Gospel for the poor

                Christ was not making a historical observation when he declared: The gospel is preached to the poor.The accent is on the gospel that the gospel is for the poor. Here the word “poor” does not simply mean poverty but all who suffer, are unfortunate, wretched, wronged, oppressed, crippled, lame, leprous, demonic. Since the gospel is preached to them, gospel remains only for them. The gospel becomes good news for them. What good news? Not: money, health, status, and so on – no, this is not Christianity. For the poor the gospel is the good news because to be unfortunate in this world is a sign of God’s nearness. So it was originally; this is the gospel in the New Testament. It is preached for “the poor,” and it is preached by the poor who, if they in other respects were not suffering, would eventually suffer by proclaiming the gospel; since suffering is inseparable from following Christ, from telling the truth. 

Becoming a Christian

            Christianity entered into the world not to be understood but to be existed in.   He makes it clear that the Christian style of life cannot be indiscriminately blended with any and all human desires. Nor are Christians left to their own devices as to what style of life to lead. And that life which they are to follow or pattern themselves after is the life of Jesus. On the basis of the New Testament, record concerning the life and teachings of Jesus, he sets up an ideal “pattern” to which the individual Christian is supposed to conform. The life of Jesus is the model which the Christian is obligated to attempt to imitate. A Christian is a person of will who no longer wills his own will but with the passion of his crushed will radically changed, wills another’s will. Christianity is not so much related to transforming the intellect but to transforming the will. But this transformation is the most painful of all operations, comparable to a vivisection. Biblical Christianity is concerned with our will, with changing the will. Everything touches this; all the instructions (renouncing the world, denying one’s self, dying to the world, and so on, also to hate oneself, to love God) are connected with this fundamental idea: the transformation of the will.       

             Real conflict between Christianity and man lies in that Christianity which is Absolute and teaches that there exists something absolute, and demands of the Christian that his life must express the existence of something Absolute. Initially and principally Christianity is and must be so terrifying that only an Absolute can drive a person to it. A Christian is literally a stranger and a pilgrim. Relationship to Christ is the decisive thing. You may be thoroughly informed about Christianity as a whole, may know how to explain it, to present it and to expound it but if with all this you think that your own relationship to Christ is a matter of indifference, you are a pagan.  This is Christianity: Let a person begin seriously to realize his need for Christ. Let him literally give all his fortune to the poor, literally love his neighbor, and so forth, and he will soon learn to need Christ.Christianity is a suit that at first glance seems attractive enough, but as soon as you actually put it on then you must have Christ’s help in order to be able to live in it. Christianity came into the world as the absolute not for consolation, humanly understood; on the contrary it speaks again and again of the sufferings which a Christian must endure, or which a man must endure to become and to be a Christian, sufferings he can well avoid merely by refraining from becoming a Christian. In a strict sense, being a Christian means ‘to die to the world and then to be sacrificed; first a sword pierces the heart (to die from the world) and then to be bated cursed by men and abandoned by God (i.e. sacrificed).

            There is an endless yawning difference between God and man and hence in the situation of contemporaneousness to become a Christian (to be transformed into likeness with god) proved to be an even greater torment and hence also a crime in the eyes of one’s neighbor. And so it will always prove when becoming a Christian in truth comes to mean to become contemporary with Christ. And if becoming a Christian does not come to mean this then all the talk about becoming a Christian is nonsense and self-deception and conceit is part even blasphemy and sin against the second commandment of the Law and sin against the Holy Ghost. 

            If thou canst not prevail upon thyself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneousness of with Him or of He is the situation of contemporaneousness cannot move thee and draw thee to Himself then thou will never become a Christian. Thou mayest honor, praise, thank and reward with all worldly goods to him who maketh thee believe thou nevertheless act Christian but he deceiveth thee.

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Followers and not admirers

            It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression “follower.” He never asks for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. No, he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life, Christ is looking for. Christ understood that being a “disciple” was in innermost and deepest harmony with what he said about himself. Christ claimed to be the way and the truth and the life (Jn. 14:6). His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible. Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time as is implied in his saving work he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower. This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness. What then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower?  A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached. He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires. Kierkegaard said that Christians “are not adherents of a doctrine, but followers of a life.

