Justified True Belief

(●) The Dane who spent his health and his inheritance asking a country full of Christians whether any of them had actually become one. + Everyone in Copenhagen knew him by sight. A thin man with a stoop and an umbrella, walking the same streets every afternoon, stopping strangers to talk, going home to write until the candles burned down. For most of his life the city thought of him as a clever oddity. He thought of himself as a man with one question, and he asked it of a nation where every baby was baptized, every couple was married in church, and hardly anybody could remember a moment when becoming a Christian had cost them anything at all. Søren Kierkegaard is usually filed as the father of existentialism, and that is true as far as it goes. Existentialism is the habit of starting philosophy from the situation of a particular person who has to get up tomorrow and live, rather than from a theory about the universe in general, and the vocabulary that Heidegger, Sartre and Camus would make famous in the next century is largely his: anxiety, despair, dread, the leap, the crowd, the absurd. But he did not invent any of it in order to found a philosophy. He invented it because he thought Christianity had been turned into a piece of national furniture, and he wanted to make it strange again, hard again, and therefore possible again. He is on a Christian apologetics site because he is the sharpest diagnostician the church has of its own comfortable version, and because he forced a question that no argument for God can answer for you: what does it actually cost you to believe this. Here is the fact about him a reader tends to remember. Almost none of his famous books carry his name. Either/Or was published by "Victor Eremita," Fear and Trembling by "Johannes de Silentio," The Sickness unto Death by "Anti-Climacus," and Kierkegaard asked in print that anyone quoting these books quote the invented author rather than him. He paid the printers himself out of the money his father left him. The money ran out almost exactly when he did.

(●) 1813 AD: Born the last of seven children, to an old and prosperous father who believed God had a score to settle with him. + He was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813, in a large house on Nytorv, the square where the city’s courthouse stands. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was fifty-six. His mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, was forty-four and had once been a servant in that same house before the widowed master married her. The father is the whole weather of this childhood. He had begun as a poor boy in West Jutland, set to mind sheep on the open heath, and the story he told his sons was that one day out there, cold and alone, he had stood on a hillside and cursed God for the life he had been given. He then went to Copenhagen, was taken into an uncle’s wool business, made a considerable fortune, and retired at forty, and none of it ever persuaded him that the curse had been forgiven. The household he ran was pious, disciplined and heavy. Søren said later that he had heard far more about the Crucified and the martyrs than about the Christ child and the angels, and that he had never had the joy of being a child. Then the deaths came. Of the seven children, five died before their father did, and the father took this as the bill arriving. Only Søren and his eldest brother Peter Christian, later a bishop in the very state church Søren would attack, lived to bury him.

(●) 1835 AD: At twenty-two, in a fishing village on the Zealand coast, he wrote in his journal that what he needed was an idea to live and die for. + He had matriculated at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 to read theology, because his father wished it, and then for the better part of ten years he did almost everything except finish. He went to the theatre and the opera, ate in restaurants, bought expensive books, hired carriages, and ran up debts large enough that his father put him on an allowance. His mother died on 31 July 1834, and in the thousands of pages of journals he left he never once mentioned her. Then, in the summer of 1835, he went north to Gilleleje, a fishing village on the coast of Zealand, and on 1 August he made the journal entry that people have quoted ever since (Q1). It is not a conversion, and reading it as one flattens it. It is a young man on holiday noticing that he has been collecting knowledge the way other people collect furniture, filling the rooms and living in none of them, and that what he actually needs is something worth living and dying for. Somewhere in these years came what he called the great earthquake, the discovery of whatever it was in his father’s past that had made the old man so afraid. He never says outright what he learned, and the dating of the journal entry is disputed, so the honest account is that something in the family’s history broke over him and changed how he read everything. His father died on 9 August 1838. Within two years Søren had finally sat and passed his theology examination.

(●) 1840 AD: He proposed to Regine Olsen, and then set out to make her despise him. + He had first met her in May 1837, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-four, and he proposed on 8 September 1840. By his own account he knew almost immediately that he had made a mistake, and the reason he gives is his melancholy: he could not lift it, he would not hand it to her, and hiding it from her would be a lie told daily for fifty years. What he did next is the thing his admirers have never quite been able to defend. Rather than simply tell her, he acted the part of a shallow, faithless man in order to make the break look like his fault and to leave her free of it. He returned the ring in August 1841, and the engagement finally ended on 11 October. He defended his master’s dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, on 29 September, and two weeks after the break he took the boat to Berlin, where he sat through Schelling’s celebrated lectures, was thoroughly disappointed by them, and came home in March 1842 to write. He never married, never stopped writing about her in his journals, and made a will leaving everything he had to "Mrs. Regine Schlegel," on the ground that an engagement bound him exactly as a marriage would have. She had married Johan Frederik Schlegel in 1847, and by the time Kierkegaard died the couple had sailed for the Danish West Indies, where Schlegel was governor. Her husband declined the inheritance.

