There is nothing so new in Christianity that it may not appear to have been in the world before, and yet everything is new. Now, if someone uses the name of Christianity and Christ’s name, but the categories are anything but Christian, is this, then Christianity? The mark of Christianity is the paradox, the absolute paradox. As soon as a so called speculative cancels the paradox and makes this qualification into an element, all the spheres are confused.
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Concluding Postscript, Hong p. 539-540Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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"Christianity cannot be poured into a child. No one begins with being Christian; each one becomes that in the fullness of time-if one becomes that. A strict Christian upbringing in Christianity’s decisive categories is a very venturesome undertaking, because Christianity makes men whose strength is in their weakness: but if a child is cowed into Christianity in its totally earnest form, it ordinarily makes a very unhappy youth. The rare exception is a sort of luck."
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Suppose that Christianity does not at all want to be understood; suppose that, in order to express this and to prevent anyone, misguided, from taking the road of objectivity, it has proclaimed itself to be the paradox. Suppose that it wants to be only for existing persons and essentially for persons existing in inwardness, in the inwardness of faith, which cannot be expressed more definitely than this: it is the absurd, adhered to firmly with the passion of the infinite. Suppose that Christianity does not want to be understood and that the maximum of any eventual understanding is to understand that it cannot be understood. Suppose that it so decisively accentuates existing that the single individual becomes a sinner, Christianity the paradox, and existence the time of decision. Suppose that speculating is a temptation, the most precarious of all. Suppose that the speculator is not the prodigal son but a naughty child who refuses to stay where existing human being belong, in the children’s nursery and the education room of existence where one becomes adult only though inwardness in existing, but who instead wants to enter God’s council, continually screaming that, from the point of view of the eternal, the divine, the theocentric, there is no paradox. Suppose that the speculative thinker is the restless resident who, although it is obvious that he is a renter, yet in view of the abstract truth that, eternally and divinely perceived, all property is in common, wants to be the owner, so that there is nothing to do except to send for a police officer, who would presumably say, just as the subpoena servers say to Gert Westphaler: We are sorry to have to come on this errand.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
In all the flat, lethargic, dull moments, when the sensate dominates a person, to him Christianity is a madness because it is incommensurate with any finite wherefore. But then what good is it? Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute. And that is how it must be presented, consequently as, that is, it must appear as madness to the sensate person. And therefore it is true, so true, and also in another sense so true when the sensible person in the situation of contemporaneity (see II A) censoriously says of Christ, “He is literally nothing”-quite so, for he is the absolute. Christianity is an absolute. Christianity came into the world as the absolute, not, humanly speaking, for comfort; on the contrary, it continually speaks about how the Christian must suffer or about how a person in order to become and remain a Christian must endure sufferings that he consequently can avoid simply by refraining from becoming a Christian.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
How can a missionary in such circumstances meet the surprise and questions of his pupils, unless he may point to that seed, and tell them what Christianity was meant to be; unless he may show that. like all other religions, Christianity, too, has had its history; that the Christianity of the nineteenth century is not the Christianity of the Middle Ages, that the Christianity of the MiddIe Ages was not that of the early Councils, that the Christianity of the early Councils was not that of the Apostles, and "that what has been said by Christ, that alone was weII said?"
Max Muller
The sum of the whole matter is this — He who is one in will and heart with God is a Christian. He who loves God is one in will and heart with Him. He who trusts Christ loves God. That is Christianity in its ultimate purpose and result. That is Christianity in its means and working forces. That is Christianity in its starting-point and foundation.
Alexander Maclaren
Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye
Kiernan, Caitlin R.
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