With regard to the new edition of Training in Christianity37
April 1855. S. Kierkegaard.
I have let this book come out in a new edition without any alteration because I regard it as a historic document.
If now it were for the first time to come out, now when the consideration of piety towards the old bishop no longer applies, and when I am convinced (partly by letting this book come out the first time) that the Establishment is, Christianly, indefensible, it would have been altered in the following respects:
It would not have been by a pseudonym but by me; and the thrice-repeated Preface would have been omitted, and of course also the Moral to Part I, where the pseudonym gives a turn to the matter such as I had sanctioned in the Preface.
My earlier thought was: if the Establishment can be defended at all, this is the only way, namely, by pronouncing a judgment upon it poetically (therefore by a pseudonym), thus drawing upon "grace" raised to the second power, in the sense that Christianity would not be forgiveness merely for what is past, but by grace would be a sort of dispensation from following Christ in the proper sense and from the effort properly connected with being a Christian. In that way truth would enter into the Establishment after all: it defends itself by condemning itself; it acknowledges the Christian requirement, makes for its own part an admission of its distance from the requirement and that it is not even an effort in the direction of coming closer to it, but has recourse to grace "also with respect to the use one makes of grace."38
This to my thinking was the only means of defending, Christianly, the Establishment; and to avoid any sort of hasty action I ventured to give the matter this turn, in order to see what the old Bishop would do about it. If there was power in him, he must do one of two things: either declare himself decisively for the book, venture to go with it, let it count as the defense which would ward off the accusation against the whole official Christianity which the book implies poetically, affirming that it is an optical illusion, "not worth a sour herring"; or attack it as decisively as possible, brand it as a blasphemous and profane attempt, and declare that the official Christianity is the true Christianity. He did neither of the two, he did nothing; and it became clear to me that he was impotent.
Now on the other hand I am clear within myself about two things: that the Establishment is, Christianly, indefensible and every day that it endures is a crime; and that one is not permitted to draw upon grace in that way.
Therefore take away the pseudonymity, take away the thrice-repeated Preface and the Moral; then Training in Christianity is, Christianly, an attack upon the Establishment; but for a consideration of piety towards the old bishop, and because of prudential slowness, this remained hidden under the form of...the last defense for the Establishment.
Moreover I know very well that the old bishop saw in the book an attack; but, as I have said, he impotently chose to do nothing, except at the most to condemn it in the drawing-room, but not even in private conversation with me, and that in spite of the fact that I begged him to do so after it was reported to me with his consent what judgment he passed upon it in the drawing-room.
Translator's Footnote
37Cf. note 7 above.
38Recalling a phrase in the Preface to Training in Christianity