The Case for Christian Anarchism - part III

That single individual - amongst others

3. While the Christian ideal is, in part, the Christian community working together as an expression of the love for God and the love for the neighbour, we do not live in the Christian ideal; as such, Christians are called to create the Christian community that captures the ideal as best as is possible when within the world. The deliberation we must make between the immovable ideal presented in the Sermon on the Mount and the human condition of fallenness, where the Christian runs up against the non-Christian.

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   I rejoiced greatly that I have found some of your children walking in truth, as we received commandment from the Father. And now I plead with you, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment to you, but that which we have had from the beginning: that we love one another. This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it… Look to yourselves, that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward. (II John v. 4-6, 8)

I. What is love for the neighbour? To love the neighbour is to become the neighbour; in the time of crisis, to appear to the one who needs us and act as the Samaritan did. To love the neighbour is to see love in the neighbour before we act, to be prepared to meet the purpose of the Lord with trust and the force of the other with meekness. Love keeps no records of wrongs, but love sees the other “as they are”—in sin, in striving.

II. What is the Christian ideal? The Christian ideal is the community of believers living in communion with God and the other. “When we open the Bible we do not find a philosophy, a political statement, a metaphysic or even a religion. We find instead the promise of dialog, a personal word addressed to me, asking me what I am doing, hoping, fearing—and especially what I am.”¹ The community that can exist in that tension, on that state of exception: that is the Christian ideal and there is no blueprint. We did not choose one another; we are brought together in the freedom of Christ, ready to become whatever we are called to become.

III. What does it mean for the congregation to oppose “the Crowd”? In the “spiritual” economy of love², the individual is not faceless in “the Crowd” but held aloft by the ideal that separates them from the other qua crowd-temptation and brings them together as sojourners. “In Christ, Christianity is the single individual; here is the one and only single individual. In the apostle there is at once—community. But in this way, Christianity is transposed into an entirely different conceptual sphere. It is also this concept that has become the ruination of Christendom. This concept is responsible for the confusion that whole states, countries, nations, kingdoms are Christian.”³

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A prominent critique of our dear Melancholic Dane, locked away in his room with scripture in the silence of faith⁴, is that there is very little concerning ecclesiology or even communal faith in his work. It seems, in chasing the faith of den Enkelte, S. K.’s attempts to escape the idealist solipsism which he was resisting failed when he found himself in a Cartesian struggle against externality. In short, it's possible that he failed to find the ground on which to plant the church.

As many interpreters have imposed upon the corpus, it seems that the only way to bring Kierkegaardian thought into reality is by way of undermining the very anti-conformist repugnance directed towards “the Crowd” that protects the individual in his search for the God-relationship from the social conformity of “the ethical”. This is possibly best exemplified by two of S. K.’s most notable interpreters, Martin Heidegger and Emanuel Hirsch, yoking themselves to the burgeoning German nationalist movement in the form of the Nazi Party. Could it be, my reader, that this ardent commitment to something greater than yourself, the passionate external “drawing” of the religious-ethical sphere, can only ever lead to unthinking cruelty and violence against God’s creation? The moment one unlocks their door and steps out into the world, are we then drawn back into the very hatred that we are supposed to oppose through the freedom of Christ? Is, in the complexity of sociality, our faith a way for us to ironically invert the freedom of being “born again” that allows for an indifference towards the struggle of the world into an indifference towards the good?

It is, for this reason amongst others, that many Kierkegaardian thinkers have attempted to use S. K.’s radical deconstruction of Christendom in order to re-erect the structures of imposed Christianity in place of the radical freedom he saw in the shadow of a church spire. Failing to capture the role of the church in this reinterpretation of the bones of Christianity could lead us into the ugly and abusive use of liberal theology in order to erect an orthodoxy of Nachdenken⁵, setting us back to where we once stood but now armed with a self-confident illusion of radical individualism. Despite their collective agreement with the critique of Christendom, an array of thinkers have attempted to move beyond⁶ S. K.’s thought in the effort to resurrect the role of the ekklesia, the collective in worship, in light of this damning polemic. Our purpose, my reader, should not be to engage in a sullen comparison of S. K.’s notes on church and communal life against those who worked and preached downstream from him. That is the kind of investigation for a lecture hall which is otherwise lacking in its pursuit of an interesting puzzle. No, my reader, we are interested in proposing a mode by which den Enkelte fits with Menighed—how does faith protect us from “the Crowd” when we are gathered together?

