Søren Kierkegaard: A Christian
Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian author who was against applying the ideas of the Scientific Enlightenment to Christianity. He lived in Denmark from 1813 to 1855. His works were written to the single individual who might be interested in reading them.
Links
Selections from the Writings of Soren Kierkegaard (now in public domain)
Aufklarung
The Aufklärung was an essentially German school of rationalist philosophy that began in 1706 when Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was appointed professor of mathematics at Halle-Wittenberg University.
Materialism makes God the product of weakness or fear, of pleasure or selfish hope, or avarice and tyranny.
SK & Possibility
When the sinner despairs of the forgiveness of sins it is almost as if he were directly picking a quarrel with God, it sounds in fact like a rejoinder when he says, “No, there is not any forgiveness of sins, it is an impossibility”; this looks like a hand-to-hand scuffle.” We actually do offend God when we reject the forgiveness he so freely offers. But we also offend God when we fail to give forgiveness to others.
Herbert Read and Kierkegaard
God had lodged a veto— such love of God as Kierkegaard had conceived could not co-exist with the love of a human being. It compelled him to an asceticism as rigorous as that of the saints I and indeed, from this moment Kierkegaard’s life was in every sense that of a saint. He is perhaps the most real saint of modern times.
Clement of Alexandria and Soren K.
I came across Clement of Alexandria’s Miscellanies while looking for something to read for librivox.org and was struck by what Clement wote in his fifth book third chapter regarding faith and hope. He elevated the mind over the senses. He wrote about the crowd as Kierkegaard and Plato did. And he quotes ancient authors as he explains how their ideas fit well with the New Testament.
Simon Magus by Irenaeus 130-202 AD
She was, for example, in that Helen on whose account the Trojan war was undertaken; for whose sake also Stesichorus was struck blind, because be bad cursed her in his verses, but afterwards, repenting and writing what are called palinodes, in which he sang her praise, he was restored to sight. Thus she, passing from body to body, and suffering insults in every one of them, at last became a common prostitute; and she it was that was meant by the lost sheep.
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