The Case for Christian Anarchism - part V
Speaking the unspeakable, seeing the impossible
Neither speaking as a Christian nor speaking from a position which is not Christian has any effect on the absolute relation (or lack thereof) that undergirds the central message of the gospel.
And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.
And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. (John 17:11-14)
I. How does the Christian speak when they speak Christianly? To speak Christianly is to speak as if “faith is a fact”. The Christian speaks from a position of “completeness”, a recalibration of body and mind to be as they are, as opposed to merely active in body and dead in spirit. Speaking from this position of unity, reliant upon the ground that brought it forth from outside of itself, the individual speaks with a tongue to speak what the eyes to see and the ears to hear have received.
II. How does the world hear when they encounter the Christian speak? Often, the world takes the Christian speaking as any other speech: a moral opinion amongst opinions, gratefully noted for quick dismissal; an outrage amongst outrages, gratefully shuffled into the discourse. When the world hears Christianity spoken as if “faith is a fact”, it encounters it as a mystery.
III. How does the Christian speak to the world? The Christian, misunderstood out loud, does not speak at all—he speaks in silence.
In Philosophical Fragments and its ironically titled Postscript, the curious investigator of Christianity, Johannes Climacus, notes a strange position that these strange creatures called Christians identify in their very being—by way of some strange, highly-subjective experience referred to as being “born again”, they seem to recognise that there is something fundamentally different about themselves that arose during this fantastical event that allows them to see the “pre-new birth” self and the “post-new birth” self as qualitatively different and comparable in that they are non-identical to the extent that the narrative is “ruptured”. By virtue of this recognition, there is a belief—and it could only ever be a belief—that there is an ontological change in the believer, something simply different about them that separates the old life from the new. While there may be “ligaments” of a former life that remain unbroken in this change1, the path opens up in a way that it wasn’t before—the fog clears, the individual can find the ground he searched for when he was “70,000 fathoms of the deep”2. In this realisation and the snapping of the ligated ligaments to the “old Adam”, one emerges as a Christian—not in identity, but ontologically.
Climacus, for the most part, largely stops at this point3. However, we can take him further, drawing him forward out of the cave to where the heathen can’t see—having understood what makes a Christian, he failed to extend his investigation into what makes Christians. As is so often the case for those wrestling with the multi-faceted and paradoxical corpus left to us by dear “Saint Søren”, the way that we fit his highly phenomenological account of learning how to love God4 into a social theory presents us with a challenge—one that I offer you no assurances on how easily we might find it. In the same way as the individual is transformed into the “new creature”, there is a possibility within Menighed [congregation] that the individual is not integrated into “the Crowd” so much as continues alongside the other towards the τέλος that unites the strivings of the many, the mutual strivings of the faithful, as movements of infinity.5
When the “born again” exist within the commonality of their reborn state, they are not under the pressure of the potentially negating effects of intersubjectivity—the fear, possibly unwarranted at times and possibly unrecognised at others, that we can become like “jellyfish”6 in the social situation, prone to unconscious reactions that fundamentally change who we are. In the moment of exposure, we find that our stance can weaken, that our desire to be and to become “as we are” before God becomes secondary, and that the will undermines our higher desires7, our higher madness8, to transcend over the aesthetic and the ethical on the path that Christ had once walked. In this potential danger, where even the tightest bonds might lead us into temptation9, they may be bound by the flimsy aestheticism of “friendliness” as the Stirnerite desires—any earnestness about heeding to Christ’s “drawing unto Him” is replaced by a sentimental, soft-handed account of chumminess and a lovethat allows to beloved to abuse themselves10. No, says the Kierkegaardian mind, there is something unspeakable, silent about the church militant in its becoming11. This image is often forgotten and lost, turning-around the church from a mode for freedom into the most sinister crucible of identitarian, crowd-forming cruelty—when the church militant, struggling and striving against the world, forgets and loses itself in the madness of the world. Plunged into the self-alienation of the one touched by the world, defenceless against the tide, the individual becomes the pitiful figure that Luther proposed without due care. When the salt loses its flavour, the church is left without anything to offer to the world. Only together, in the “holding together” of the faithful in communion, can this evade the tribulations that surely face you and me, my reader.
