who is contemporary with the God-man's appearance, Climacus, in what he refers to as a ‘poem’, offers an account of how the God will appear on earth if his appearance is to be ‘poetically’ correct. If he is to be a teacher who is more than Socratic, then he must appear himself, in his own person, otherwise the relationship remains on a purely human level where the Socratic is the highest (SKS4, 258/PF, 55). Yet, like the King wooing the poor maiden, he must also appear in such a way as not to overawe the one who is to be taught by him. Therefore, with an overt allusion to Philippians 2, he will humble himself, taking the form of a servant (SKS4, 259/PF, 56),¹⁴ and, in a further sequence of New Testament allusions, what this means is spelt out in terms of such a teacher being without a home or possessions, living like the birds of the air, unmarried, so absorbed in his work as not to seek after food or drink but ‘seeking only the love of the disciple’ (SKS4, 259/PF 56). Such a one, he suggests, will soon attract the attention of the crowd, especially of the lower classes. The wise will first want to subject him to a hair-splitting cross-examination, but all those who are willing to become learners will be his brothers and sisters. Although Climacus indicates that such a teacher will arouse opposition as well as a following, his narrative stops short of following the gospel narrative through to the passion.¹⁵ His point, he says, is that in this way ‘The appearance of the god is now the news of the day, in the market place, in people's houses, in the council meeting and in the ruler's palace’ (SKS4, 260/PF, 58), an event that is as remarkable as if ‘the god had let himself be born in an inn, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger' (SKS4, 260/PF, 58). But although this brief and somewhat curtailed ‘life of Christ’ goes beyond the minimalist statement of Chapter 5, we may still say that – not least with regard to its self-definition as a ‘poem’ – it involves a deliberate turning away from historical enquiry. Of course, there are polemical reasons for this, and, as Kierkegaard's later writings make clear, the figure of Christ presented by the gospels is a major focus of his religious thinking. If the discourses on the lilies and the birds invite us to a theocentric view of existence, Practice in Christianity, Judge for Yourselves, and other later works (including, of course, the discourses on the sinful woman) are decisively Christocentric and their Christocentrism is focused not just on the dogmatic identification of the man Jesus as Son of God (although this is presupposed) but also on the lived quality of his life. Kierkegaardian faith is ‘teleological’ in the exact sense that Schleiermacher gives to the term, namely, that it is focused on the person of the Redeemer.

Although Strauss's Life of Jesus seemed effectively to have swept away any religious interest in the historical details of Jesus' life, his work – paradigmatic as it was – was contemporaneous with an upsurge in reconstructions of the life of Jesus and the ‘Quest of the Historical Jesus’, as it would be called, would become one of the hallmarks of the theology (and especially of the German theology) of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ As has been mentioned, Kierkegaard is generally seen as having rejected this whole movement in advance. Yet, in 1849, he made the following entry in his journal:

A few notes later, he says further:

‘The little essay’ referred to here is the short work entitled ‘Has a Man the Right to let himself be put to Death for the Truth?’, but we may also see this project as coming to fulfilment in the quasi-biographical section of Practice in Christianity entitled ‘The Inviter’. Here, Kierkegaard succeeds in making the life of Christ ‘present and intimate’ not by historical reconstruction (as in the ‘life of Jesus’ movement) but by re-imagining the effect of that life if it were to be being lived today, in our contemporary world. In doing so, Kierkegaard offers a pioneering venture in what William Hamilton has called ‘the quest for the post-historical Jesus’,¹⁷ in which we might include such works as Dostoevsky's ‘legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ (and arguably also the novel The Idiot), Kazantzakis's Christ Recrucified, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, and Denis Arcand's movie Jesus of Montreal. In each of these the New Testament narrative of the life of Christ is recontextualized in relation to an alternative historical time and place, thus allowing the absolute existential possibility posed by the text to stand out from its contingent historical circumstances. In this spirit, Kierkegaard sets out to discuss Jesus ‘as contemporaries talk about a contemporary’ (SKS12, 54/PC, 40).

