The Kierkegaarden

“People have mutually confirmed one another in the notion that by the aid of the upshot of Christ’s life and 1,800 years (the consequences) they have become acquainted with the answer to the problem. By degrees, as this came to be accounted wisdom, all pith and vigor was distilled out of Christianity; the tension of the paradox was relaxed, one became a Christian without noticing it, and without in the least noticing the possibility of offense.”
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~Source: Practice In Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“But this precisely is now the misfortune of Christendom, as for many, many years it has been, that Christ is neither the one thing nor the other, neither what He was when He lived on earth, nor what (as is believed) He shall be at His return, but one about whom in an illicit way, through history, people have learned to know something to the effect that He was somebody or another of considerable consequence. In an unpermissible and unlawful way people have become *knowing* about Christ, for the only permissible way is to be *believing*.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“Can one learn from history anything about Christ? No. Why not? Because one can ‘know’ nothing at all about ‘Christ’; He is the paradox, the object of faith, existing only for faith. But all historical communication is communication of ‘knowledge,’ hence from history one can learn nothing about Christ.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“Are the consequences of Christ’s life more important than His life? No, by no means, quite the contrary — if this were so, Christ was merely a man.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“The print of a foot along a path is obviously a consequence of the fact that some creature has gone that way. I may now go on to suppose erroneously that it was, for example, a bird, but on closer inspection, pursuing the track farther, I convince myself that it must have been another sort of animal. Very well. But here we are far from having an infinite qualitative alteration. But can I, by closer inspection of such a track, or by following it farther, reach at one point or another the conclusion: ergo it was a spirit that passed this way? A spirit which leaves no trace behind it! Just so it is with this thing of concluding from the consequences of an (assumed) human existence that ergo it was God.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“Lord Jesus Christ, whether we are far away or nearby, far away from you in the confused human throng, in worldly busyness, in earthly cares, in temporal joy, in purely human loftiness, or far away from all this in solitude, in forsakenness, in unappreciation, in lowliness — and closer to you: draw us, draw us wholly to yourself.”
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~Source: Practice in Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus

“People have mutually confirmed one another in the notion that by the aid of the upshot of Christ’s life and 1,800 years (the consequences) they have become acquainted with the answer to the problem. By degrees, as this came to be accounted wisdom, all pith and vigor was distilled out of Christianity; the tension of the paradox was relaxed, one became a Christian without noticing it, and without in the least noticing the possibility of offense.”
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Practice In Christianity (1850)
Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus