> Charles Creegan wrote:
> 
> My point was that your readings don't resonate
> with the traditions of Kierkegaard reading--European,
> American, scholarly, pious, or any other. Not even
> French Existentialism, not even Mark C. Taylor's
> A/Theology!  They don't resonate with SK either;
> they don't take SK's own communities into account. 
> For instance (perhaps the most important instance) your
> understanding of his "project" is far removed from
> biblical and historical Christianity, which Kierkegaard
> approved by and large while applying a corrective to
> its incarnation in his time.  
> 
> What can be *done* with such an idiosyncratic reading? 
> Nothing: it can't be dealt with, built on, even refuted. 
> There are no handholds, it doesn't connect. Thus to me
> you make nonsense.

I am reminded of Bishop Martensen's newspaper comments
on December 28, 1854, with respect to Kierkegaard:

         "To be sure, the foregoing considerations
      are pointless so far as Dr. S. Kierkegaard is
      concerned, whose Christianity is without church
      and without history, and who seeks Christ
      only in the "desert" and in the "secret chambers".
      It contradicts every community of interpretation
      (Gemeindebewusztsein) to assert that one is able
      to bear witness to the truth only in extraordiunary
      times and only under extraordinary ordeals and only
      by means of extraordinary gifts of grace."

I interpret the references to the desert and to the
secret chambers as an allusion to Kierkegaard as a false
prophet (Matthew 24:26).  To enable the reader to verify
my translation I quote the German text on which I relied: 

          "Freilich ist es unnuetz, fuer Dr. S. Kierkegaard
       solche Betrachtungen anzustellen, dessen Christentum
       ohne Kirche und ohne Geschichte ist, und der Christus
       nur in "der Wueste" und im "Kaemmerlein" sucht. Doch
       widerspricht es jeglichem Gemeindebewusztsein zu
       behaupten, dasz man nur in den auszerordentlichen
       Zeiten und unter den auszerordentlichen Pruefungen
       und mit den auszerordentlichen Kraeften und Gnadengaben
       von der Wahrheit zeugen koenne, ..." (XIV, 11)
   
Far be it from me to intimate that whatever is eccentric and
incongruous must be a revelation of Truth merely by virtue
of its absurdity. It seems to me safer to generalize that
the understanding which has its roots in and derives its
nourishment from community, the conventional wisdom,
becomes untrue by virtue of its conventionality; and
I see no escape from the fact that community unavoidably
degenerates into convention.

With due apologies for flaunting my boorishness, I confess
that there are uncounted pages in Kierkegaard's books
which I don't understand, which don't make sense to me.
Isn't Kierkegaard, when he demands of us to accept the
paradox of Christ, asking that we accept the absurd,
that we accept what makes no sense?

It helps, I believe, to distinguish on the one hand,
objective truth, the truth inherent in a community
of interpretation, the truth of logic, of reason and
science, the communicable truth, and, on the other
hand, subjective truth which is inward and idiosyncratic
to the individual, which is not communicable, which is
unspeakable (unsagbar), the existence of which is confirmed
for us by poetry and music.

It would be obviously contradictory to presume to 
describe or in any way to set forth subjective truth.
The role of the paradox, of the absurd, of that which
makes no sense, is, as it were, to neutralize the community
of interpretation, and thereby to create a (spiritual)
space in which that which is inward and incommunicable
can come to life.

The truth of Kierkegaard, as I read his books, is _not_
the objective truth of a community of interpretation.
I perceive it as the discovery and confirmation of ones
own (subjective) reality, which becomes visible only
in the shadow of paradox.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com