With regard to Bishop Mynster's death Mark 13:2. Seest thou these great buildings?
There shall not . . .
March 31, 1854.* S. Kierkegaard.
Certainly it would have been most desirable if it had ended with Bishop Mynster saying to the nation straightforwardly and as solemnly as possible that what he represented was not the New Testament Christianity but, if one would put it so, a pious tempering and mitigation of it, which in manifold ways was enveloped in illusion.
This did not come to pass!
For my part I maintain inalterably my assertion, only that now I utter aloud and publicly that concerning which I dealt secretly with the deceased Bishop, hidden from his enemies (for against them I fought for him), hidden from the many, who surely had no presentiment of it: my assertion that official Christianity, the official preaching of Christianity, is in no sense the Christianity of the New Testament. In any case this then must be admitted as loudly and openly as possible, so that divine governance, if it might be pleased to do so, could take a hand, and then we would have opportunity to see whether it is willing to permit such a preaching of Christianity. But without such an admission the official preaching of Christianity, by giving itself out to be the Christianity of the New Testament, is — unconsciously or wellmeaningly — an illusion. Christianity cannot be well served by calling this sort of thing Christianity, with the implication that it is the Christianity of the New Testament; and Christianly the congregation cannot be well served thereby, for it fails to observe what Christianity according to the New Testament is.
Feast of the Annunciation
O thou, whosoever thou art under whose eye this falls — when I read in the New Testament the life of our Lord Jesus Christ here on earth, and see what he meant by being a Christian — and when I reflect that now we are Christians by the millions, just as many Christians as we are men, that from generation to generation Christians by the millions are handed over for inspection by eternity — frightful! For that there is something wrong with this, nothing can be more certain. Say for thyself what good it does — even if it were ever so pious and well-meant! — what good it does to wish (lovingly?) to confirm thee in the vain conceit that thou art a Christian, or to wish to alter the definition of what it is to be a Christian, in order presumably that thou mayest more securely enjoy this life; what good it does thee, or rather is not this precisely to do thee harm, since it is to help thee to let the temporal life go by unused in a Christian sense — until thou art standing in eternity where thou art not a Christian, in case thou wast not one, and where it is impossible to become a Christian? Thou who readest this, say to thyself: Was I not in the right, and am I not, in saying that first and foremost everything must be done to make it perfectly definite what is required in the New Testament for being a Christian; that first and foremost everything must be done in order that at least we might become attentive?
Kierkegaard's Footnote
*Notice the year and the date. [Bishop Mynster died at the beginning of February; so this was written not quite two months later.]