The Christian Ideal

“The form of the world would be like—well, I know not with what I should liken it. It would resemble an enormous version of the town of Christenfeld.”⁷

Since the ascendancy of Marxism, there has been a preference for “materialist analysis”⁸ in left-facing movements. The ideal, quickly dispatched along with Hegel’s fantastical structure of his imagination, became unsuitable for laying out a society and its teleological path that we would walk; as had been shown since the times of Plato, this approach seems only to lead to the imposition of a tyrannical ideal onto an unwitting and unwilling population. While this ethos certainly played a part in the root of Constantinianism⁹, we now live in an age where this brutish form of the Christian “civilizing mission” should be long discarded. There is nothing more to say on the matter aside from that we were duped, the terrible sinners we are, into believing that the way of the world would give itself so readily to the goals of the Christian faith; that the sword, when adorned with crucifixes and regalia (which is, of course, the only change that a Christian transformation would require), would come under the power of not only God but also his faithful. We had failed with the ideal, therefore either proving ourselves incapable of civilising those who do not know the Lord or showing the need for a different approach.

Following from that, there was an attractiveness to a “materialist” understanding of Christianity—it is, of course, “the demand of the times” to accept methodological naturalism and materialist thought if we want to be accepted into the prattling intellectualism of theoretical politics, therefore we should only expect that our prattling should follow suit and take up a position concerned with the biopolitical engineering of a populace. Whatever we say of the Christian faith, what matters is results for the people we approve, displays of power on behalf of the people we approve, the causes we promote—that general line of thinking. Such a thought permeates the theory and praxis of the church in its “radical” sections, offering a message of domination from the position of weakness, allowing the grim reality of amoral materialism to stay at arm’s length and inviting in the idealistic inversion of said materialism to judge those who at least had the passion to do something in this world from a position of intellectual sanctity. Love becomes the inversion of itself in the shallow pity for the poor and wretched, faith becomes a matter of democratic workplaces, Christianity becomes a sorry admission in the midst of the credible. Leave aside these silly motions of faith, resurrection, eternal life, Christian freedom, perfection in love—these are matters for poets, not those who wish to rule on behalf of something.

However, this simply isn’t tenable. Not only is a materialist interpretation of the Bible or the life of Christian unthinkable to the Christian mind (granted, of course, we’re not engaging in demythologisation simply to run away from scripture), but this disengaged approach fails to actually promote the life of faith, the freedom of Christ, that is promised to us by the apostles in the blood of our Saviour. We have noted our error in the rejection of Constantinianism, but then inverted our approach to say that approaching from the left flank to stab the innocent in the side is qualitatively different than approaching from the right. In either sense, the difference is only perspective, is only the particular collection of approving secular scoffers who have put our hands to work. The notion of being “born again” is a useful fiction for political curmudgeons and teary-eyed sentimentalists, “the freedom of Christ” the tool by which we tear down both the believer and the church. The ironic inversion is palpable, goading and taunting those touched by Christ to turn from their calling; to accept some serious and intellectual response to the calling that draws us out into their unknown before slowly unravelling the thread of faith. No, this materialism will not do—it has corresponded to a failure in the historical church to produce theologies of liberation, only instead attaching theological language to the methods of secularity. Without the ideal that proceeds from God's intervention in our lives hanging over us, our message is apologetic and ignorable; without the ideal dragging us forward, kicking and screaming, we are indolent and ethical.

“In community, the individual is; dialectically, the individual is crucial as the prior condition for forming a community, and within the community the individual is qualitatively essential and can at any moment rise above ‘community’, that is, as soon as ‘the others’ give up the idea. What holds community together is that each is an individual, and then the idea.”¹⁰

Although some have attempted to frame our Melancholic Dane as a “romantic-idealist”, instead we might find fruitful pursuits in holding this ideality, this admission of the importance of an Idea that hangs over the individual and his community, is not the opposite of the material but the factor by which we complete it. The Christian collective will be both material and ideal—painfully ready to face a world which knows only dead, inert matters, but held high and driven forwards by an idea that has grasped those individuals who rise out from complacency, who live in this “state of exception” outside of society. The Christian is a criminal who breaks the law by holding to the Law; the Christian is someone for whom faith is not a choice but a calling. Without works, faith is dead; but without faith, our eyes are dead to see creation at all.

