The Case for Christian Anarchism - part II

Responsibility, irresponsibility, and you

Towards an ethics of responsibility—for irresponsible Christians

2. Politics then absolves us from responsibility to the other, to the neighbour, and to God; first, we hide from the responsibility to become a self by integrating into the anonymity of collective action, thereby allowing us plausible deniability about any and all of our actions; secondly, from this selfless position, understood to mean “lacking a self”, it becomes impossible to make a genuine connection with the neighbour as the neighbour is met with the willing love to recognise the face of Christ in the unlovable object—something that cannot be done without the will, therefore it must proceed from a self^; and thirdly, in this position without a self and without love for the neighbour, there is no love for God in that there is no recognition of God, His Son, and His presence amongst us. Many will say His name, but their saying could well be indistinguishable from falsehood or superstition—and they would have no mode by which to identify if it were as such.

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Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load. (Galatians 6:1-5)

I. What is responsibility? It is the recognition of the individual’s existence within the world in the knowledge that the world is not as it ought to be, and this knowledge weighs on the individual. The emergence of responsibility in the life of the individual requires an existential participation in reality because responsibility is reality’s drawing or tempting of the individual to participate in it. There is no syllogistic basis for duty and it has no antecedent rational structure, no intelligible world, of which it is an expression¹; the real weighs upon the individual and calls forth the concrete unity of ideal and real that only the individual can provide.

II. How does the Christian find responsibility in his life? Responsibility, as with all things Christian, is found in the Truth of the God-relationship. Breaking the double-mindedness of one’s relationship with God, i.e., the false choice between either speaking on behalf of the Lord qua ardent “defender”² or the indifferent passivity of the cultural adherent in their cultural adherence, leads to a sense of responsibility that brings both the understanding of the Truth of one’s life and the the mode for understanding the Truth of one’s life, i.e., Christ. This responsibility begins with the individual emerging from worldly solipsism in a relationship with Christ and then is expressed through the neighbour.

III. How does the politician find responsibility in his life? As the comedic shifting of responsibility onto someone else.³ In that sense, responsibility weighs on the responsibility-avoidant ironically and as an inversion of the responsibility of the Christ: whereas the Christian stands before God, within both the Menighed and within the God-relationship, sees, feels, and searches for the duty, the “love letter request”, of the Lord in order to gleefully act out the will of the beloved, the political sees, feels, and searches for the duty, the “law-destroying imposition”, of the Lord in order to pass that feeling onto someone else. It is a distraction from the hedonistic self-involvement of, e.g., the fear of death or the will to abuse authority. They are, in all things, a shadow to the idea of any ought that might weigh on them.

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Responsibility, as a philosophical concept, is a much-abused and neglected term: despite its popularity in the mouths of great thinkers like S. K. and Derrida, it is often overlooked in its concreteness in favour of an abstracted responsibility that could only ever be used as some ideological tool to wield over those foolish enough to ever think that a person espousing an “ethics of responsibility” could be speaking sincerely. Consumed by politicking and pragmatism, responsibility becomes a bludgeon used by “the One” to turn the plight of the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, and the peacemakers that encounters the political agent, homo abstractus, into an exercise of passing the responsibility of charity onto someone else—often those very poor, mourning, meek, hungry, merciful, and peacemaking wretches thmselves. Responsibility, in the mouth of the politician, openly calls for irresponsibility.

Personal responsibility, like all political promises, is an empty category, something that means nothing to no one until they become a self in a world that lacks the backbone to call itself selfish. The importance of responsibility, then, is one which can only be taken from an embarrassed position. To assert the importance of responsibility (and other subjectively-involved, participatory aspects of an ethical stance) is to assert an invisible politics, an ethics of responsibility, that shows once again that God creates ex nihilo: in the situation where the empty vessels of “the Crowd” encounter their divine command as the threat of political violence, the Spirit fills Christians, “new creatures” in the shell of the old world, with the very contents that the individual needs to become a self in the relation of selves-amongst-selves where there was nothing prior. Embarrassed, we emerge into the world, with our fundamentalist and liberal fellow travellers qua simulacra fallen off either side of the horse on which we ride.

