Message From a netfriend:

I have already learned so much from my old friend Soren Kierkegaard, and recently I stumbled on some pretty darn good advice from him about what it means to genuinely re-missionalize the church. In his terms and by his own admission, his sense of vocation before God was "to introduce Christianity to Christendom." What might seem at first to be paradoxical, can become a very useful reference for us who work with the Established Church in all its forms because in so many ways this I believe is exactly what is required of any ministry that tries to awaken the church to its true missional purpose and calling--we simply have to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom.

Kierkegaard did not attack the Established Church simply because it and its clergy had failed. He was probably all too aware that neither they not he himself could fulfill the stern demands imposed by Christianity. What provoked him most of all was the Church's self congratulation at what was percieved as a job well done and therefore their refusal to admit its real failure. This is what really fired him up and let him to assume a role of an Apostle to Christendom; as if Christendom itself was a pagan land that itself needed evangelizing....

He rightly observes that ""...the task of an apostle is to spread Christianity, to win men to it.." This I suggest, lies at the core of all genuine apostolic work. It is to spread Christianity. He goes on to say that it was his task as an apostle to Christendom "...to liberate men from the conceit that they are Christians...It is the illusions that must be got rid of, the ground must be cleared, and instead of bringing new life into the illusions, the little life they have in them must be starved out, so as to make it manifest that Christianity simply does not exist. (For Self Examination, trans. E+H Hong, 1940, p.56f.)

According to Kierkegaard then, Apostolic ministry to Christendom, that very particular calling that aims at re-missionalising the supposed people of God, must first aim at making it much harder to be a Christian. It must raise the bar significantly in order to be able to allow the innoculated pagan that calls himself a disciple, to shed any illusions that he is in fact a Christian. It must not, as is often the case, try to give it more life and so add to the illusion of NT Chriatianity and thus deepen and prolong its infidelity; truly apostolic work must first dis-illusion the church, before it proposes to bring it life. The aim of the Apostle remember, is to 'spread Christianity', which must also require apostolic ministry to engage with and destroy all of Chistianity's counterfiets; including that of the prevailing church order. Kierkegaard is thus very harsh in his appraisal of his contemporary church, a church he called "Sunday Chritainity" and even more sarcastically "a reilgion of quiet hours in holy places". He blatantly says of it that "The official worship of God, with its claim of being the Christianity of the New Testamant, is, apostolically speaking, a counterfeit, a forgery" (Attack upon Christendom, 59)

For Kierkegaard, the real problem was that the Established Church presumes far too much about its status 'before God.' He condemned the readiness with which the Established Church accepts its own condition. "Strangely enough it is precisely this deification of the established order which constitutes the constant rebellion, the permanent revolt against God. It desires, in fact...to be everything, to have the world evolution a little bit under its thumb, or to guide the development of the race. But the deification of the established order..is the invention of the indolent worldy mind, which would put itself at rest and imagine that all is sheer security and peace, and that now we have reached the highest attainmentt." (Training in Christianity, 89)

His simple apostolic diagnosis and remedy is to propose that "...every individual ought to live in fear and trembling (holy insecurity) before God, and so too there is no established order that can do without fear and trembling. Fear and trembling signify that one is in process of becoming, and every individual, and the race as well, is or should be conscious of being in process of becoming. And fear and trembling signify that God exists--a fact which no man and established order dare for an instant forget" (Training in Christianity, 89)

Anyhow, that's Soren and for what's its worth, I think he has got hold of some truth in it all.

--Adapted from A. Heschel, A Passion for Truth, 150-1)