(●) 1843 AD: In a single year he published four books under four invented names, and paid the printers out of his own pocket. + Either/Or appeared on 20 February 1843 and made him famous in Denmark overnight. Fear and Trembling and Repetition came out on the same day, 16 October, under two more invented authors, and alongside them, under his own name, went a small book of religious discourses. Over the next three years came Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety in 1844, Stages on Life’s Way in 1845, and in February 1846 the enormous Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The invented authors are not pen names in the ordinary sense, and this is worth getting right, because it changes how the books are read. A pen name hides an author. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are characters who hold positions he does not hold, so that a reader can live inside a view of life and feel where it gives way, instead of being told from the outside that it is wrong. He called this indirect communication, and he took the method from Socrates, who also refused to hand anybody a conclusion. Johannes Climacus, who wrote the Fragments and the Postscript, says flatly that he is not a Christian. Anti-Climacus, who wrote the two late books, stands at a height Kierkegaard said he had not himself reached. Quoting either one as "Kierkegaard says" is the commonest mistake made about him. He was living off his father’s money the whole time. He printed at his own expense, sold modestly, and treated the shrinking capital as a clock running down.

(●) 1846 AD: The Corsair, a satirical weekly, turned him into a public joke, and he gave up the quiet country parish he had been planning. + The Corsair was the funniest and most feared paper in Denmark, a weekly of satire and caricature edited by Meïr Goldschmidt, who happened to admire Kierkegaard enormously. At the end of 1845 one of its contributors published a clumsy review of Stages on Life’s Way, and Kierkegaard, who despised the anonymous press on principle, wrote back with a sting in the tail: he complained of being the only author in Danish literature never yet abused in The Corsair. Goldschmidt wrote long afterwards in his memoirs that he had looked for some sign the quarrel could be dropped and had found none. Then he turned the paper loose. For most of 1846 the caricaturists worked on his body and his clothes: the stoop, the thin legs, the umbrella, the trouser legs of unequal length. Children learned to shout after him in the street, and the nickname the city gave him was "Either/Or." It sounds trivial. He wrote hundreds of journal pages about it, and asked in one of them what being burned alive or broken on the wheel amounted to next to being grinned to death. He had been seriously planning to stop writing and take a rural pastorate. He now decided that leaving would look like running, and stayed. Out of that year came Two Ages, a book review whose last part turns into an anatomy of the age itself, and its target is what he called levelling: the way a public, a mass of anonymous people who are not answerable for anything, flattens every individual who tries to stand up out of it. He was among the first to see modern publicity clearly, decades before anybody had a name for it.

(●) 1847 AD: He put his own name back on the title page and wrote directly about Christian love. + Works of Love was published on 29 September 1847, signed, with no invented author standing between him and the reader. It is a long, patient book about what the commandment to love your neighbor actually requires, and it is the best answer to anyone who thinks Kierkegaard had nothing constructive to say (T4). Christian Discourses followed in 1848. Then came the two books he could not bring himself to sign. The Sickness unto Death appeared on 30 July 1849 and Practice in Christianity on 27 September 1850, both credited to Anti-Climacus, a name he chose to signal an author above him rather than below him, holding up a standard of Christian existence he did not claim to have met (T3, T5). In 1848 he also wrote The Point of View for My Work as an Author, an account of what the whole strange authorship had been for, and then declined to publish it. His brother Peter brought it out in 1859, four years after his death. He was not well, and the money was going. He knew both.

