Critique of the Official Christianity in Late Writings of Søren Kierkegaard

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting a synthetic reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s late critique of what he called “official Christianity,” that is that which in the world counts as Christianity but which, according to Kierkegaard, has nothing to do with real Christianity. The paper begins with a short presentation of what according to Kierkegaard the essence of real Christianity is, with special emphasis on his idea of imitating Christ. Then his main reproaches follow: (1) leading a pagan life and calling it Christian, (2) rejection of imitation of Christ and putting some verbal activities instead, and (3) rejection of imitation of Christ and worshiping him instead. Those three points are supplemented by Kierkegaardian (4) critique of clergy. In the final section it is argued that Kierkegaard’s critique is universal in scope, i.e. it concerns all major Christian denominations.