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"One of the oddest prophets ever."

This is how the late Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) begins his short portrait of Soren Kierkegaard. And it is an apt beginning to a strange but wonderful tale.

Which we'll get to in a moment.

Today, as I promised last month, we are returning to A Third Testament— Malcolm Muggeridge's little book celebrating the lives of six "wrestling prophets" (or "sinner saints") from Christian history. If you are not familiar with this insightful British journalist and Christian apologist, I encourage you to look back at the earlier newsletter of which this is a continuation. There you will find a few suggestions and links for a quick internet study of the man's life and thought.

While of course a creation of its time (the early 1970s) and of the curmudgeonly nature of its author, this book does wonderfully what it sets out to do. It shows God's grace at work in His church through seven flawed, struggling, but nevertheless faithful and obedient people. These are Augustine, William Blake, Soren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Of all of these odd characters—and each one of them certainly had his oddities—Muggeridge singles out Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) as the oddest.

Kierkegaard's father, a wealthy man with a reputation for "wide reading and intellectual attainments" "as a poor shepherd boy … had cursed God for the hardness and frustration of his life and had, in consequence, suffered ever after from a sense of having sinned." He passed on to his son a sense of melancholy with the state of the world and with himself.

When in later years three of Kierkegaard's sisters, two of his brothers, and his mother died in quick succession, the introspective Dane felt that his father's curse was still having its effect.

The son also felt that he participated in the father's youthful faithlessness. As a young student of theology, he had his vices—wine and pretty girls among them. When he became engaged to Regine Olsen, then decided the relationship was wrong for both of them, instead of manfully ending the relationship he behaved so obnoxiously to her that she broke off the engagement—thus bearing the stigma of having done so.

Of course the young man realized what a rotten thing he had done. This episode added to the heavy load he carried—the load of Bunyan's pilgrim. As Muggeridge describes Kierkegaard's situation, this intense young man began asking himself "how to get rid of all his own personal impediments—the ego lifting its cobra head, the appetites reaching out greedily like octopus tentacles." Above all, he wanted to know "how to strip himself down until there was nothing, nothing at all, other than a sense of his own worthlessness."

After years of seeking, this Godly sorrow bore fruit. Kierkegaard later wrote, "Now, with the help of heavy sufferings and the bitterness of repentance, . . . I [have] learned enough about dying away from the world so that I can rightly speak of finding my whole life and my salvation through faith in the forgiveness of sins."

His own faith thus set on solid ground, but with his former sins still very much before him, the melancholy young man began writing penetrating critiques both of a church that had become far too comfortable and a world whose materialism was destroying men's souls.

Muggeridge writes that "the Danish Church was particularly abhorrent to [Kierkegaard]—such a genial, worldly church, even the salaries of its clergy and bishops were paid for by the secular state."

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April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48