(●) 1855 AD: He spent his last year attacking the Danish state church, collapsed in the street with his fortune gone, and died at forty-two. + Bishop Jacob Peter Mynster, who had been his father’s pastor and friend, died on 30 January 1854. At the memorial service Hans Lassen Martensen, the theologian who would succeed him, described Mynster as a link in the holy chain of witnesses to the truth reaching back to the apostles. Kierkegaard thought a witness to the truth was somebody who suffered for the teaching, and that Mynster had been a comfortable and eloquent official who had suffered nothing. He wrote his reply at once and then, so that nobody could say he was interfering with the succession, put it in a drawer for ten months. It appeared in the newspaper Fædrelandet on 18 December 1854. What followed was the loudest year in Danish church history. Article after article, then his own one-man pamphlet, The Moment, of which nine numbers appeared between 24 May and 24 September 1855, with a tenth left finished in his desk. He wrote that the official worship of the state church was a forgery, and that a reader who simply stopped attending it would at least have one great sin the less, the sin of passing something off to God as New Testament Christianity when it was not. The language is savage, funny and unfair by turns, and he meant every line of it. On 2 October 1855 he fell in the street. He was carried to Frederiks Hospital, partly paralysed, and lived another six weeks. His friend Emil Boesen, a pastor, asked whether he wanted communion; he answered that he did, but from a layman rather than from a clergyman, and in the end he received none. He refused to see his brother Peter, who had come up from his country parish at Pedersborg and had to go home again. He died on 11 November 1855, aged forty-two, and the last of his father’s money had been spent. The state church buried him from the cathedral, and at the graveside his nephew Henrik Lund interrupted the service to protest that the church was claiming a man who had spent his last year denouncing it.

What He Taught

(T1) Truth that saves is truth a person has staked a life on, not truth a person has merely got right. + Picture two men in the same pew reciting the same creed. One of them means it in the way you mean it when you sign a mortgage. The other is thinking about lunch. Nothing whatever distinguishes them on paper. Every word matches. Kierkegaard’s claim is that something enormous distinguishes them anyway, and that Christianity is about that difference and almost nothing else. His word for what the first man has and the second lacks is inwardness. Inwardness is not private feeling, and it is not sincerity in the modern sense of meaning well; it is the extent to which a person’s whole self is actually staked on the words coming out of his mouth. Think of the mortgage again. You could read those papers aloud to a friend for practice and read the very same papers over to sign them, and only the second reading has your next thirty years in it. Not one word changes between the two. The slogan attached to inwardness is "truth is subjectivity," the title of the central chapter of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and it has been misread for a century and a half, so the misreading is worth clearing away first. He is not saying that you make something true by believing it hard enough, and he is not saying that one man’s God is as good as another’s. Subjectivity here is not opinion; it is the whole self actually related to what it claims. The claim concerns a certain kind of truth, the kind that decides how you live, and about that kind he says something uncomfortable: having the right answer while standing in no relation to it is itself a way of being wrong. A man can hold a correct account of the atonement the way he holds a correct account of the Danish tax code, filed, accurate, and touching nothing. Kierkegaard thinks that man has not yet begun. You might think, well, so much the worse for evidence, then. That is the standard objection and it misses him. He is not attacking the historical case for Christianity; he is saying that no amount of it, by itself, gets a person over the line, because the last step is not a further piece of information. Scripture says the same thing more briefly: "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves" (James 1:22). What he adds is a lifetime of noticing exactly how hearers deceive themselves.

(Q1) "What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die." + Source: journal entry written at Gilleleje, 1 August 1835 (Hong translation; Journals and Papers 5:5100, from Papirer I A 75). He was twenty-two, on holiday on the north coast of Zealand, five years into a theology degree he had barely started, and about to spend another five not finishing it. The entry is the seed of everything: not what must I know, but what must I do, and whose am I.

(T2) Faith begins where the calculating stops. + Fear and Trembling is a book about one man on a three-day walk. God has told Abraham: "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you" (Genesis 22:2). Kierkegaard makes you take the three days at walking pace, and the effect is to strip the story of its stained-glass calm. Sunday school has Abraham arriving. Kierkegaard has him setting out. Two figures are set side by side. The first he calls the knight of infinite resignation: the man who gives Isaac up completely, holds his grief with enormous dignity, and expects nothing back. That, Kierkegaard says, is as far as courage and philosophy can take anybody, and it is already more than most of us manage. The second is the knight of faith, and he does something stranger. He gives Isaac up just as completely, and at the same moment expects to receive him back, in this life, without being able to say how. That double movement is what Kierkegaard means by faith, and the phrase he uses for the second half is by virtue of the absurd, which the 1923 English version renders "on the strength of the absurd" (Q2). The absurd is not nonsense. It is what human reckoning can no longer underwrite, the point where the sums stop and only God is left holding the outcome. The letter to the Hebrews reads Abraham the same way: he went up the mountain reckoning that God could raise the dead (Hebrews 11:19). The hardest thing in the book is the phrase teleological suspension of the ethical, so here it is in plain words. Teleological means for the sake of an end; the ethical means the general moral rule everyone is under; suspension means held in abeyance. Kierkegaard is asking how a father who intends to kill his son can be the father of faith rather than a murderer, and his answer is that Abraham stands in a relation to God that the general rule cannot contain. Christians have argued about that answer ever since, and they should. What is easy to miss in the arguing is how tightly the book fences its own conclusion in. Abraham cannot explain himself to anybody, not to Sarah and not to Isaac. No one is permitted to imitate him. And Johannes de Silentio, the invented author whose name is on the title page, says outright that he cannot make the movement at all. It is a description of what faith costs, not a licence anybody may pick up.