The point for the one who is responsible in the Christian way is not that there is a choice that we must make against the prevailing desires of the society that one exists within, i.e., the trapped secular perspective of the individual, formed by his society, within his society. No, instead, my reader, we refer back to this astounding idea that one could be “other than they were” and recognise this as some kind of fact about ourselves—the earnest belief that being “born again” is a concrete aspect of the person and responsibility must proceed from that being “born again”. We are not merely choosing against the prevailing desires of the society that we exist within, but choosing against the prevailing desires of the society that we exist within because we are ontologically different and, to draw upon that fantastical image of Martin Luther qua earnest defender of the Lord in the only way that would matter to Him, “can do no other”.

And responsibility is a theme that pervades scripture, that makes the role of the human agent clear from the very beginning and asserts it throughout. As a piecemeal preview of a grander exegesis, my reader, think back to Genesis 2:15 and the charge of stewardship. As is so often the case for Christian thought, the “progressive” reading of this passage is reduced to merely environmentalist in nature, as if God could only ever want us to save the Earth from the danger of climate catastrophe. No, we have thought too quickly! We engage in the Vordenken of “the One” confident that they understand the entirety of their life as well as they understand God Himself! At the most basic, long before we can even consider the role of the Christian Church in undoing the damage that we have done to the Lord’s Creation, we should remember: this is indeed God’s creation and it is ours to steward. Our first step, in the freedom of faith, is to understand that the responsibility to the Earth that weighs upon us is not simply a matter of chasing some particular τέλος or other that the scientific aesthete or the self-congratulatory board of abstracted professors hands to us—no! We are already offered the “gift and task” of a life that is responsible for God’s creation as the chosen who foster it under His tutelage, as the chosen who care for it in the teaching of His love, and as the chosen to walk it in the joy gifted to us. As we emerge into the world, we always already stand upon the very thing which grounds our responsibility to ourselves, to God, and to the other—this Creation, gifted in love and tasked to us in confidence, cements our responsibility for everything within it within our power; this Creation, fallen and desacrated by those who have walked this ground before us, can be redeemed through the love of God that works in our hands. When we begin from these grounds, we create the passionate interest of a self who loves Creation as God loves Creation, as a self who loves the other as a creation as God loves His creations, as our fundamental awareness of duty outside of cultural impositions handed to us. Only by agreeing to sacrifice our confidence in the joy of being “born again” as a “new creature” in the Body of Christ in the adoption of secularly acceptable terms do we begin our descent into the selfless face of Christian nihilism, i.e., the collapse of the self capable of seeing the beloved neighbour as they would be loved. Remember: The emergence of responsibility in the life of the individual requires an existential participation in reality because responsibility is reality’s drawing or tempting of the individual to participate in it.

The Responsibility from the Self

I may not be far off if I say: man is nonsense—and he is that with the aid of language.

With the aid of language every man participates in the highest—but to participate in the highest with the aid of language, in the sense of talking about it, is just as ironical as being a spectator in the gallery observing the royal dinner table. If I were a pagan I would say that an ironical deity had bestowed the gift of speech upon man in order to amuse himself by watching this self-deception.⁴

There's a certain comfort in approaching “foundational” thought for our own ends. Regardless of whether the Cartesian or Hegelian thinker is correct in the higher echelons of their palatial grandiosity, their efforts to right our psychic uncertainties, like ships battered by the storm, fail. Although we are rarely brave enough to suggest we can intuit the nature of reality in toto in a way that eschews all doubt, occasionally philosophers have assumed that we can start from seemingly radically ungrounded principles of basicality—“first principles”. Having seen through the façade of the world as it appears to be, they have derived some irreducibly fundamental aspect of reality with certainty, which allows for them to go on their merry way in elucidating the nature of reality, in some way or other, as it proceeds from reason⁵. Descartes, having discovered his own irrefutable existence made the stunning movement to a “clear and distinct” idea of God; Hegel, going one better, had discovered pure being; what marvelous thoughts these thinkers of old would discover as they lept from syllogism to syllogism as if ascending Mount Olympus ready to slay the gods of even older in the modus ponens.