Where Johannes Climacus coyly refrained from naming Jesus as the subject of his abbreviated life of ‘the god's’ appearing on earth, Anti-Climacus makes clear that his is precisely about Jesus Christ, ‘a lowly man, born of a despised virgin, his father a carpenter’ (SKS12, 54/PC, 40). Yet, at the same time, this ‘lowly man’ asks to be believed on as God.¹⁸ Even though he performs miracles, these, in the context of the time, do not decisively reveal him as also God – although they do attract attention to him and require his contemporaries to take a stand in relation to him. But what sort of stand? Kierkegaard proceeds by picturing how each of a group of contemporaries – who are portrayed as very much his nineteenth-century contemporaries – might react to such a figure. He begins with the ‘clever and reasonable’ men who seem prepared to acknowledge the exceptional nature of this man but cannot concede his claim to be God. In fact they see his lowliness and his readiness to be servant of all, to the point of living like a beggar, to make it impossible to follow him (SKS12, 55–6/PC, 42–3). Or else they see the whole thing as a fantasy, as foolishness (as, he says, in many contemporary novels, where the good is represented by a ‘half-baked person’ [KS12, 58/PC, 43–4]), or as applying too high a standard to human life. We come next to a member of the clergy (SKS12, 59–61/PC, 46–8), who affirms that he is looking for a divine revelation, although not for the advent of the God himself in his own person. In any case, this man, despite giving himself out to be the long-awaited one, is as little like such a one as can be imagined. Moreover, his whole life-style bespeaks a judgement on established religion, whereas the one religious believers are expecting is the bringer of comfort and solace. As soon as the crowd realize that he also comes in judgement he will suffer the same fate as his predecessor (referring to the execution of John the Baptist). The cleric is followed by the philosopher who, of course, takes issue with the claim that a single individual human being can be God (SKS12, 61/PC, 48–9) and he in turn is followed by the statesman, who sees the danger Jesus poses to the state but believes that this can best be dealt with by doing nothing and let him fall a victim to his own excessive claims (SKS12, 61–2/PC, 49–50). The comfortable bourgeois follows the advice of Pastor Grønvald (given in the club on Monday, rather than from the pulpit) that it is only idle and feckless types who are ready to follow him (SKS12, 62–3/PC, 50–1). Finally, the mocker concludes that if the qualification for being God is to look exactly like everybody else, then we are all gods (SKS12, 63–4/PC, 51–2). Yet, concludes Anti-Climacus, it is this person, who is so systematically misrepresented, who is the one who invites ‘all who labour and are heavy laden’ to come to him and find rest.

This, Anti-Climacus says, constitutes the first part of his life. The second unfolds as might be predicted and he inevitably comes to be rejected and outcast, as the worldly-wise had foreseen. And so, he concludes, this is the end – not of the ‘sacred history as drawn up by the apostles and disciples who believed in him’ but of the ‘blasphemous history that is its counterpart’, that is, how his story looks when seen by the eyes of the world (SKS12, 68/PC). This is not the only ‘life of Jesus’ found in Kierkegaard's later writings, but it exemplifies how Kierkegaard saw that life as meaningful – not as the object of historical reconstruction, but as a contemporary challenge and call. As in many later texts, it is precisely the note of challenge and the possibility of offence that dominates the portrayal of Christ in Practice in Christianity. So too in the twenty-page ‘life of Jesus’ in the posthumously published Judge for Yourself (SV3, 184–201/FSE/JY, 160–79), it is the difference between a life such as His, dedicated to serving one Master (cf. Matthew: 6.24), and a worldly life split between multiple aims and values that is emphasized – and, again, so that his being rejected and put to death emerges as an inevitable outcome of the life he had led. At the same time, and as we read these narratives of the incommensurability between Christ and the totality of aims and values that constitutes ‘the world’, we must also bear in mind that this is the same Christ to whom the sinful woman comes in self-forgetful love and at whose feet she finds forgiveness and the assurance of unconditional love. He is judgement – but only for those who do not respond to the ‘call’ of love with and in love.

The response

Christ requires a response. That is part of the point of the commentary on ‘the Inviter’ in Practice in Christianity. And for Kierkegaard, that response is essentially threefold. The first, that we have seen exemplified in the sinful woman, is, in the power of love, to believe that despite his lowly appearance, despite his being ‘despised and rejected’ by human beings, and despite the potential offence of his claims about himself, he is able to give assurance as to the forgiveness of sins. Just as the ultimate sin is not being able to believe in the forgiveness of sins, faith in forgiveness is the basis of the believer's relation to Christ. In this regard, Kierkegaard is, we may say, classically Lutheran. Yet he also strikes a new note – or, more accurately, renews an older tradition preserved within Lutheranism in Pietism – in emphasizing the need for imitation. This becomes a major theme in the journals during what Ronald Gregor Smith has called ‘the last years’.¹⁹ As developed by Kierkegaard, it seems increasingly to involve conforming oneself to the pattern of Christ's suffering and death. The true disciple is one who suffers rejection as Christ was rejected. As in the experience of the early Church, the true Church is watered and nourished primarily by the blood of the martyrs. Many commentators have, unsurprisingly, seen this kind of emphasis as morbid – although it has to be said that much of what Kierkegaard says on the subject is in significant continuity with older Catholic tradition and with Pietist teaching and a contemporary Christian of any mainstream denomination who attempted to live out the values of Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ (a Catholic text popular amongst Pietists)²⁰ might well be viewed as peculiar by their fellow churchgoers.²¹ However, as the essay on ‘Has a Man the Right to let himself be put to Death for the Truth?’ argues, only one who, like Christ, can offer forgiveness to those who put him to death has such a right and the individual must in no way actively seek martyrdom. Furthermore, Kierkegaard's own primary point of reference with regard to martyrdom was what he experienced as his persecution by the satirical newspaper The Corsair, which he could wryly speak of as his ‘martyrdom of laughter’, acknowledging that, in the modern world, persecution might take more subtle forms than those seen in the Coliseum (SKS20/KJN4: NB10:42). Nevertheless, the lack of visible signs of persecution and suffering becomes one of the main criteria deployed by Kierkegaard in his final attack on established Christianity, in which the clergy are depicted as cannibals, living off the pickled bodies of the martyrs whilst doing nothing that would risk their own livelihoods or comfort (SKS13, 383–5/M, 321–3). Indeed, the starting-point of the attack was precisely Martensen's use of the phrase ‘witness to the truth’ with reference to the recently deceased Bishop Mynster, a man whose life, according to Kierkegaard, was completely alien to that of a genuine witness (SKS14, 123–6/M, 3–8). From Kierkegaard's perspective the distortion of language was confounded still further when Martensen himself was consecrated Bishop on the Feast of St Stephen, the proto-martyr (SKS13, 146–8/M, 25–7).