(Q2) "And all the while he had faith, believing that God would not demand Isaac of him, though ready all the while to sacrifice him, should it be demanded of him. He believed this on the strength of the absurd; for there was no question of human calculation any longer." + Source: Fear and Trembling, "Preliminary Expectoration" (Hollander translation, 1923). The sentence before this one has Abraham mounting his ass and riding slowly on his way, which is the whole point in miniature: no rapture, no visible heroics, just an old man on a donkey, holding two things at once that cannot both be held.

(T3) Despair is not a passing mood but a self out of true with the God who made it. + A bicycle wheel that is out of true looks perfectly round when it is standing still. Spin it and it wobbles, and the wobble is not a mood the wheel is in. It is a fact about how the wheel is put together. That is roughly what The Sickness unto Death means by despair, and why the book insists that a cheerful man can be in despair, that most people are, and that not knowing it is itself one of the forms. The book opens with a famously knotted sentence about the self being a relation that relates itself to itself, and it repays the untangling, because underneath the tangle is something fairly simple. You are not merely a bundle of parts, a body and a mind and a history sitting in the same chair. You are the ongoing activity of holding those parts together as one life. And you did not set that activity going, any more than a wheel trues itself; there is a shape you were built to run in, and it was not you who decided what it was. Given that, there are three ways to run out of true, and only three. The first is to refuse the self you actually are, to spend your days wishing you had been handed somebody else’s. The second is its mirror image: to grip the self you are with both hands and insist on running it alone, on your own authority, as though you had made it. The third is simply to drift, never once noticing that there is a question here to be answered, and Kierkegaard thinks this last one is far and away the commonest and quietly the worst, since a man who does not know he is ill will never send for a doctor. The cure is not effort, and this is the turn that makes the book Christian rather than merely clever. A wheel cannot true itself. Despair ends only when the self stops trying to found itself and rests in the God who founded it (Q3). Notice what this does to the word sin. Sin here is not chiefly a list of things done wrong; it is this whole standing condition, before God, and its opposite is therefore not virtue but faith.

(Q3) "In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it." + Source: The Sickness unto Death, Part One, A, A (Hong translation, 1980). This is offered in the book as the formula for the state in which despair is completely rooted out, and the same sentence is repeated later as the definition of faith. Transparently is the load-bearing word: nothing hidden from God, and nothing held back from him.

(T4) Love that is commanded is the only love that can be relied on. + Ask why a man loves his wife and he will tell you about her: she is funny, she is kind, she was the only person who laughed at his terrible joke in 1998. Every one of those answers ties the love to something that can change, and some of them will. Kierkegaard’s point in Works of Love is not that this kind of love is bad. It is that it is not safe, because it rests on the beloved staying loveable and on the lover staying charmed. Then the commandment arrives: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:39). Two words in it do all the work. You shall makes love a duty, and a duty is precisely the thing that does not evaporate when the feeling does; it is why we trust a nurse on a night shift more than an enthusiast. Neighbor removes the choosing. The neighbor is not the person you picked; the neighbor is whoever is nearest, including the one who bores you, the one who has wronged you, and the one you would cross the road to avoid. Jesus puts the same knife in: "If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them" (Luke 6:32). So the commandment is not a colder substitute for real affection. It is what makes affection survivable. It secures love against every change, Kierkegaard says, and sets it free (Q4). And the book is careful about the direction of travel: you are not commanded to feel something on demand, you are commanded to act toward the person in front of you as the one God has given you to love, and the feeling has a way of following the obedience rather than leading it.