But, via negativa, there is something odd that Climacus fails to note about the position that he has adopted: he, as an individual within “the world”, a creature that has so far not become a “new creature” in the life-giving freedom of Christ, fails to make a similar movement. In seeing the Christian reborn standing opposite him with outstretched finger in the declaration “that is the world”, Climacus and the rest of the scoffers look around them in a Pythonesque confusion: who are they pointing at? Who is this force that stands against God? In this way, the world doesn’t even recognise itself as such and it lacks the presence of mind or the freedom of spirit to actually recognise the sin that they are in.
By pointing to the world that stands against God—the good, the beautiful, love itself—Christians expose a wicked confusion in the ranks that necessarily stand opposed to Christ’s message; by drawing the individual within the worldly crowd out of the collective safety of nihilism, there is a chance for evangelism. Having pointed the finger at “the crowd”, the deadened eyes of those not yet ready to become selves look around in confusion as to where this crowd precisely is; when the deadened eyes look around, there is a chance, a moment of risk, where the world can see itself as it is through the eyes of the heathen. When the Christian can recognise that they are now ultimately different in nature and by no means responsible for their cultivation in sanctification12, they can turn back to the world and identify it as such, against itself as such—that is the world that stands against the Lord and only by recognising the world can they begin to enter into a useful critique.13
“This is no longer a band of men and things that surpass each other in striving up to the deity. It is a band in which every member looks back toward those who are further removed from God and comes to resemble the deity by helping and serving them—for this great urge to love, to serve, to bend down, is God's own essence.”14
Towards an Ethics of Offence
While not directly walking in the footsteps that S. K. had attempted to uncover, a fellow traveller in the shape of John Howard Yoder, the great Mennonite theologian15, becomes an interesting foil to the Kierkegaardian message—a thinker who, despite at first glance contradicting the resurrection of the “individual contra individualism” stance by adopting a communitarian, collective stance, offers a potential completetion to the image that we try to hold up. At its root, we might remember to treat S. K. not as a normative ethicist, but as a corrective polemicist: the Lord God’s desire for the individual to turn to Him through Christ is not a gauntlet that we are expected to run alone; therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect a purely Kierkegaardian account to give us a new blueprint for the church that absolves us from the subjective, engaged process of building it.
While the particular must fold into the universal to find its place, the universal is the only ground that the particular can emerge from. While some have called for “the collapse of universality and particularity”16, where the individual and the communal become some kind of interminent mix, the Almighty hangs on high and shows us “there is no contrast between universality and particularity in the constitution of the human self but rather, the particular grows out of and perfects the universal.”17 When the individual enters into the church, when you enter into the Body of Christ, my reader, only then can you emerge from the objective reality of being “held together” qua an individual strengthened by the collective.
Here, we find ourselves at a crossroads: in the moment of possibility, where the individual recognises themselves as individual by virtue of their participation in the universal, they have the ability to shape their own character (and to be shaped) through their response to the voice of creation that is speaking to and through them.18 As a collective of individuals, united in their aim to become the representation of the Body of Christ to the world as a light in the dark, the church must remember those terrible words from the apostle’s lips: you are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). In order to do this, Mahn proposes a number of modes in which the church, having committed itself to teaching the world and those who emerge from it to breathe before God and with the help of God, can set to in order to produce the very fruits which show what confession is, which show what communion is—not merely “chatter” about them.19
The Offense of Indifference
“First, the clearest boundary of the church might just distinguish all political partisanship on the one side—distinctions between conservative and liberal, Democrat and Republican, friend and enemy, right and wrong, white and black, the haves and the have-nots, sinners and saints—and, on the other side, those whose discipleship of Christ and solidarity with outcasted others tears down every other partition.”20
In these tumultuous times of identitarian antagonism, the basic offence of the church that “all are welcome” becomes even more difficult for the individual in his political life. It appears, by way of intricate received opinions and propagandistic fine-tuning, that the would-be omnipotent force of the state has chosen to develop its own Manicheanism, its own crowd-formation and crowd-infuriation: the state and the culture that flows therefrom opens up the society over which it “hangs” and splits it into manageable, conflicting, unaware sub-cultures. The world itself works through division, which is the only thing that an objective, technical body can imagine21, and so division becomes the presupposition for its functioning. In an age of liberal democracy, where the state is predicated upon the finding of acceptable candidates and the counterposing of them against one another qua central and necessary function for the flowing lifeblood of manipulation to circulate, reified division is prior to all other things. Indeed, the divisions are created and made real in such a way that the very agents of the state and those who would dote upon them in doxastic fervour do not recognise the parts they play in producing and reproducing the very social function that their handling relies upon.