Kierkegaard Against the Individual

To return to our opening polemic, it is wise to consider that S. K. was an unusual philosopher who surrendered any claim to the ability to think sub specie aeternitatis: thought begins with the individual within the individual’s world as the individual both encounters it and reflects upon it. Pretending that this subjective interaction with scripture gives us the ground to “know” objectively the will of God is child's play—in the separation of the individual from God through sin and the individual from himself in being “born again”, we are already the sinful subject when we learn how to turn to God, therefore the weight of sin is forever present in our interpretation of His Word and in our contact with His grace. There is no “ideal” situation where we can think about the existential in the comfort of our wildest abstractions, no position where the Christian is permitted to think of their acts as separate from the world and free from the ubiquitous weight of sin—personal, collective, and external.

In this sense, despite the ugliness of the term, S. K. is presupposing and insisting upon a kind of “materialism”, or, as Ellul refered to it, “realism”¹¹ that means any conception of den Enkelte, in the passionate pursuit of an individualism worth wanting, of the sole agent against the tide, must be understood within the world that is always already conditionally his existence and undermining his “imagination”¹². This means that there are two fundamental reorientations that we must make in the knowledge that Christianity is ontological and not identitarian and that the individual is always already existing in the world qua sinner in his sin prior to turning towards God:

i) Awareness of his epistemic failures, allowing for genuine humility in the face of opposition and the temptation of power, and

ii) Awareness of his weakness, allowing for genuine reservations in the pursuit of universal goals.

The individual, up against “the world”, is powerless and already lost. Despite the grand narrative building by those radical philosophical minds before us, there is always the simple fact that the individual is not the universal; no amount of theory—or even thinking—can deliver us freedom as we are always in a fallen state before we can think. In a totalising position of oppression under the thumb of “the world”, there is no hope for the Christian to escape the yoke of the enemy through his own efforts. He is, in a sense, in a position of hopelessness. To ask for a single individual or even a collective to change the world is too much—at the same time, far too imprecise to actually achieve anything against the backdrop of totality and also far too much for any individual to be able to achieve in a life. Before we turn to insist that we are right in our faith as God is on our side, we should remember that we are all abjects sinners that have already turned from Him—just as much as the next person. Adrift, even our best laid plans, laden with references to scripture, might still only serve the aims of the enemy.

Drifting free in the existential, flotsam floating out of control, Parmenides laughs at the individual who attempts to make sense of his insane surroundings and assert that he can not only make sense of them, but that is ladder of syllogisms will help us climb our of the crashing torrent. The Christian becomes an idealist who floats free from reality, swept up in his “imagination” that God has gifted him with the power of omniscience—or, even more embarrassingly, he starts to sound like a theological Camus. Instead of becoming a self before God, this view leads the individual to be busy with wasting life and losing oneself completely¹³.

“...to label Kierkegaard and his successors as “individualists” is to miss the point. In their rebellion against mass society, they are trying to preserve the possibility of free thought and of genuine interpersonal relationships. Kierkegaard’s condemnation of modern “progress” and the tepidity of bourgeois Christianity is hardly a nihilistic attack; it is a recognition that “the ‘goodness’ of the good may in fact be the greatest religious disaster for a society.”¹⁴

Against the individual qua individualist, S. K. stands as a stalwart of our reminder that we can become the self that we are—not merely an individual! “Born again” by the grace of God, the individual can become free by refusing to be caused to act against their wishes; by listening for the quiet whisper from the desert, in humility and weakness, the Christian becomes transformed into an agent against the political—while the secular ear is constantly pulled into some crowd or other, the Christian has a mode to remain on an even keel in times of temptuous peril and act only as they intend. Whilst freedom requires the humiliation of seeing oneself as nothing against the “infinite qualitative difference”, it also allows one to become a self that can float on the vicious tides of power manipulation. The Christian is not impervious to the rages of the waves that push along the madness of liberal democracy, but they do have the opportunity to act as if their life is not merely the product of their immediate environment. In slavery to the Lord, there is a possibility of otherness; another choice that can always be made, even when it appears impossible. The essence of the religious breaks through and becomes clear “when the tensions of the impossible are raised to their highest pitch”¹⁵.