It is not my intention here to debate further the pros and cons of Kierkegaard's view of imitation, merely to note that, in the last phase of his authorship, it becomes the inescapable obverse of accepting the forgiveness offered and received in love.²² Crucial here is that ‘faith’ is not simply a noetic act but involves action on the part of the concretely existing individual. The believer must not be content simply to admire Christ, but believes by doing something. In the first instance, as we have been seeing, this means practising the imitation of Christ. However, if Christ is essentially understood as love, then imitation will not just be a matter of seeking to resemble the external pattern of Christ's life. Rather, it will require the believer, ‘to trust in his redeeming love and try his works to do’: in other words, imitation is not just a matter of religious exercises but of a basic commitment to a life lived in and as love. What love requires may not always be directly or obviously ‘religious’, but, for Kierkegaard, it will always be rooted in the relation to God given in Christ. As the prayer with which Works of Love opens asks, ‘How would it be possible to speak properly about love if you, the God of love, from whom comes all love in heaven and on earth, were forgotten?’ (SKS9, 12/WL, 3–4).

The title, Works of Love, indicates that love is not just a matter of inward sentiment, but something we have to do. Now it is certainly true that throughout that book he lays great emphasis on intention, on doing what we do for the right motive, on doing it in love and for love. But there is also always something to do. In order to show how inextricable both sides – intention and doing – really are Kierkegaard retells the story of the Good Samaritan. He asks: What if the Good Samaritan had not had anything with which to bind up the wounds of the man attacked by robbers? What if he had not had an ass on which to place him but had carried him as best he could on his shoulders? What if he had no money and the innkeeper would not take him in? What if the man had died in his hands? ‘Would he not then have been as merciful, just as merciful as that [other] good Samaritan?’ (SKS9, 314/WL, 317). Or else, what if there had been two men together who had been attacked and robbed, and whilst one of them could do nothing but lie there and groan, ‘the other forgot or overcame his own suffering in order to speak a mild or friendly word, or . . . struggled to where he could get a refreshing drink for the other, or, if both of them had been rendered speechless, one of them nevertheless sighed silently in prayer for the other’ (SKS9, 320–1/WL, 324) – wouldn't this be an act of mercy? Good intention is necessary if we are to consider an action ‘good’, and is fundamentally more important than securing good outcomes. As it stands the parable of the Good Samaritan has a happy ending but, Kierkegaard suggests, the Samaritan would have been just as praiseworthy if he hadn't been able to persuade the innkeeper to take the wounded man in or if he had died in his hands. Yet in any case, he will have done something. Similarly with the two wounded men. Perhaps all that the one who is motivated by mercy can do is to say a comforting word, but if that really is all he can do, he will nevertheless do it. And in the extreme case that he is physically incapable of doing anything, he will nevertheless pray – but Kierkegaard only adduces such an extreme case in order to underline the point that there is always something, no matter how little, we can be doing and ought to be doing for our fellow human beings.²³

Whether with regard to imitation or love, then, Kierkegaard's emphasis on believing is developed in terms of doing – what, in classical theological parlance, was termed sanctification, that is, living a holy life. And here, we may and perhaps need to say again, that if – as is all too likely – many of his expressions of what discipleship requires seem morbid, forced, or over-strained, these must be interpreted both in the light of the requirement of love and of faith in the possibility of forgiveness, even when all we can do to ‘earn’ it is to bring our sin to the feet of the Saviour and weep.