In this situation, where the divided parts are set apart from one another and when the divider can rent out the appropriate reactions to the appropriate identity actors, the stalwart of the church is in providing a ground for “holding together”: even when we find the Christian, called in faith and good works to the service of the Lord, out of accordance with our own particular mechinations and musings about how one ought to live the faith and electing ourselves as the moral arbiters who act on behalf of the Eternal and Unchanging God, operating in a way which sits at odds with our aims, it doesn’t follow that they are not following in that hidden faith which bolsters their actions and holds them up, over, and against the world. In a worldly sea of “the many”, there is not a self amongst them; in the church’s inclusivity, there just might be.
Indeed, to think of a world in which Abraham would be called before the secular court of public opinion and decidedly sentenced as a would-be murderer as the world in which vox Dei is reduced to the infantile vox populi is not a Christian thought22; by greeting “the enemy”, the figure that we are handed for our own good and allocated the appropriate opinions and identitarian security to further enemize this unloveable object, with open arms is the highest offense to the world. To meet the neighbour qua neighbour, to meet the conservative qua neighbour, to meet the immigrant qua neighbour, to meet the liberal qua neighbour, to meet the rapist qua neighbour, to meet the banker qua neighbour, to meet the tax collector, the murderer, the boaster, the glutton, the journalist, the animator, the agitator, the activist, the communist, the capitalist, the anarchist—to meet the sinner qua neighbour… this is what the church can offer.
A place where “all are welcome” is not a statement of liberal inclusivity, whereby the tolerated are granted tolerance at the hands of an impositional body politic, but rather a statement of the radical inclusivity of Christ and the Body of Christ learning to walk in His image, learning to breathe before God. A τέλος, balanced with a demand.
The Offense of Egality
“Second...: a manifest, hidden church would follow Christ in siding and hiding with and among the poor and oppressed. For all of the structural symmetry between Anti-Climacus’s high Christology and low Christology, clearly Kierkegaard considers God’s kenotic self-emptying into a poor and suffering human being to be determinative for occasioning the possibility of offense and for providing the prototype for Christian emulation.”23
In remembering that our duty to God and the other is prior to all other duties, as illustrated in the two Greatest Commandments (Matthew 22:36-40), we find that the triadic relationship of the Christian who walks Christianly amongst the world is one which expresses sympathy and love first to those who require it most: those who sit on the outside of society, where no one but God could love them. This is not, however, a matter of identifying the unloveable object in their pitiful unloveableness—a kind of sycophantic, cloying “love” that expresses sympathy for the poor qua the poor that imposes hatred onto the objectivised subject:
“...the ‘altruistic’ urge is really a form of hatred, of selfhatred, posing as its opposite ('Love') in the false perspective of consciousness. In the same way, in ressentiment morality, love for the ‘small,’ the ‘poor,’ the ‘weak,’ and the ‘oppressed’ is really disguised hatred, repressed envy, an impulse to detract, etc., directed against the opposite phenomena: ‘wealth,’ ‘strength,’ ‘power,’ ‘largesse.’ When hatred does not dare to come out into the open, it can be easily expressed in the form of ostensible love—love for something which has features that are the opposite of those of the hated object. This can happen in such a way that the hatred remains secret.”24
No, Christianity does not seek the poor, those on the “outside” of society, those forced into the court of public opinion and exposed in their nakedness as the homo sacer25—Christianity is a cure to both the individual that finds himself exposed and “the Crowd” that only keeps itself together inasmuch as it can continue to find something worth exposing. When the gaze of the world descends, when one has the possibility to hide away from what they ought to do and desire that they ought to do, faith becomes alive—the beating heart and the rushing blood of choosing to choose oneself is the step into faith; the beating heart and the rushing blood of choosing to side with the poor and the oppressed in deed is the faith that opens up reality.