“God and man are two qualities between which there is an infinite qualitative difference. Every doctrine which overlooks this difference is, humanly speaking, crazy; understood in a godly sense, it is blasphemy. In paganism [and Hegelianism] man made God a man (the man-God); in Christianity God makes Himself man (the God-Man).”⁶

This confident approach, of course, is a fabrication—an exercise in intellectual masturbation that insists one’s chosen mode of inquiry is, of course, the correct mode of inquiry for discovering truth sub specie aeternitatis. The fabrication, better understood as “chatter” that sees reality as inconvenient factor to which the ideal is bound than as inquiries into the nature of this world, betrays a detached objectivity and unreasonable reasonableness in the minds of these thinkers: by attempting to escape the confines of the subject, the thinker escapes the very mode by which they could uncover any truth at all. In that sense, for the individual before God, they find that they are the very mode by which truth can enter into the world—only through the Christ-relationship, by the exposure to the kerygma, can one properly orient themselves for the life in Christ:

“Since human life is lived out in time and space, man's encounter with God can only be a specific event here and now. This event, our being addressed by God here and now, our being questioned, judged, and blessed by him, is what we mean when we speak of an act of God.”⁷

“To have faith is constantly to expect the joyous, the happy, the good... You are in some measure always suffering-hence the task lies right here: Divert your mind, accustom yourself by faith to changing suffering into expectation of the joyous. It is really possible”.⁸

From this revised view of the human individual, in their relation to God, constantly prepared to engage in the deliberation of Nachdenken⁹, we find the locus for our politcal stance: the engaged individual, as part of an intentional community, lives their life intentionally in a way that works to uphold and give life to the “positive unity” of aestheticism and ethicism in i) finding the object of our desire “outside” of ourselves to draw us closer to truth and ii) the inward element that prepares the individual for commitment and action—the religious-ethicist is still “wrong” in that they don't “know” the object of their desire, i.e., Christ, but they do, however, exist within a relationship with Him that provides them the “existence-communication”. Here, “the existential” breaks through any particular way of seeing the world and draws the individual unto Him¹⁰. The individual is aware that they are in untruth qua sinner and so pursues the external element to find meaning in the world, but the individual is also aware that they can't simply flit from aesthetic object to aesthetic object in a way that provides something to the ontological reality of being “born again”, therefore must retain the inwardness of commitment.

But how can we identify this recognition of the self before “the Crowd”?

“The ability to rejoice when persecuted, to love when hated, and to bless when cursed, reveals that one has truly become spirit.”¹¹

Spirit will be known by its fruits—but Christians are in danger of forgetting that fruits can be sour before they ripen.

Can Salvages Ought

One of the more popular moral principles, both in theist and atheist circles, is that “ought implies can”. In short, we cannot be expected to do what we are literally incapable of doing, or, “impossibility implies ommisibility”. Any moral rule that appears to be actually impossible cannot actually be a moral rule as, quite simply, no one can achieve it—therefore, it would be unethical to expect someone to act in such-and-such a way. As noted by the ethicist Judge Wilhelm, we are demanded to do the universal, but we can only ever do the particular¹². To make this clearer, regardless of what the deontologist or the utilitarian desire for us to do, it appears that their universalising tendencies leave both i) incredibly demanding “peaks” to our moral behaviour and also ii) nihilist “troughs” at the same time, where it is not clear how the moral individual acts in the moral situation that falls outside of the abstractions that philosophers deal in.

I’m not interested in promoting a more comprehensive critique of normative ethics here, my reader, as that is contrary to our goals: it is not a matter of collapsing the importance of reflection and teleological thought about the way we live our lives, but rather exposing that the way we think about our lives and the ethical actions that we do or don’t take in those lives is not reducible to merely normative thinking and, instead, requires the individual to take account of their lives and the lives of others in the ugliness, the flesh and blood of real life—a “second ethics” that starts not with abstracted agent, but the rush of blood and a pulse of real action in real life. When all else is life falls away, when treading water out over the deep leaves us held aloft only by a solitary “existence-communication” that breaks through all other “approximation-facts”, we shall be aware of how we ought to proceed through the gates of the spheres on life’s way, the earnest ethics of the earnest survivor constructed in the wreckage of universalist ethics of rights and duties when the world rejects them¹³. This collapse, when all other categories disappear, is what gives us the grounds to break out of the “can” handed to us by society and its imposed horizon of thought and instead, in that state of exception, where the Christian is freed from the historically conditioned mode of their life and learns to see again that the necessary actions of secularity—dread, theft, violence, war—are a choice amongst choices, that we can always do the unthinkable for the one who is unthinkably sinful before the unthinkably forgiving—rest, charity, love, and peacemaking. The politician desires that all possible means are reduced to a single, efficient technique¹⁴, regardless of whether it fits with the demands of reality or not; the Christian, imperinent and ironic in nature, says that all things are possible with God (Matthew 19:26)!

