The Wisdom of Kierkegaard: A Collection of Quotations on Faith and Life

The Wisdom of Kierkegaard

A Collection of Quotations on Faith and Life

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Clifford Williams

THE WISDOM OF KIERKEGAARD

A Collection of Quotations on Faith and Life

Copyright © 2009 Clifford Williams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-60608-485-4

eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7548-4

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A., and used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Abbreviations

Introduction

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J–K

L

M

N

O

P

Q–R

S

T

U–Z

Abbreviations

Citations in the text use the following abbreviations:

CD Christian Discourses

CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript

D The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard

EO Either/Or

EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

FSE For Self-Examination

FT Fear and Trembling

JFY Judge for Yourself!

JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers

PC Practice in Christianity

SLW Stages on Life’s Way

SUD The Sickness unto Death

TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions

UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits

WA Without Authority

WL Works of Love

Introduction

Tucked away in the complicated prose that fills many of Søren Kierkegaard’s books are numerous insightful declarations. They arrest the reader with their depth of understanding. They often are expressed in a lilting and lyrical manner. Encountering them makes working through the intricate prose eminently worthwhile.

This book contains 250 such passages. I have chosen them partly because they can be understood apart from their context and partly because they prompt the reader to think, Ah! That’s true. Many of them contain a twist that gives an incisive jab. Some are on themes for which Kierkegaard is well-known, but many are on a variety of other significant themes.

Søren Kierkegaard lived in Denmark from 1813 to 1855. The Danish church at that time was an official extension of the government. The pastors’ salaries were paid by the government, and citizens who wished to form alternative congregations were frowned upon. Kierkegaard thought that the Danish church had departed from the New Testament ideal. He thought, in fact, that the Danish church did not exemplify Christianity at all. So he made it his life’s aim to reintroduce Christianity into the church. This could not be done simply by restating the truths of Christianity, however, for those in the church regarded themselves as believers. They would have been offended at the implication, or direct charge, that they did not really believe. Reintroducing Christianity could be done, Kierkegaard thought, only indirectly. This meant that he would have to produce a psychological analysis of the causes of unbelief and describe extensively what genuine faith should be.

For Kierkegaard, the most important cause of unbelief, at least in Denmark, was individuals’ thoughtless identification with the church. His favorite term for the church was the crowd. What happens, he thought, is that individuals so identify with the crowd that they lose their own identity. In a sense they become one with the crowd. This means that what they think of as being their faith is not really theirs. It is the crowd’s faith.

Although Kierkegaard’s concern was for those in the Danish church, he has pinpointed a phenomenon that is universal. We humans find it alluring to identify with some group. In this identification we find security. The group is established and stable, so identifying with it gives us the sense of being established and stable. It is a fearful thing to stand alone. We would have nothing to back us up if we did, nothing to validate us. And we desperately need validation.

What Kierkegaard saw, then, is that in a religious context, we use this identification as a substitute for real faith. The identification is, in fact, a way of hiding from God. It is a way of evading the responsibility we need to take for our faith. And it is the most ruinous evasion possible, he asserted, partly because we do not know we have done it, and partly because it makes us think we have real faith when in fact we do not.

Faith, then, for Kierkegaard is something we must have for ourselves. To paraphrase one of his statements in Faith (p. 32), a group can do much for its members—it can give them security and a sense of belonging—but it cannot give them faith. Ultimately, we stand alone before God. And ultimately it is only we who can have faith.

Faith has a number of other features as well. Its inner core is earnestness. It exhibits searching restlessness. It springs from a longing for God. It rests on God’s grace. It requires being honest with oneself. It excises self-satisfaction. It results in adopting the right priorities.

Kierkegaard’s analysis of unbelief and his concern with the nature of faith form the context of the following passages. Some of the passages bear directly on these themes and some bear indirectly. All of the passages deal with what Kierkegaard designates the call from eternity. This call comes both early and late, and, as these passages amply demonstrate, it involves a wide variety of attitudes, desires, and motives.

I have given the passages titles and have alphabetized them. In addition, I have introduced each alphabetical section with a page of thoughts on one of the themes in the section. It is my hope, as it is Kierkegaard’s, that readers will be moved by his reflections to meditate deeply on what matters most in life.

A

We become anxious when we imagine what it would be like to be alone, Kierkegaard says—alone not just for a time and not just with respect to our friends and acquaintances, but overlooked by everyone and forgotten by God. In this aloneness, no one would notice us as we walked along a busy city sidewalk. We would