An anarchism of sojourning

As is suitable for any Christian thought, there is a seemingly strange and contradictory purpose to the church: it is both intended to be the Body of Christ that joyously sojourns towards eschaton and also has no power to bring about its own salvation. It seems, bearing in mind Kant’s pointy principle that “can implies ought”, that the church is charged with the impossible and, as such, God issues commands unethically. This is a distinct problem for anyone who believes that God’s all-loving, all-knowing, and unchangeable nature is more than an intellectualist theological puzzle for the empty lecture halls and the saddest portion of virtual debate circles. It also seems, at the face of it, that “already/not yet” social theologies implicate the impossibility of church action by arbitrarily and reactively declaring certain aspects of scriptural revelation to be simultaneously unfolding and unfolded. By declaring what is “already” redeemed, we congratulate ourselves on the achievement of the other; in proposing a radical theory of “not yet”, we set ourselves alight with Pelagian grasping. It seems, my reader, that this liberal theological idea, where the “not yet” is dangled like a divine carrot before the equine Christian collective, is a way of pushing responsibility away by failing to see that the freedom of Christian is possible now. To even think about this seems impossible, as if it was always possible to be on fire with the passionate fire of the faith and that faith can prosper—no, does prosper—under the cosh of a disapproving world. But, remember, my reader, that the religious is precisely that which appears when our conception of the possible is eradicated—what is left in the wreckage of what “the world” promises is permanent.¹⁶

The concerns of the secular view of the church lead us into dead ends and misguided impositions by way of discovering our own Vordenken when we exit the field of theology—we, having decided that God has said quite enough to us, take to constructing our own salvation through secular means. Needless to say, this approach is certainly tempting: you and I, my reader, in an age without God-leadership, must actually do something! When even not deciding is a choice, in some way or other, it is clear that we cannot treat the entirety of our existence with indifference; such an idea seems entirely opposed to the idea of the freedom of Christ. It is not enough to take on the attitude of the mystical desert fathers and leave those unprepared for such hardship at the mercy of the world¹⁷. No, we must think our basic assumptions about what it means to be a Christian and, by inference, how our liberal theological counterparts of Marxist or Realpolitik flavour have succeeded in eschewing their responsibility to God when the church doors are closed on a Sunday afternoon. By placing some other field at the foot of our salvation, we subvert the very divine promise we pretend to espouse. It appears that there is an art of not choosing—or, rather, treating the necessary with indifference.

“The reason why the world does not advance but goes backward is that men consult only with each other instead of each one individually consulting with God.”¹⁸

Against Economics! Against Utopianism!

Economics, as a field of study, is concerned with the use of material goods around us, up to and including the use of human resources. Economic questions start from the position of “the gathered”, i.e., what the particular economic community has gathered or can gather towards the end of some particular economic goal, e.g., the extraction of cobalt from Congolese slave mines allow for the propogation of our environmentalist and technological goals in electronic car batteries and smartphones. The “already” gathered cobalt and “not yet” gathered cobalt allow for the economic community, however it is structured, to create particular goals that match with a broader overarching goal of technological production. Hopefully, my reader, you will have noticed something is amiss here: the positive value gained through environmentalist production or technological advancement seems to depend upon the deeply immoral use of slavery as a necessary component of Western culture.

Of course, this problem is not new and neo-colonial extraction has been written about in varying levels of rigour, from Marxist theories around the reappropriation of colonial extraction practices under the guise of liberal progressivism or the screeching self-righteousness of the dismissible voices of critical theory. That is, this problem does not shock us as a cultural unit—we find the constant reminder of this ethical dilemma, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, boring. There is a culture of nihilism which hangs over the West that is enforced by its materialist presuppositions: without an overarching teleological goal for how we want our community to be and how our community must realise itself, there is a certain pragmatic instrumentalism to the use of slavery which the world, on the whole, finds uncomfortably acceptable. Despite our knowledge that we could live without these things¹⁹, we accept that our cultural reliance on slavery is prior to the importance of God’s “sweeping away” of slave economics—we do not make both modern and conventional slavery an aspect of our subjective guilt that the Lord has forgiven. The economist plays his greatest trick in convincing the world that his methods were the only ones worth pursuing. A lack of hermeneutical rigour here leads to the churches of the world using investments and other economic arrangements to say, in a roundabout way, that the ways of “the world” are the correct ones for us—it is only pragmatic that we should indulge in such methods. Without the ideal to provide us the lens with which to see, the scales of our eyes remain firmly in place.