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Christ

            Jesus Christ came to the world to establish His Father’s wish and kingdom on earth. Christ through his death brought salvation to all. Therefore, Christ is the pattern after which all Christians must seek to shape their lives. His purpose in this was to deliver man yet he also would express what the truth had to suffer in every generation and what it must always suffer. He went about in lowliness, in the lowly form of a servant, in poverty and wretchedness in suffering. Christ was the truth and is the truth. He consistently pictured Jesus as a real man, caught up in many everyday problems and trials. Kierkegaard constantly emphasizes that the recorded specificity of Jesus’ human life provides the category of imitation with concrete content. Kierkegaard asserts that the life of Jesus is “infinitely more important” than the doctrines written about him.

Priest or clergy

                      There is a complete crew of bishops, deans, priests, learned men, eminently learned, talented, gifted, and humanly well-meaning but not one of them is in the character of the Christianity of the New Testament. If such is the case, the existence of this Christian crew is rather a peril, because it is so infinitely likely to give rise to a false impression and the false inference that when we have such a complete crew we must of course have Christianity, too. He criticized the Danish state church, its clergy, its sacraments, its institutions, its worship, and above all, its claim to be servant of the Gospel in a Christian society. According to him, Danish Lutheranism had nothing at all to do with New Testament faith.  

           

The word of God which is essential for Christianity should be preached to the people. Hence, men are still necessary to preach the word of God and reach it to people. The medium is the clergy. This medium ought to be free from all selfishness. But evil has always been fond of this medium, and still is. Catholicism has correctly seen that it was good for this medium to belong as little as possible to this world; hence celibacy, poverty, asceticism. It is perfectly correct to remove selfishness from the medium. Protestantism did not overlook this error.  To guard against this spiritual pride, Protestantism contrived the notion that the clergy should be exactly like other men. So there is completely laicized clergy, officials, dignitaries, married men with wives and children.This is the medium through which God’s word must resound. Luther is an exact opposite of Apostle. The apostle expresses Christianity for the sake of God. He comes with authority from God and for His sake. As for Luther, he expresses Christianity for the sake of man. He is fundamentally the reaction of the human against the Christian acting for the sake of God.

           

 Kierkegaard accuses the clergy of the Established Church of being hypocrites who do not practice what they preach. Kierkegaard says that they are simply actors in disguise, and caustically remarks that the only difference between Church and theatre is that the Church doesn’t allow you to claim your money back if you don’t like the show!

NOETIC DIALECTIC OF KIERKEGAARD

What is the task of Christian teaching? According to Kierkegaard, there are two types of dialectics by which communication takes place. One has been called the Noetic dialectic and another Religious dialectic. Essential to this dialectic are the distinctions between knowledge and ignorance and between truth and falsity. This is the dialectic employed by most teaching, scholarship and science in order to obtain more information or in order to understand a given subject matter. It of course can be applied to activities related to Christianity, for example, in order to obtain more historical information about the apostle Paul or about the formation and development of the Church.

As Kierkegaard saw it, the evasion of the requirements of a genuinely religious Christian existence, which had been going on for centuries, was now greatly amplified in his time because Hegelian philosophy had permeated the intellectual leadership and the scholarship of Christianity.This had influenced the intellectual élite and scholarly teachers of Christianity to examine various doctrines of the Gospel, in order to demonstrate how correct reasoning and understanding could reveal their truth. Consequently, only revelations which can be justified by reason were considered acceptable. Kierkegaard regarded this presentation of ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’ as a form of treason because it dared to presuppose that an infinite God and his infinite wisdom could be grasped by finite human understanding. Since, as finite beings, we cannot know God’s existence. Kierkegaard asserts that one can accept Christianity solely by making a ‘leap to faith’, and if we are unable to live in true faith then we should give up Christianity altogether. 

According to Kierkegaard, however, faith that is rooted in understanding is not true faith, but merely an intellectual acceptance of doctrines containing dogmatic truths. Genuine faith, which lies at the heart of Christianity, cannot be sanctioned by human reason. He observes that the general absence of true faith in contemporary Christianity is connected with, and reinforced by, the fact that virtually anyone can ‘become’ a ‘Christian’ – people now call themselves Christian merely because they are born to Christian parents in a Christian nation – and this has reduced Christianity to a mere fashionable tradition adhered to by swarms of unbelieving ‘believers’.

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Reason and Faith

Reason and faith are like two sides of the same coins. None of them can stand by themselves isolated from one another. Reason helps us to know something intellectually and faith challenges us to leap into darkness of hope and belief. Reason which also means ‘Noetic dialectic’ focuses on understanding, intellectual capacity and observation. Religious dialectic makes distinction between faith and doubt, not that between knowledge and ignorance.