Practice in Christianity /by Sren Kierkegaard ; edited and translated with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
- Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, (c)1991.
- xix, 416 pages ; 23 cm.
- Kierkegaard's writings ; 20 .
Translation of: Indvelse i Christendom.
I. "Come here, all you who labor and are burden, and I will give you rest" for awakening and inward deepening. Invocation -- The invitation -- Come here, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest -- Come here to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest -- The halt -- The inviter -- The invitation and the inviter -- Christianity as the absolute, contemporaneity with Christ -- The moral -- II. "Blessed is he who is not offended at me", a biblical exposition and Christian definition. Exordium -- A brief summary of the contents of this exposition -- The possibility of offense that is not related to Christ as Christ (the God-man) but to him simply as an individual human being who comes into collision with an established order -- The possibility of essential offense in relation to loftiness, that an individual human being speaks or acts as if he were God, declares himself to be God, therefore in relation to the qualification "God" in the composition God-man -- The possibility of essential offense in relation to lowliness, that the one who passes himself off as God proves to be the lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless human being -- The categories of offense, that is, of essential offense -- The God-man is a sign -- The form of a servant is unrecognizability (the incognito) -- The impossibility of direction communication -- In Christ the secret of sufferings in the impossibility of direct communication -- The possibility of offense is to deny direct communication -- To deny direct communication is to require faith -- The object of faith is the God-man precisely because the God-man is the possibility of offense -- III. From on high he will draw all to himself -- Christian expositions.
Of the many works he wrote during 1848, Kierkegaard specified Practice in Christianity as "the most perfect and truest thing." In his reflections on such topics as Christ's invitation to the burdened, the imitatio Christi, the possibility of offense, and the exalted Christ, he takes as his theme the requirement of Christian ideality in the context of divine grace. Addressing clergy and laity alike, Kierkegaard asserts the need for institutional and personal admission of the accommodation of Christianity to the culture and to the individual misuse of grace. As a corrective defense, the book is an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for the established order, which would involve the order's ability to acknowledge the Christian requirement, confess its own distance from it, and resort to grace for support in its continued existence. At the same time the book can be read as the beginning of Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom. Because of the high ideality of the contents and in order to prevent the misunderstanding that he himself represented that ideality, Kierkegaard writes under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.--From publisher's description.