I hope that you, my reader, become aware of a fantastic power that is within you—your subjectivity and capacity for deliberation. The key to ethics, then, is apparently that infamous and barbarous notion that “subjectivity is truth”¹⁵: that the link from the individual to the God upon which they rely unto the other to which they express love is the mode by which we start ethics; that our desire for a better world that exudes the love of God adds that “little knowledge” of revelation which can only become real when “subjectivity is passion”¹⁶. And with passion, as the love of God shining through His light in the world to the world, comes the λόγος that grafts us (Romans 11:17-19).

“Without such an overriding teleological orientation, choice collapses into an arbitrary decisionism, and intersubjectivity into social conformism.”¹⁷

Now consider the Christian at the moment he is most blissfully aware of his fellowship with God and has to confess that he nevertheless owes a good share of it to his persecutors – then to say: I will forgive them, I am not angry with them – how unfestive – no: I bless them.¹⁸

The Political Difference

Here, we have sketched the Christian individual against the backdrop of a world which is drawn unto God in its imperfection and conflict. The responsibility that is central to one's own pursuit of salvation, of the responsibility to self and to the other before God in the grounded triadic relationship, becomes alive in the dialectical relationship of faith and works: while faith itself always reflects some aspect of the divine handed down from on high and, as such, beyond the realm of human capabilities without the breaking through of the divine kerygma in the life of the believer, works draw the individual out of their abstracted theological palace and their legalism that forces them, through the curse of the law, to lord over their equals and make a claim to objective knowledge that lingers beyond the bounds of human comprehension. While we, no doubt, claim the truth of revelation that reaches from beyond the horizon of natural human comprehension within any given historical period, we deny that any particular person could ever hold this knowledge in love for their neighbour as if from the uncaused and unmoved position—the need for repetition comes through recognising that we are constantly caused and moved, but need not be thrown to the rocks.

The politician, however, does not recognise this triadic relationship which grounds and orients the Christian. Indeed, they cannot because their way of the world works in reverse: whereas the Christian recognises their reliance upon an unseen God and the ethical calling of the apparent other, the politician inverts their action by seeing the other in abstracta and electing themselves the God-function in the relation.

The reliability of numbers is of course a fraud, they are unreliable; and yet this is what is offered you in the world, calculated to fool you, so that you become part of the numbers... Numbers are used in order to conceal the emptiness of existence, they put you in a state of exaltation, like opium, and so you are tranquilized by the immense reliability of numbers running into millions... the animal needs no higher certainty than numbers.¹⁹

The politician, failing to recognise their personal relation to God and the separation that raises itself as sin, instead looks at the world objectively—as if all other humans, those creatures predestined by their creator to live with the potentiality of the freedom of Christ, were merely numbers on a spreadsheet, figures in a calculation as to what is the most objectively correct thing to do to these subjectively alive individuals. By abstracting away the life of the individual as a pre-violent imposition of non-recognition, the politician recognises their duty to abstractions and abstractions alone. It is in this inversion of values where we find the politician in their despair—they lack the self that makes the man, makes the Christian. The impersonal and detached relation with humanity makes the art of politics an attempt to create one’s own solipsism, an attempt to reduce the external world to a matter of automatic misrelations that can be, through the correct process of displaying power and drumming up authority, fixed like the mechanations of any other technical system. The technological view of the human subject reduces the ζώον λόγον έχον to a simple technical problem in need of a technical solution amongst technical solutions—and while “the possibility of sickness is man’s advantage over the beast”²⁰, the imposition of this selfless sickness reduces simply to the herd animal.

The philosopher-king, highly heralded since antiquity in Plato’s Republic, becomes a mutilating individual who fails to see the world and its inhabitants “as they are”. The abstraction, abstracting away the very humanity of the human subject, leads to an uncomfortable view of the world defined only by its brutish materialism:

“Just like the others.” This phrase expresses the two characteristic marks of being man in general: (1) sociality, the animal-creature that is linked to the herd: just like the others; (2) envy, which, however, animals do not have.
This envy is very characteristic. To be specific, animals are not envious because each animal is only a copy or specimen [Examplar]. Man, on the other hand, is the only animal species in which every specimen ... is an individuality, intended [lagt an] to be spirit. Number or the numerical man, of course, does not become spirit but still retains this feature that distinguishes him from other animal creatures—envy.²¹

The individual person, created for and granted the possibility to fulfil some purpose by the Creator upon and within whom they rely and rest, becomes nothing aside from “just like the others”. An inconvenience for the politician’s blustering objectivism, a figure to be cajoled and coerced towards whatever purpose the politician sees fit, the individual collapses under the numerical imposition placed onto them—it is not solely a matter of the politician failing to recognise the humanity of the other, but the failing to recognise the humanity of the other creates “the Crowd” before the politician and sets us on the path to nihilism²². When humanity is placed into the cauldron of political abstraction, the individual is in danger of failing to see itself qua spirit; “the One” creates “the Crowd” and “the Crowd” performs the opposite of the God-function in stripping subjectivity from the subject and allowing objectivity to the specimen.

