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     My own interpretation of Kierkegaard's emphasis on
contemporaneity is that he is reacting to the historicism that
had become fashionable in his day.  In the "Philosophical
Fragments" Kierkegaard addresses the issue of how an eternal
consciousness (read Salvation) can be grounded in an historical
event. This in response to Hegel who, in his Lectures on the
Philosophy of History describes Jesus as an historical personage
and explains the establishment of the Christian religion as a
development in the process of history.  The objective
rationalization of Jesus' Messiahship is intolerable to
Kierkegaard. He reacts to it with an unconditional demand for
contemporaneity, in effect denying the validity of history
altogether and perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath.

     It is with somewhat embarrassed humility that I discover my
disagreement with Kierkegaard's interpretation, as I understand
it, of history. In my experience the distinction between past and
present corresponds rather closely to the distinction between
contemplation (reflection) and action. All contemplation, hence
all deliberate inwardness, is historical, is of the past, be it
10 minutes or ten centuries remote from what I do here and now.
Kierkegaard's summons to contemporaneity has the virtue of
stripping contemplation of explicit social and political
encrustations; it trashes Hegel's philosophy of history; but it
most emphatically does not translate contemplation into the
active engagement with our fellow human beings of which we are in
such dire need.

     I cannot write about capital punishment without remembering
Socrates' admonition from the Crito that fear of death is
testimony to ignorance, that, indeed, death might prove a great
blessing to some, if not to all of us. The focus of my thought is
not the loss sustained by those who are the beneficiaries of
death, but the cruelty and meanness and insensitivity of those
who delight to inflict it.

     The figure of Jesus I see through the account of Isaiah as
one so despised and rejected that "we hid as it were our faces
from him." (53:3) From Jahwe we hide our faces in fear and awe.
From his Messiah we hide our faces in disdain and disgust.
Perhaps as it is blasphemous for us to presume to gaze upon
Jehovah, so it is, notwithstanding the sentimental mysticism and
paramysticism of the 16th and 17th centuries, equally blasphemous
for us to presume to gaze upon Jesus and to cozy up to him in the
delusion that we can co-opt his collaboration for our own
emotional enterprises.

     But then, one might argue dialectically, that the
incarnation, that God's becoming man, unavoidably results in a
Janus figure, who is at one and the same time infinitely remote
from and infinitely intimate with his human creatures, a
conceptual contradiction, which, if nothing else,  will keep the
theological mills turning for ever and ever.

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