ModernLutheran

Søren Kierkegaard

1813 – 1855

Danish philosopher and theologian often called the father of existentialism. His passionate critique of comfortable Christianity and emphasis on the individual’s leap of faith profoundly influenced modern theology and philosophy.

BornCopenhagen, Denmark

DiedCopenhagen, Denmark

TraditionLutheran

EraModern

Melancholy Dane

Born to a wealthy Copenhagen family haunted by his father’s conviction that God had cursed them, Kierkegaard was brilliant, melancholy, and intensely self-reflective from youth. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, wrote a landmark dissertation on irony, and fell deeply in love with Regine Olsen — only to break off their engagement in an agonized decision he never fully explained but which haunted his work for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous merchant who lived in a state of chronic spiritual guilt. He believed that as a boy he had cursed God on a Jutland heath, and that this sin had doomed his family. Five of his seven children died before him. This atmosphere of brooding religiosity shaped Søren profoundly: his entire intellectual project can be understood as an attempt to answer the question of what it means to exist before God when existence itself feels like a curse. The broken engagement with Regine Olsen became the emotional engine of Kierkegaard’s work. He never stopped loving her, and the theme of sacrificial love — the willingness to give up what one loves most for the sake of a higher calling — runs through nearly everything he wrote. His meditations on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling are, at one level, a reflection on his own sacrifice of Regine. Blaise Pascal’s famous wager about faith and reason addresses similar territory: the question of what we are willing to stake on what we cannot prove.

The Pseudonymous Works

Between 1843 and 1846, Kierkegaard produced an astonishing body of work under various pseudonyms, each representing a different existential stance — the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. Either/Or explored the choice between a life of pleasure and a life of moral commitment. Fear and Trembling meditated on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as the paradigm of faith’s “teleological suspension of the ethical.” The Concept of Anxiety pioneered the analysis of dread as a fundamental human condition. The pseudonymous method was not a literary gimmick but a philosophical strategy. Kierkegaard believed that truth cannot be communicated directly — that the reader must be drawn into a process of self-examination through which truth is discovered rather than received. This approach, which he called “indirect communication,” makes his works function more like novels or dramas than like philosophical treatises. The reader is not told what to think but is placed in situations that demand a personal decision. In this, Kierkegaard anticipated the narrative theology of the twentieth century and the literary apologetics of C.S. Lewis. The theological sophistication of these works is remarkable. Fear and Trembling draws on the story of Abraham in Genesis but reads it through the lens of Luther’s theology of faith alone — the conviction that faith is not a natural human capacity but a leap beyond rational calculation into the arms of God. The Concept of Anxiety analyzes the relationship between freedom and sin with a psychological depth that anticipates Freud and Heidegger. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript — despite its whimsical title, one of the most important works of philosophy in the nineteenth century — argues that truth is not a proposition to be known but a reality to be lived. These insights would profoundly shape the existential theology of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Attack on Christendom

In his final years, Kierkegaard launched a furious assault on the Danish State Church, which he saw as a comfortable institution that had domesticated Christianity into something Jesus would not recognize. “The Christianity of the New Testament simply does not exist,” he wrote. “What has to be done is to throw light upon a criminal offense against Christianity, prolonged through centuries.” He collapsed on the street in October 1855 and died a month later at age 42, having spent his entire inheritance on publishing his works. Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom was provoked by the funeral of Bishop J.P. Mynster, the primate of the Danish Lutheran Church, who was eulogized as a “witness to the truth.” Kierkegaard, who had known and respected Mynster, was outraged by the comparison of a comfortable bishop to the martyrs and prophets. His polemic, published in a series of pamphlets called The Moment, argued that institutional Christianity had become the exact opposite of what Jesus intended: a system of social respectability that inoculated people against the radical demands of the gospel. The attack was prophetic in the precise theological sense: Kierkegaard spoke as one who had seen a truth that his contemporaries refused to acknowledge. His critique anticipated Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s distinction between cheap and costly grace, Karl Barth’s rejection of cultural Protestantism, and the broader twentieth-century crisis of institutional Christianity. His insistence that authentic faith requires personal risk, passionate commitment, and the willingness to stand alone against the crowd resonates with every era that has seen the Church grow comfortable with the powers of this world.

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Meaning

At the heart of Kierkegaard’s thought is the question of what it means to exist as a single individual before God. In a world increasingly dominated by systems, institutions, and mass movements, Kierkegaard insisted that the fundamental unit of reality is the existing individual who must choose, commit, and bear responsibility for that commitment. This emphasis on individual existence — its freedom, its anxiety, its potential for authenticity or despair — is what earned Kierkegaard the title “father of existentialism.” The Problem of Meaning explores themes that Kierkegaard would have recognized immediately: the search for significance in a world that seems to offer none, the relationship between belief and purpose, the question of whether meaning is found or created. Kierkegaard’s answer was that meaning is neither found in the external world (as the aesthete hopes) nor created by moral effort (as the ethicist believes) but received through a relationship with the God who calls each individual by name. This answer, while rooted in the Lutheran Church’s tradition of justification by faith, was articulated with a philosophical depth that made it accessible far beyond confessional boundaries. Kierkegaard’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche is debated but significant. Both thinkers attacked the complacency of their respective cultures; both insisted on the importance of passionate commitment; both recognized that the modern world was facing a crisis of meaning that superficial optimism could not resolve. The difference is in their response: where Nietzsche declared the death of God and looked to the “Übermensch” for salvation, Kierkegaard looked to the God who meets the individual in the moment of despair. Pascal’s Wager Revisited takes up this very question: what is at stake in the choice between faith and unfaith, and what does it mean to wager one’s existence on an answer?

Legacy

Largely ignored in his lifetime outside Denmark, Kierkegaard was rediscovered in the early 20th century and recognized as a thinker of the first rank. His influence divides into two streams: philosophically, he inspired the existentialism of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus; theologically, he shaped the neo-orthodox movement of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His insistence that truth is subjective — that authentic existence requires passionate personal commitment rather than detached objectivity — remains one of the most radical challenges to modern intellectual life. Kierkegaard’s theological legacy is especially rich. Karl Barth drew on Kierkegaard’s concept of the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and humanity to launch the dialectical theology movement. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on costly grace and concrete obedience owes much to Kierkegaard’s attack on comfortable religion. Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Kierkegaard at Boston University, absorbed his emphasis on individual moral responsibility. Timothy Keller frequently cited Kierkegaard’s insights about the nature of faith and doubt in his preaching to skeptical New Yorkers. Kierkegaard died virtually alone, estranged from the Church, from his family, and from the woman he loved. Yet his work has proven inexhaustible. Every generation of Christians that has grown uncomfortable with institutional religion — that has sensed a gap between the radical claims of the gospel and the comfortable practices of the Church — has found in Kierkegaard a kindred spirit. His question remains as sharp as ever: “Is the Christianity of the New Testament still possible?”