Kierkegaard:
“The matter is quite simple.
The Bible is very easy to understand.
But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers.
We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.
Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly.
'My God!,' you will say, ' if I do that my whole life will be ruined!'
Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.
Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.
Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God.
Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
-Kierkegaard, "Provocations" (free)
Apparently Kierkegaard never read 2Peter.
ReplyDelete3:15 "Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are ***hard to understand***, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."
Hey, J-M: Excellent point. I think, in context, its clear SK gets that scripture...but he is speaking in this section particular to the clergy and scholars of his day who were bent towards a secular state-church..
ReplyDelete