What is clear here, my reader, regardless of whether you agree with this bludgeoning image of the God Who Weeps that is turned back upon us by the mirror of perfection, is that the church offers no alternative to “the world” at this present moment—it is, at root, a pragmatic organisation, a business amongst businesses, when it gets down to the serious business of economic relations. We accept that our use of “the gathered” is prior to the divine; we, by sleight of hand, have invented theological economics that are liberal in their ability to agree that “the world”, of which we are not a part, is correct and absolutely correct in its methodology and lowly weeping. We are not perfect, therefore pursuing economic perfection is an unethical demand—Peter was unethical to demand that we turn to Leviticus and maintain “be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). As with all individuals who maintain some grander theological commitment up, over, and against the pragmatism of “the world”, he rather unfairly and muddleheadedly assumes that theology has something to say to this desired knot that we place ourselves in. He doesn’t recognise the necessity of our condition in the modern world and almost seems to suggest that another way is possible, but not only possible in some far-off imagined future (where it can be the task of the Great Christian, the Over-Christian perhaps!) but also right here and right now! Doesn’t he know that these things are necessary? How could he suggest that we do something that is extremely difficult? Hasn’t he heard of “demandingness” objections?

My reader, it should be clear by now: the problem of a division between “already” and “not yet” is our attempt to push our responsibility to ourselves, to God, and to one another onto a later generation, a great generation that is greater in faith and vigour than ours. Think!—at some point in the future, when people have acquired the approval of secularity necessary for proper Christian action, we will see an overspilling of faithfulness that is greater than any previously seen display. Or, we will see perfection at some point in the future. In the disbelief that our generation, you and I, my reader, could actually put a stop to this nonsense of intellectualist self-abstraction and set to living as the “new creatures” we are in our ontological reality as the “born again”, is evidence that we simply do not believe that the church is a real alternative to the evils of “the world” and that Christ achieved His mission in His life. The church, in this view, is a pragmatic organisation that punctuates its economic and political activity (even if that is only slight or moderate in flavour) with an amusing theatrical display on weekends. The problem, which I pose to the presumed disgust of the very serious thinkers following in the wake of Marx’s dismissal of all idealisms, is that we do not have some other categorical formulation that views the world from within the “religious-ethical” sphere, as S. K. had put it. The “little knowledge”²⁰ of revelation that sits in the hearts of all those within the Body of Christ has nothing to do with “the world” and has nothing of importance to say to the faithful—we have been “built up” in the image of the world despite the knowledge that God “builds up” His faithful in His own image. Hauerwas calls us to sanctification:

“Salvation is a political alternative that the world cannot know apart from the existence of a concrete people called the church. Put more dramatically, you cannot even know you need saving without the church's being a political alternative.”²¹

In the “economics” that takes what is given as gift at the root of all thought, that view each individual and each item from nature as irreducibly valuable, we must find in the balance between S. K.’s explosive liberation of the individual in the light of his uniqueness in individuality and Hauerwas’ call for discipline in the creation of a “concrete people” that sojourn as a political alternative—the “born again” must be able to journey onwards, as pilgrims in a strange land, as an alternative to the world. S. K. has already offered us the image of his imagining, suitably understanded and anti-utopian in its ideals: the communal Christian town of Christenfeld, where believers co-exist in the faithfulness of their community that are all working towards eschaton as individuals and as collective²². “The caravan”, as Eller worded it, is a free Christian settlement that exists as a commune, as a monastery to the world, not in its display of Christian perfection to the grotesque world that lies beyond it, but as a community of striving that makes the Christian ideal of the egalitarian community of believers before God—same in our sin compared with the “Wholly Other” perfection of the Lord—clear now. The bewildering belief that “God gives his people everything they need to follow him”²³.

Note here, my reader, a point of clarity: I do not suggest that we eschew the great intellectual efforts of our time in favour of a rigid or gnostic use of scripture. We can leave that to the fundamentalists. What I suggest is that we neither believe that we hold the keys to reality that will civilise this despicable world nor that the sciences of the world can grant salvation—rather, that we remember that we, as individuals before God and as collectives of individuals before God, have something different to offer that turns the dead eyes that see impossibility into the fire of faith which will grant us freedom as a church in a world which acts as a light to the world. Only when we can “carry and be carried” in that way can we begin to speak about a grander mission—but, before then, freedom shall have to suffice.

