Plenty of young people may find Søren Kierkegaard relatable on the basis of his biography alone.
He once dug himself into debt during a personal crisis by spending too much money on books and coffee. He agonized over romance, unsure whether he was suited for marriage. He canceled his engagement—then he overthought and regretted that decision too.
Despair hounded him, as it hounds many of us. “I have just come from a party of which I was the soul: witticism flowed from my mouth, all laughed and admired me,” he wrote in his journal in 1836. “But I went (here indeed the dashes should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit)—————————————————————————away and wanted to shoot myself.”
Kierkegaard ultimately found a true path out of his despair: an absurdly hopeful, fiercely devoted faith in Jesus Christ. For him, Christianity was not an affair of cold reason or apologetics but a falling in love that should shape a whole life.
I think Practice in Christianity, his book exploring that idea (and published 175 years ago this week) will resonate with younger generations even more than the details of his life do. Of all his writings, Practice is perhaps the most urgent for modern, disillusioned people, especially those who have considered leaving the church in recent years due to doubt or disgust with the failings of Christian leaders.
I’m thinking of young people a lot like me: those who grew up attending church, then started working through serious questions about religion as adults while also watching some prominent Christians behave maliciously and transactionally in the public square.
Practice speaks to both concerns, first by laying out the existential requirements of Christian faith—we must either reject or believe the paradox of a God-man walking the earth, but we can never fully reason or study our way to faith—and second by painting a picture of earnest, untamed discipleship that bears fruit, a faith that won’t let young people down as their fallen institutions and leaders do.
Kierkegaard saw Practice as a judgment on Christendom more broadly but also as a judgment on himself, with the hopes that he could live up to the radical faith it describes. To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to him as the author, although he published this book under a pseudonym, “Anti-Climacus,” who represented “a Christian on an extraordinary level.”
Kierkegaard wasn’t just doing a bit, though. Practice was deeply meaningful to him. He privately described it as “the most perfect and the truest thing I have written.” And outside Scripture, Practice has done more than any other book to help me work out my faith with fear and trembling.
In Practice, Kierkegaard begins by asking, When we think about Jesus Christ, do we imagine him in glory, reigning over all things? Or do we envision him just as clearly as a human being walking dusty streets, an outcast who suffered and died in agony?
He argues the answer to that question reveals whether a Christian has truly become contemporary with Christ or is worshiping a false image of him.
“Directly there was nothing to be seen except a lowly human being who by signs and wonders and by claiming to be God continually constituted the possibility of offense,” Kierkegaard writes. “A teacher, a wise man, or whatever one wants to call him, a kind of miscarried genius who claims to be God—surrounded by a band of rabble.”
What madness to expect help from him! To follow Christ as his contemporary was to risk losing everything, to become an outcast like he was.
Would we do it?
Instead of reckoning with that question, being a Christian 1,800 years after Christ’s death and resurrection had become “as simple as pulling on one’s socks,” Kierkegaard writes.
“In Christendom we have all become Christians without perceiving any possibility of offense at an individual human being’s speaking and acting in terms of being God,” he continues. But “the God-man is the paradox, absolutely the paradox. … The understanding must come to a standstill on it.”
To become contemporary with Christ is to see the possibility of offense—not “offense” in the sense we usually understand it, like doing or saying something provocative or hurtful. Kierkegaard is using the word more existentially, based on Scripture: “What is the offense, that which offends? That which conflicts with all (human) reason.”
Christ must always pose the possibility of offense, Kierkegaard argues, both because he was an individual human claiming to be God—his loftiness—and because he was God present as a mere human being—his lowliness.
The Gospels are filled with accounts of people who were offended by Jesus for those very reasons. Healing on the Sabbath, associating with sinners, claiming to be the bread of life: Who is this man to act as if he’s God?
Christ himself repeatedly blesses those who aren’t offended by his presence. But Kierkegaard sees the possibility of offense as intrinsic to Christ’s role as the revealer of hearts: “It is he who is the examiner; his life is the examination, and not for his generation alone, but for the human race.”
Indeed, to try to believe in Jesus as Savior without confronting the possibility of offense is to bypass “the death throes that are the birth pangs of faith,” Kierkegaard writes. It is to skip “the shudder that is the beginning of worship.”
I have a hunch, partly out of my own experience, that some of the young people who have struggled with faith in recent years are seeing the possibility of offense clearly for the first time.
This may be because many American Christians rely on apologetics to evangelize. It’s useful in many ways, but our debates about archaeology and Bible translations will never explain the beautiful mystery of the Incarnation.
I also think people who grow up in the church necessarily start with a childlike Christianity; children cannot really comprehend Christ’s lowliness. I loved Jesus as the king of the universe when I was a kid, and I was grateful he had rescued me. This was good news!
Still, I had little clue of Christ’s sufferings, and I knew even less about the state of the world. As I got older, I learned that for all its beauty, that world was also horrific. Christ definitely didn’t appear to be reigning over it. Why hadn’t he returned yet to make all things new? My God!—I could see the offense.
I had discovered Christ’s lowliness. It’s a lowliness that chooses, out of love, to suffer at the hands of evil people, even praying for them to be forgiven while he was dying, rather than conquering with a mighty fist. A lowliness that asks his disciples to do the same.
“From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith,” Kierkegaard writes. For me, choosing faith, by God’s grace, after seeing the possibility of offense was like becoming a child again.
Kierkegaard feared that pastors in his time weren’t forcing the question. He laments throughout Practice that churches are more likely to focus on the risen, glorified Christ than the abased Christ—even though Jesus told his disciples to lead self-sacrificial lives like his own.
“There is incessant preaching in Christendom about what happened after Christ’s death, how he triumphed and his teachings triumphantly conquered the whole world,” Kierkegaard bemoans. “No, Christ’s life here on earth is the paradigm; I and every Christian are to strive to model our lives in likeness to it.”
By the same grace that helps us turn to Christ in faith, we can become more like him. Kierkegaard’s view of continually striving, with God’s help, to be like Christ out of love for him, reminds me of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead,” the apostle says (Phil. 3:10–12). “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”
That path is narrow, and the journey is hard, but it is the way to life. “He came into the world in order to suffer; that he called being victorious,” Kierkegaard writes. “Only the imitator is [the true Christian].”
For my disillusioned friends, this rigor and earnestness before God is exactly what many of them have been longing for: a church that truly imitates Jesus.
Haley Byrd Wilt is a journalist whose work has been published in Foreign Policy, CNN, and The New York Times, among others. She reports on Congress for the nonprofit news publication NOTUS.