“Here it will suffice to recall how the Christians regarded the pagans, looked on their gods as the work of the Devil and their virtues as glittering vices, how one of their coryphaei declares man prior to Christ to be a block of wood and stone, to recall how they in no way linked the preaching of their gospel to the human being as such, how they always began with “Repent ye,” and how they themselves declared their gospel to be folly to the pagans and a scandal to the Jews. And in case anyone thinks it was only through exaggeration that I managed to present them in such sharp contrast, and that one should also pay attention to the countless nuances to be found here, I shall look at these just a little in case there really are some such. And what is it that makes so many say at least that they are conscious of Christian impulses but on the other hand neither are nor pretend to be Christians? It is presumably because Christianity is a radical cure which one shrinks from, even without these people having to envisage such external circumstances as led many early Christians to postpone the decisive step to the last moment—they no doubt lack the strength to make the despairing leap. Add to that the strange suffocating atmosphere one encounters in Christianity and which exposes everyone to a very dangerous tropical fever (of which above—spiritual trials) before becoming acclimatized.”26
Through the willing self-emptying of the church—as God indeed engaged in His own kenotic omnipotence—in the moment where neither the aesthetic pulling nor the ethical grounding serves their purpose, the poor and the oppressed are not objectivised and deified in their poverty and oppression27. Instead, the “dangerous tropic fever” of Christian suffering28 is one which must be walked through as it cannot be the topic of “chatter”, a frivolous lightness that makes for passing time in between the genuinely important and serious endeavours that grant our lives value—a monetary value, of course. It cannot be sermonised and homilified, as only the Christian can walk as the Christian: in silence.
The church, then, offers itself through those who will walk with the poor on the outskirts of society, qua offense, because to walk with the neighbour is to see the Weeping God before us and to walk with the neighbour qua neighbour is to do His will.
The Offense of Honesty
“A third way that the church reveals itself as hidden is by publically confessing its sin. Note that theologians who emphasize the invisibility of the church often do so out of a realism about sin.”29
Key to an ethics of forgiveness is the opportunity to forgive and be forgiven. Here, the Christian message becomes clearer, our weakness as creatures held in the deliberative distance of the “infinite qualitative difference” between humanity and God, and our failure qua creatures of the world that hold and are held to the “Old Adam” by the ligaments of sin burns.
If we are charged to assist in drawing those who live in the world unto Christ (Matthew 28:16-20), then the church qua collective of individuals must present itself as capable of presenting an alternative, of presenting the expanded possibility of a different kind of life to the world, made not of the righteous and self-important but of those very sinners who sin and are conscious of their sin. This possibility, of course, is not to civilize the world, but to act in revolt against it12. In part, this revolt will also be against the vicious failures of the faithful or would-be faithful within its own ranks as well. The church’s role, in offering confession and communion, is in a position where it can offer itself as the confessing one. The offense is invoked: from the hiddenness of the invisible church, those sheltered within the Body of Christ openly confesses its failure to a world that knows nothing of honesty.30
The world doesn't know the concept of forgiveness. It understands its own idea of justice, it's own demand for the spilling of blood—the guilty will be forced into the spotlight, subjected to “the Crowd” that demands the show of power, shown to be guilty at the wrathful and vengeful hand of the Court, and then paraded into the public sphere where the aesthetic grinding, the bone-on-bone contact of the human connection without the mediating balm of God's love, reduces the other to a nub, a hollow shell that is ground down “like all the others”. Without the possibility of confession, “we lose our sense of being a particularly special individual and become simple and relatable to others—like a child31. When the church prepares to present itself qua church, the third aspect qua the God Who calls us to the repentance and the reconcilitation of the religious and acts as a distancing for individuality within a community; where the aesthetic grinds together, like bone-on-bone32, the Christian has a chance to walk alone above the crowd—with the help of the other!33 By way of the church, the enlightened population of secularity is identified in the negative; the Christian emerges from under the safety of darkness to invite the state onto himself—crush me, so you might.
The enlightened population, having outgrown the curse of God's law, demands a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye; the quiet voice in the desert that pleades for a show of mercy, a quiet act of forgiveness, sees His call for restraint turned into a lust for blood; the One Who Weeps to see his children fighting and steps out of the way so that they might learn offers the only truth possible—to love thy neighbour. The Jewish like for like is a hallucination, the call for mercy is an insult to the ones who deal in violence—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; love for love, the God-relationship for the God-relationship; these things invoke the fear and trembling necessary for the opportunity for faith.34 The terrified aesthete, who only knows justice by the way of the sword, is drawn to the actor in the pulpit or the state who preaches of hellfire and suffering, of violence and power, as the eye of the aesthete can only see the sign of power and the ear of the aesthete can only hear the sign of “justice”. It makes no sense to talk about discipline for these people; the scales of their eyes close off the very justice they see as worth maintaining discipline for—it makes no sense to talk about discipleship for these people; they've not yet learned how to follow at all. The only thing that shakes the aesthete from their slumber is not a sermon, but the witness of a Christian who walks Christianly with the neighbour qua neighbour and exposes the neck when they have failed in that walk.