(Q4) "Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair." + Source: Works of Love, Part One, II.A, "You Shall Love" (Hong translation, 1995). Published under his own name in September 1847, six years after he had broken an engagement he could not explain. The book never mentions Regine, and it is hard to read the chapter on duty without hearing her in it.

(T5) A country where everyone is a Christian is a country where nobody has to become one. + In the Denmark he lived in, the baby was baptized, the boy was confirmed, the couple was married and the coffin was buried, all by a clergyman paid by the state, and the box marked Christian was ticked before anyone could read. Kierkegaard’s name for that arrangement is Christendom, and he uses the word as a diagnosis rather than a description: Christendom is what you get when a whole society has the label and nobody has to make the decision. His image for it is a hospital where the patients keep dying whatever the doctors try, because the fault is not in the treatments but in the building, which has gone bad in the walls. Change the hymn book, change the liturgy, add music: the air is still tainted. That is why he thought the state church could not be reformed from inside. The clergy were licensed officials of a kingdom, and a licensed official is exactly what a witness to the truth is not. Underneath the polemic sits the argument of Practice in Christianity, and it is the more interesting half. There is no such thing, that book says, as knowing Christ from a safe historical distance, because the person you would then be handling is not the person who lived. The Christ who invites you, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28), is the same lowly man who added, "And blessed is the one who is not offended by me" (Matthew 11:6). The invitation and the possibility of offence arrive together, and Paul says the same thing when he calls the message a stumbling block (1 Corinthians 1:23). To be contemporary with Christ, Kierkegaard’s term for encountering him without that protective distance, is to stand where the invitation can still be refused. Eighteen centuries of Christian civilization had made the refusal unthinkable, and in making it unthinkable had made the acceptance meaningless.

(Q5) "To such an extent, then, is the New Testament no longer true: the way is the broadest possible, the gate the widest possible, and we are all Christians." + Source: The Moment, no. II, section 5, "A Panegyric on the Human Race or Proof That the New Testament Is No Longer True" (Hollander translation, where the periodical is called The Present Moment, 1923). He has just quoted Jesus on the narrow gate and the hard way that few find (Matthew 7:14), and he sets beside it the broadest road in Denmark, the one everybody travels. The sarcasm is doing an argument: either the New Testament is describing something rare and costly, or the word Christian has come to mean nothing at all.

(Q6) "It signifies that every one, in silent inwardness before God, is to feel humility before what it means to be in the strictest sense a Christian; is to confess sincerely before God what his position is, so that he may worthily partake of the grace which is offered to every one who is not perfect, that is, to every one." + Source: Practice in Christianity, Part One, "The Moral" (Hollander translation, where the book is called Preparation for a Christian Life, 1923). The first part has spent itself raising the standard of Christian existence until nobody could pretend to meet it, and then it turns and ends on this, which is the sentence his angrier readers tend to skip. The demand is not there to condemn anyone. It is there so that a man stops calling himself a finished article and comes to grace as what he is. Much of what the next century made of him runs back through that sentence.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Theologians after the First World War took him as the name for the distance between God and man. + He was almost unknown outside Scandinavia when he died, and for fifty years he stayed that way. Two things ended the obscurity. German translations put him in front of readers that a Danish book was never going to reach, and then a war flattened the confident liberal theology that had assumed God and human progress were roughly headed in the same direction. In 1922 Karl Barth, a Swiss pastor who had spent ten years in the village parish of Safenwil and had just taken a chair at Göttingen, published the second edition of his commentary on Romans, and wrote in the preface that if he had a system it amounted to recognizing what Kierkegaard had called the infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity. Everything in that phrase hangs on the word qualitative. A quantitative difference is a difference of amount, the sort of difference there is between a child and a grown man: God would know more than we know, last longer, lift heavier things, and stand at the top of a ladder the rest of us are somewhere on. A qualitative difference is a difference of kind, and it means there is no ladder at all. God is not the far end of anything human, and no amount of moral progress or civilization or good intention moves anybody a rung nearer to him, because there are no rungs. He has to come down. That one sentence in a preface made Kierkegaard a founding name of the movement that followed, and Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr all worked in his shadow. Barth also grew wary of him. Accepting the Sonning Prize in Copenhagen in April 1963, he said that Kierkegaard was a teacher every theologian ought to pass through, and one nobody should settle down in, which is about as fair a verdict as the man is likely to get. The English-speaking world met him through the translations of Walter Lowrie, David Swenson and Alexander Dru in the 1930s and 1940s, and by then his vocabulary had escaped theology altogether. Anxiety, dread, despair, the single individual, the crowd, the leap: Heidegger, Sartre and Camus built a philosophy out of those words with the God taken out, and the label father of existentialism, which is how most people first hear his name, comes from that inheritance rather than from anything he set out to found.

