Practice in Christianity
Overview
Of the many works he wrote during 1848, his “richest and most fruitful year,” Kierkegaard specified Practice in Christianity as “the most perfect and truest thing.” In his reflections on such topics as Christ’s invitation to the burdened, the imitatio Christi, the possibility of offense, and the exalted Christ, he takes as his theme the requirement of Christian ideality in the context of divine grace. Addressing clergy and laity alike, Kierkegaard asserts the need for institutional and personal admission of the accommodation of Christianity to the culture and to the individual misuse of grace. As a corrective defense, the book is an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for the established order, which would involve the order’s ability to acknowledge the Christian requirement, confess its own distance from it, and resort to grace for support in its continued existence. At the same time the book can be read as the beginning of Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom. Because of the high ideality of the contents and in order to prevent the misunderstanding that he himself represented that ideality, Kierkegaard writes under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.
Top Highlights
“In order to invite them to come to one in this way, one must oneself live in the very same manner, poor as the poorest, poorly regarded as the lowly man among the people, experienced in life’s sorrow and anguish, sharing the very same condition as those one invites to come to one, those who labor and are burdened. If someone wants to invite the sufferer to come to him, he must either alter his condition and make it identical with the sufferer’s or make the sufferer’s condition identical with his own, for if not, the contrast makes the difference all the greater.” (Page 13)
“Remain with me, I am that rest, or to remain with me is that rest.” (Page 15)
“his presence here on earth never becomes a thing of the past” (Page 9)
“Indeed, he walked the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man; he walked that way in order to seek sinners!” (Page 20)
“It is already loving, when one is able to help, to help the one who asks for help, but to offer the help oneself!” (Page 11)
- Title: Practice in Christianity
- Author: Soren Kierkegaard
- Series: Kierkegaard’s Writings
- Volume: XX
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Print Publication Date: 1991
- Logos Release Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christian life; Psychology, Religious; Atonement; Grace
- ISBNs: 9781400847037, 0691020639, 9780691020631, 9780691073965, 0691073961, 1400847036
- Resource ID: LLS:KKGWRTGS20
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-05T00:04:05Z