The church is not a stalwart of the sinless amongst the sinful. Indeed, the very “people who are incapable of sin because they are “spiritless” are mistaken for people whose passions have been thoroughly schooled.”35 The Body of Christ is the mode for the sinners who recognise their sin, in the paradoxical recognition of the objective imposition of God by way of the subjective appropriation of the always already ubiquity of sin, to hide from the world and gain strength to once again walk amongst it—from which they emerge, steeled for the task. To emerge out from the universality of the church qua particularity called to divine favour and fervour, to walk with the neighbour qua neighbour, to present oneself in the earnest admission of guilt and the willing acceptance of guiltlessness—to walk in the alternative way of life and not merely to talk about an alternative way of life, that is what the church can offer in its “holding together” of Christians who would otherwise rub against one another like bone rubs on bone.
Bringing Kierkegaard to the Church Militant
In the hectic to-ing and fro-ing of a Kierkegaardian paradox, it can be sometimes difficult to find the floor again. Without the possibility of a “downward gaze”, then, it would be irresponsible for us to leave this at this stage—we must find the floor if we are must kneel in communion. We are gifted the opportunity to “either Christianly to turn away from the care of poverty by turning onto the Way upward, or in ungodliness to abandon oneself to the care of poverty by turning onto the wrong way downward.”36
What Kierkegaard is doing in this illustration of the church is offering a liminal space, an “in-between” that acts as a buttress between mass society and the “sacred canopy” of those believers who preach by way of their lived faith. In a way, as a strange bedfellow of Max Stirner and his view of insurrection37, S. K. proposes that authentic Christian action is spontaneous and spirit-guided in its unpredictability—it doesn’t wait for corporate sanction nor should it wait for corporate sanction, instead allow for the emergence of particularity up, over, and against itself in the moment of passionate faith. Unlike Stirner, however, S. K. does not abandon those faithful to the world and to the fecklessness of friendship in the time between those authentic moments. The church, then, has a dual role in loosing and binding the faithful to itself; offering the freedom to rise up, over, and against the ethical in the manner of Abraham, but also offering the solace, the comfort of a place to hide (Luke 13:34), that nourishes the faithful in forgiveness and communion.38
The faithful, then, emerge always already appearing from the backdrop of the church’s “holding togetherness”—the sinners, bound together in their earnest desire to “go and sin no more” (John 8:11), can only become the faithful by way of discovering that their sin is theirs, individually as a collective of individuals, brought together in the potential tension that sits contingently against the necessary “knot” of Christ’s reconciling love. When the faithful community, identified by itself through the movements of infinity that bring it into reality and against itself through the naming of the world, encounters the agents of the state, those humble believers who take theological commitment and earnest responsibility as key to their way of life will be able to confound the very techniques that the state uses: any movement worth making, when interrogated by divisive eyes, will be irreconcilable with the categories that they wish to impose upon you, my reader; any movement worth making, when interrogated by divisive eyes, will evade categorisation within the imposition of the state and will remain a theological value when all the world can see are technical values.
“The Absurd in Kierkegaard might best be seen as a category introduced to make livable something that is unthinkable.”39
“Silhouettes: Psychological Diversion” from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 180, ed. [V. Eremita]
Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard
He also abandons this mode as relevant to a philosophical inquiry—it is, of course, a highly subjective experience and distinctly “hidden” from the world. Much like God hides Himself away in order that we might do good in our striving, the Christian “hides” himself away in order to “draw them unto Him”. While this line of thought isn’t appropriate for the philosopher musing away to himself, we merely here find the limits of philosophy’s usefulness in explaining God’s actions.
