Is God Really Our Lord?
by Jack Cottrell (Notes) on Saturday, October 3, 2009 at 11:09am

Here is a challenging quote from Kierkegaard that is making the rounds of the blogosphere:

“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. How would I ever get on in the world?

“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. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”

[This is a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, taken from an e-book called Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 2007), p. 201. Accessed 10/3/09, at www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/Provocations.pdf ]