An alternative that sojourns

But what would that look like? How could we possibly construct such an alternative? Hauerwas and Willimon offer us an illustration:

In the church where one of us was raised, Dorothy was a perpetual member of the third grade church school class. Every child in the church knew that, when you arrived at the third grade in the primary division of the Buncombe Street Church Sunday school, Dorothy would be in your class. She had even been in the class when some of our parents were in the third grade. Dorothy was in charge of handing out pencils, checking names in the roll book, and taking up the pencils. We thought she was the teacher’s assistant. It was much later, when we were nearly all grown up and adult, that the world told us that Dorothy was someone with Down syndrome. At the church, we were under the impression that Dorothy was the teacher’s assistant. When Dorothy died, in her early fifties—a spectacularly long life for someone with Down syndrome—the whole church turned out for her funeral. No one mentioned that Dorothy was retarded or afflicted. Many testified to how fortunate they had been to know her.²⁴

Here, the church is primary—the believers in their belief in the church are primary, not technological goals. There is a role for everyone when we reject the economist’s technical approach in favour of a politics of salvation: instead of working with “the gathered”, in its materialist shallowness, we start with “the given”. Human resources, reverted back into the image of the person created by God for a life of freedom in faith, become the locus through which we organise our missionary society. While S. K. upholds the individual’s duty to the self, to God, and to the other in the readiness for faith, Hauerwas offers the other side of the coin: “the church not only gives us the support we need in being moral, it also teaches us what being moral is.”²⁵ The above example, slight and marginal in the eyes of an economist, unimportant in the grand scheme of “the world” and its obsession with “the gathered”, opens up the path for a Christian ethic that “carries and is carried”—we find alternative in the cracks of society where love might dwell, in the hiddenness of the church that is clear for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, much like God’s hiddenness moves in us. When we say “all are welcome” in God’s house, it is not a matter of identitarian resource management that aims to treat the morality of this life as if it was a matter of frantic economic pluralism—no, we maintain that all are welcome to God’s calling because all will find a place to “carry and be carried” towards eschaton in the viable alternative of the church, “the caravan”, Menighed. "The particularity's particularity" and "the universality's universality" are maintained in the exception of the church—mediation must be abandoned.²⁶

My reader, I have no interest in laying out specific ideas for how you should structure your church—I am neither qualified to teach nor informed enough to suggest how you might find these in-roads, these alternative ways of living, that cut apart the primacy of “the world” that turns all sociality into the simulcral “powers” that it can abuse. There is no theory that can give you the answers to that—it can’t exist as such a theory would, necessarily, be an attempt at politics and turn the theorist into “the one” who lords over creation from the false position of the assumed God-function. What I can illustrate, in the embarrassed admission that I have no clue how you will descend from Mount Nebo, is that attempting to “kill the new Adam” that you are called to become is no way to find liberation in the church-polity²⁷. There is no programme for this life because life must be lived forwards—the opportunity for life, the expression of love for God and the neighbour, is one which cannot be reduced to a formula or a legalist collection of moral principles (as if anyone would view scripture as such!) for an identitarian mass. No, I offer a “grammar” that seeks to negate the world in the positive affirmation of faith.

Onwards, Sojourning Pilgrims

But what holds us aloft in this effort? How can we really believe that we can both “carry and be carried” in the sojourning of faith and also avoid the reinvention of the faithlessness of Christendom? S. K. reminds us of our epistemological limits that run up against our ontological facticity:

“The absurd is the negative determinant [Bestemmelse] which assures… that I have not overlooked one or other possibility which still lies within the human area. The absurd is the expression of despair: that humanly it is not possible—but despair is the negative sign of faith.”²⁸

Holding tight to faith qua a belief that the “new creature” created by Christ’s sacrifice, our recognition of suffering in faith and growth in despair forms a defence against the temptations of the world. Strengthened by the freedom of submission to God, the church can become the impossible—a collective individuals who evade the temptation of “the Crowd”:

“Where that which is only human seeks to press forward; where that which is only human loses heart; the commandment strengthens; where that which is purely human becomes lifeless and prudent, the commandment gives fire and wisdom. The commandment consumes and burns up that which is unhealthy in thy love. By the commandment thou canst inflame it again when it bids fair to die down. Where thou thinkest thou canst easily counsel thyself, the commandment intrudes upon thy counsels. Where thou turnest to thine own counsel in despair, thou shouldest turn to it for counsel. Where thou canst think of no counsel, it will create it for thee and all will be well.”²⁹

1. Money & Power, p. 25-26, J. Ellul

2. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 337 V. Eller

3. JP II, 2056

4. “It is quite simple. Take the New Testament—lock your door, talk with God, pray—and then do what it says simply and plainly in the New Testament, actualize it by expressing it existentially – this is Christianity.’ JP 3:3014

5. For example, see O’Gorman’s treatment of “Death of God” theology in Demythologizing Revelation: A Critical Continuation of Rudolf Bultmann's Project, p. 56, C. O’Gorman

6. Whether through a sharp break with S. K., e.g., Barth and Hauerwas, or through a speculative continuation with Eller.

7. The Book on Adler, p. xxv-xxvi, S. Kierkegaard

8. Although what this phrase means can be a subject of its own investigation—for example, Marx’s materialism was by no means the brutish materialisms of Feuerbach or Stalin, leading to a “conscious” thesis which fuses the ideal and the material qua the real. Similar movements were made by Nietzsche, the phenomenologists, and our dear S. K.

9. Most notoriously, Augustine’s pragmatic and un-Christian approval of violence that would “push along” the victim towards finding the Lord. Long before Luther’s vital correction in sola fide, it appears that sola per Augustum was acceptable at least some quarters.

10. Pap. X 2 A 390, 1850, S. Kierkegaard

11. Money & Power, p. 24, J. Ellul

12. “Thus it is in all Christendom and established Christianity: to have Christianity in imagination means that they do not have it. And from them is taken - i.e., they sink deeper and deeper in the delusion.” JP II, 1829, S. Kierkegaard

13. Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology, p. 36, C. B. Barnett

14. Ibid., p. 152

15. “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion” from The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 4: 2001-2004, Continental Philosophy of Religion; Kindle locations 1268, 1289; J. Caputo

16. Ibid.

17. While not intended as a swipe at the mystical tradition, we should wonder to ourselves just how much we can draw from their insights in their appropriation of the God-relationship at the behest of the neighbour-relationship. Much like many critiques of S. K.’s late career, we should wonder how one actually implements a triadic relationship in this flavour of personalism as opposed to merely collapsing into either the agent—neighbour diadic relationship or the agent—divine diadic relationship. It seems that both of these depreciated approaches fall either into the dangerous objectivity of secularity or into the dangerous subjectivity of “imagination”.

18. JP 4:4148

19. Leave aside the teary-eyed, “imagined” suffering of an ideal proletariat here, my reader; no one should be impressed with the classism of a theorised revolutionary group that is too stupid to know what is best for the world (Marxist intellectualism) or the collapse into liberal apologetics that comes with bludgeoning use of each and every emerging technology’s apparent “necessity” for the life of the labourer in modernity.

20. “…the ethical is the universally human itself, but religious (Christian) upbringing must first of all communicate a knowledge. Ethically man as such knows about the ethical, but man as such does not know about the religious in the Christian sense. Here there must be the communication of a little knowledge first of all – but then the same relationship as the ethical enters in. The instruction, the communication, must not be as of a knowledge, but upbringing, practicing, art-instruction.” JP 1:650

21. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, p. 35, S. Hauerwas

22. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 258-259 V. Eller

23. “The Gift of the Church and the Gifts God Gives It”, S. Hauerwas and S. Wells, from The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, p. 13, ed. S. Hauerwas and S. Wells

24. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, p. 54, S. Hauerwas and W. H. Willimon

25. Ibid.

26. "The Many Faces of a Hidden God: Agamben’s Relations to Kierkegaard Reconsidered", L. Lazzaretti, from Agamben and the Existentialists, p. 39, ed. M. A. Norris & C. Dickinson

27. “Toward a Kierkegaardian Understanding of Hitler, Stalin, and the Cold War”, C. Bellinger, Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, p. 225, ed. G. B. Connell and C. S. Evans

28.  JP I:9, S. Kierkegaard

29. Church Dogmatics, IV/2, p. 886, K. Barth