Lappano offers this as the overall feel of S. K.’s work in and around 1847 in “Johannes Climacus and Two Kierkegaards: Strategies for Theology and Social Engagement”, D. Lappano, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 36, edited by R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 93, [J. de silentio]
“The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage” from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 402, ed. [V. Eremita]
“‘Eternity will nail him to himself’: the logic of damnation in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death”, R. Z. Manis, from Religious Studies (2016) 52, p. 295-296
“The Inviter” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 55, Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard
Works of Love, p. 61, S. Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard for the Church: Essays and Sermons, p. 39, R. F. Marshall
“The Exposition” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 90, Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard
The Religious Confusion of the Present Age Illustrated by Magister Adler as a Phenomenon: A Mimical Monograph, p. 63, [P. Minor], ed. S. Kierkegaard
Methodist Theology, p. 122, K. Wilson
Ressentiment, p. 67, M. Schelers
As is customary for our age, an appropriate warning about Yoder’s particular misdeeds in life is due. My reader, I’ll ask you first to read this short piece of writing to the end before turning back to understanding the evil that lay in Yoder’s heart: while it would be easy to identify the sinner qua sinner and possibly even far too forgiving to think of Yoder qua sinner alone, we should first endeavour to understand his thought before we discard it as stemming forth first from the hands of those out of accordance with the Almighty.
“Revisiting John Wesley and Divine Command Theory”, W. S. Stepanenko, from Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol. LX, p. 107
“Equality: a Proposal Rooted in Kierkegaard's Theological Anthropology and Theology of Love”, N. Marandiuc, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 97-98, edited by R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
“Yoder’s Christ and Girard’s Culture: With Reference to Kierkegaard’s Transformation of the Self”, p. 8, C. Bellinger
S. K. makes a fascinating note on the “scope” of scripture, by saying that there is no room for “chatter”—the New Testament only deals in what is important, only clings to what is necessary. For that reason, learning to imitate Christ involves learning to imitate the way in which Christ dealt with the merely contingent. See “We are all Christians” from The Instant, no. 2, June 4th 1855, from Attack on “Christendom”, p. 108, S. Kierkegaard
“Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 270, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
“But we must bear in mind that Christians are not required to do this, and that in any case this is not true commitment. To believe that joining a movement is the same as committing oneself is simply to capitulate to today’s sociological trends, and it is to follow the herd while claiming to make free choices. Better to judge the herd instinct beforehand and give in to it only when it is objectively valid, as we are trying to do here; otherwise we are in exactly the situation described by St. Paul: “children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14). It is painful to see countless Christians in this situation.” Money & Power, p. 23-24, J. Ellul
"Public Confession", from The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, p. 9, S. Kierkegaard; Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology, p. 40, C. B. Barnett
“Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 270, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
Ressentiment, p. 74, M. Scheler
"The established order wants to be a totality that recognizes nothing above itself but has every individual under it and judges every individual who subordinates himself to the established order.” This is the individual’s “collision” with “the established order,” and the existing order was upset about the fact “that the single individual wanted to withdraw from his relation to the established order.” See “Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception”, L. B. Hansen, from Kierkegaard's Influence on the Social Sciences, p. 19
JP AA:18, p. 29
Something that the liberal identitarian salivates for, regardless of whether their self-imposed oppression is created for the patronisation of the poor or the obfuscation of the rich. In this sense, as should be well-noted to all, the political approach of all given solutions, varied and wondorous in their claims, is only varied and wondorous inasmuch as they all operate in the same way. The lyrical quality of modern politics, whereby the act of speaking grants the act a completely different flavour, betrays that secularity offers no “salt” to proceedings.
“Was Bishop Mynster a “witness to the truth,” one of “the genuine witnesses to the truth”–is this the truth?” in Articles in The Fatherland, from Attack on "Christendom", p. 7 S. Kierkegaard
“Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 270, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
Kierkegaard: Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World, p. 57, A. Hannay
“Envy as Personal Phenomenon and as Politics”, R. L. Perkins, from International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. XIV: Two Ages, p. 116
Works of Love, p. 274, S. Kierkegaard
Ibid., p. 376
“Kierkegaard after Hauerwas”, J. A. Mahn, from Theology Today 64, p. 182
“The Cares of the Pagans” in Christian Discourses, p. 20, S. Kierkegaard
The Ego and His Own, p. 165, [M. Stirner]
Kierkegaard for the Church: Essays and Sermons, p. 40, R. F. Marshall
‘The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth Century Receptions,’ R. Poole, from The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p.56
Incredible series! This will be something I come back to re-read often!