Kierkegaard's Armed Neutrality, Open Letter, and Selections from the Journals

The Armed Neutrality book also carries the short "Open Letter"; taken together, they're a couple of the more straightforward things Kierkegaard ever published. In condensed form, they set forth his anguished effort to witness to the faith he could never fully externalize from a relationship with God to an identity in the world, but which he could never stop talking (or writing) about, either.

The task, then, is to portray the ideal Christian... (44)

In what sense he contrives to portray, ultimately, seems to be a matter between him and his reader, rather than between him and his neighbors, though in the "Open Letter" Kierkegaard comes near to engaging with a polemical reform effort. That is, he wants to set straight the attempt to connect his name with it, to correct the reformers:

There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion which can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church-reformation, a reverse reformation which in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something older and better... 

Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening. (49)

Finally, in the selections of his Journals edited by Alexander Dru, a stream of Kierkegaard's inner thoughts, prefaced with a harrowing summary of his family drama, concludes my reading project of the past year. Here is his prophecy:

Certainly things will be reformed; and it will be a frightful reformation compared with which the Lutheran reformation will be almost a joke, a frightful reformation that will have as its battle-cry "Whether faith will be found upon earth?" and it will be recognisable by the fact that millions will fall away from Christianity, a frightful reformation; for the thing is that Christianity really no longer exists, and it is terrible when a generation which has been molly-coddled by a childish Christianity, fooled into thinking it is Christianity, when it has to receive the death blow of learning once again what it means to be a Christian.... (253)

I wish I could make up my mind whether than reformation has already taken place, or proved imaginary, or whether we find ourselves in the midst of it.