(†) Christians who wanted a sleeping church awake have been using his diagnosis ever since. + The word Christendom is old, but turning it into a charge against a whole baptized society is his contribution to the church’s vocabulary, and it turned out to be portable. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in a Germany where the churches were making their peace with Hitler, read him closely, and his phrase cheap grace, grace preached as a possession rather than a summons, is the Danish argument in German clothes. Wherever a church has found itself established, respectable and unopposed, somebody has reached for Kierkegaard. Not everyone is grateful. Francis Schaeffer, writing for evangelical readers in the 1960s, made him the origin of the modern leap of faith and blamed him for a split between reason and belief that has cost the church dearly. The charge has a name: fideism, the view that faith needs no reasons at all and is free to hold what reason plainly forbids. If that is really what Kierkegaard taught, then he spent his life handing believers a permission slip to stop thinking, and Schaeffer was right to want it back. Philosophers such as C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal have worked out the reply at length, and it comes in three parts. For one thing, Kierkegaard’s absurd means what outruns human reckoning rather than what contradicts it, which is the distinction (T2) already turns on. For another, the man doing the arguing in the Postscript is Johannes Climacus, a pseudonym who says in his own pages that he is not a Christian, so quoting him as the author’s creed is a mistake before it is an objection. And the Fragments, so far from telling anyone to stop thinking, calls the paradox the passion of thought, the place reason presses hard against and cannot get past. The dispute is live and both sides have texts. What is not in dispute is the effect on ordinary readers. He is the writer people go to when the religion they grew up in has come to feel like furniture, and what they find is not an argument for God but a man asking, without much sympathy, what difference it has actually made to them.

(†) Where his own record will not bear the weight: a church he told his readers to walk out of, and a woman he set out to wound. + He was a Christian writer, and the ledger is still not clean. Four entries, all of them from what he himself did or wrote. - He ended by telling people to stay away. In the pamphlets of 1855 he moved past reform to withdrawal, urging readers who could not honestly call the state service New Testament Christianity simply to stop attending it, and on his deathbed he asked for communion from a layman rather than from any clergyman. Whatever is right about the diagnosis, the New Testament does not treat the gathered congregation as optional: "And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near" (Hebrews 10:24–25). A corrupted church is a reason to contend, and Christians across every tradition have judged that he stopped contending too soon. - The single individual crowds out the body. His deepest instinct is that a crowd is where responsibility goes to die, and he is often right about that. But Scripture does not treat the church as a crowd. It calls it a body with members who cannot do without one another: "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it" (1 Corinthians 12:27). He wrote again and again for the communion table, but nearly always to the single communicant kneeling at it, and there is little room in his pages for the congregation as something a Christian needs: preaching heard together, discipline, being answerable to other believers. - Regine. He did not simply break the engagement. He acted the part of a scoundrel in order to make her let go of him, and then, sixteen months later, published The Seducer’s Diary in a book the whole city was reading. He believed he was setting her free and he suffered for it every one of the fourteen years he had left. It was still a cruelty planned in advance and carried out on a young woman who had done nothing to deserve it, and the account he gives of his motives is the account of a man who has decided he is a special case. - He wrote in a way that let him disown what he had written. For seven years the books that made his name were published by invented authors whose positions he did not hold, and he asked in print that readers credit the pseudonym rather than him. He had reasons, and (T1) is one of them: a reader who is handed a conclusion has not made the movement. But a man teaching the church about honesty before God spent those years unable to be pinned to any particular sentence, and could always answer that Johannes Climacus said it. He seems to have felt the difficulty himself, and it did not stop him. The last two books of the pseudonymous years, the two that raise the standard highest, went out under Anti-Climacus rather than under his own name, on the stated ground that he had not reached that standard, and within four years he was in the newspapers demanding that everybody else stop hiding. None of this is why the church keeps him. It keeps him because he asked, as hard as anyone has, a question the New Testament asks too, and left almost nowhere to hide from it: what does it cost you, and what have you actually done about it.