The Difference to the Political

What happens when this is the case? Because the politician thrives in both eschewing the view that humans are, in some way or other, subjectively notable, this grim and surface-level materialism of “the One” quickly turns life’s complexities and contradictions, existing in the tension of two individuals who are necessarily separated from one another in their subjective reality, into a puzzle that requires a solution. The living, breathing, blood-pumping, and interesting nature of life is compressed, distorted, and disfigured into a puzzle which demands a solution—regardless of what the issue is, “the Crowd” cannot be allowed to escape the objectivizing activity of “the One” that hangs over them in his God-function; regardless of what the issue is, efficiency and immediacy are the two metrics by which the puzzle must dissolve. The objectivizing materialism of “the One” leads both that very politician and their conglomerous flock-cum-chimeral abomination to turn away from the loving grasp of the Lord and the mediating forgiveness of His Son. Reflexing back upon itself, “the Crowd” becomes fixated upon eschewing and redefining their conception of “the good” in their own terms qua “the useful” or “the otherwise as I would like it”—leveraged by the objectivizing objectivity of the heraldic politician. “The Crowd”, knowing that truth can only ever emerge when the subject views the other as subject, turns away from any possibility of discovering or enacting “the good”. They are teleologically drawn to “the demonic”²³.

Detached from reality “as it is”, content merely with the imagined imposition of desire and pragmatism, the politician remains an impersonal figure of irresponsibility, only capable of and fanatically driven to using violence towards his own means—“the useful” rejects and inverts “the good”, turning it inside out and hiding from goodness like a beast from the deep. Even when forced back upon himself in the light of herdlike inverted anger against the figure who drove them to anger, the politician can still always escape like a thief into the night by appealing to the collaborative and conspiratorial efforts of bureaucratic modernism—which makes me wonder, my reader, why on Earth we would ever agree to a mode of governance which seemingly never has anyone responsible for anything and yet consistently drives forward policies which seem to imply some feigned attempt at intelligent design. The Christian, a self in the sea of confusion, shines like a light in the eyes of a deep-sea fish when the politician finds that violence cannot touch that single individual who has no fear of death—is completely indifferent to the threats of contingency²⁴. As with all instances of “the demonic”, the only solution, inefficient and distant in the face of the demand for efficiency and immediacy, is the forgiveness that sees sin²⁵—for casting out demons was always a matter of exposing evil to “the good” as evil is to be overcome with good (Romans 12:17-21).

What is the role of the Christian in this world? How can one oppose “the Crowd” that both turns to “the One” in an effort to escape their responsibility to self, other, and God? Ellul muses and calls us to discipline:

People generally join the material struggle out of their own volition, spontaneously. They are able to conduct these political or economic wars, and if need by they will do it by violent means. But the other war can be waged only by Christians, for they have received the revelation not only of God's love but also of the creation's profound reality. Only Christians can contend against the powers that are at the root of the problem. The state would be powerless and unimportant were it not for the something-more-than-itself that resides within it. And to contend against institutions or against the men who serve the institutions (the police, for instance) is useless. It is the heart of the problem that must be attacked. And Christians alone can do that—because the others know nothing about all this, and because only the Christians receive the power of the Holy Spirit and are required by God to do these things. I know the temptations! People will say: "The Christians keep the good part for themselves. They evade the hard, dangerous battle and stay calmly in their room and pray." Well, people who do not know what it is all about will talk like that. They will say: "The Christians are full of kind words. They insist that they are participating in our struggle, but they are careful not to get their hands dirty, and so they can keep a good conscience." Anyone who has never fought spiritually will agree.²⁶

And in the Pulpit

Of course, this is not an issue merely for politicians and polticians alone, no. Indeed, we may find this irresponsibility and detached gnosticism of the politician in the words of those who walk amongst us—indeed, in our own words if we are not reflective enough. Indeed, an overly pagan and abstracted view of religious truth can leave us in an abstracted and brutalising position that demands abstracted and brutalising solutions. We think back:

For these people, who typify the religious nihilism of S. K.’s “Religiousness A”, i.e., a realisation of the combination of the aesthetic and the ethical but without the realisation of ones active role in the world, there is a religious abandonment that comes with receiving the law. This should be no surprise, however, as they are clear representatives of those who suffer under the “curse of the law” (Galatians 3:10-14): the Lord exists in ideality opposite and against the suffering subject in reality, offering only juridical intercession on the part of the good against the sinner. As such, the self-elect (assuming a quasi-Calvinist understanding of such a thing, as is typical of these fundamentalist approaches to the faith, although stopping short of considered theological sophistication) can only recognise God and God’s will as a judgement against humanity that casts the cursed non-believer into the depths of hell—on the face of the earth itself!

Forgiveness and love become alien concepts or completely empty in some semantic gymnastics where forgiveness is shown through the cruel violence of calling the police and prisons into the service of the church, thereby showing total disbelief in the genuinely transformative power of the Spirit in the church by relegating that to a nice side-effect that might come about in some possible world or other. This still remains secondary to the need to punish the sinner to the full extent that we are allowed to do so by the ruling powers—the demand for a blood sacrifice was not lost in the sacrifice of Christ, it appears.²⁷

While reflection can leave us alienated from reality, reality can leave us alienated from the ideal. It is our task, as those who choose God when there is the freedom to do otherwise, to ensure that we do not allow for that to happen first in ourselves and then in the life of the other. Against politics, theology. Against irresponsibility, you—as the locus over which the choice breaks.

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For more, follow the links below:

• The Case for Christian Anarchism: On transcendence and immanence

1. “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Philosophy”, from On Kierkegaard and the Truth, p. 29, P. L. Holmer, ed. D. J. Gouwens and L. C. Barrett III

2. An aside, for a later date, my reader, is the incoherence that comes with those who elect themselves “defenders of the Lord” or similar. Not only is this sense of self-election nowhere within scripture or a tradition (aside from, possibly, Pelagian thought), the idea of a self-election into the role of God’s defender is beyond thought. What possible defence could a single human or even a great army offer the omnipotent, omnipresent God? As with all aesthetic declarations of faith, it might be better to view these fanatics as syncretic in a way they don’t recognise or like a child who steps into the fray of an argument between his parents—unaware of what to do, unaware of how he could do anything, and unaware of the problem he steps between. There’s something admirable about this childish promise to defend God by the sword, mirrored by their childish eisegesis of Matthew 26:52 that apparently means everything but “put your swords away”.

3. “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama: A Venture in Fragmentary Endeavor” from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 142, ed. [V. Eremita]

4. JP 1:89

5. Pensées, p. 9-13, B. Pascal

6. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 207, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

7. Kerygma and Myth, p. 196-197, R. Bultmann

8. “Letter 167” from Letters and Documents, S. Kierkegaard, ed. H. Rosenmeier

9. Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth, Kindle location 2955, A. J. Torrance & A. B. Torrance

10. “Christian Expositions” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied’ It, p. 151, Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard

11. “Kierkegaard on Language: Peril and Promise”, R. C. Zachman, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 45, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

12. “Derrida, Judge Wilhelm, and Death”, I. Duckles, from Kierkegaard and Death, p. 225, ed. P. Stokes and A. J. Buben

13. “Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida: The Death of the Other”, L Llevadot, from Kierkegaard and Death, p. 214-215, edited by P. Stokes and A. J. Buben

14. The Technological Society, p. 21 J. Ellul

15. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 203, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

16. “Kierkegaard on Rationality”, M. G. Piety, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 66, edited by J. J. Davenport and A. Rudda

17. “Kierkegaard and the Critique of Political Theology”, A. Rudd, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 18, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

18. JP 4:4648

19. The Last Years: Journals 1853–1855, p. 163–4, S. Kierkegaard

20. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 28-29, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

21. JP, 3: 2986

22. For more on this, see The Problem of Nihilism.

23. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, p. 99, V. Haufniensis (S. Kierkegaard)

24. “Love, Hate, and Kierkegaard's Christian Politics of Indifference”, R. A. Davis, from Religious Anarchism, p. 79, ed. A. Christoyannopoulos

25. “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins”, from Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 59 S. Kierkegaard

26. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 164 J. Ellul

27. The Joy of Responsibility