Thursday, April 15, 2021
Take This Book Back Again
The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. A Selection Edited and Translated by Alexander Dru (1938; rpt. London: Fontana Books, 1958), pp. 244-245 (from 1854):
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And all this tom-foolery with Bible societies distributing New Testaments by the million, is supposed to be Christianity.
No, I am tempted to make a different proposal to Christendom. Let us collect all the New Testaments there are in existence, let us carry them out to an open place or up upon a mountain, and then, while we all kneel down, let someone address God in this fashion: Take this book back again; we men, such as we are now, are no good at dealing with a thing like this, it only makes us unhappy. My proposal is that like the inhabitants of Gadara we beseech Christ to "depart out of our coasts." That is an honest and human way of talking, quite different from that disgusting, hypocritical, mealy-mouthed trash about life being of no value to us apart from the inestimable blessing of Christianity.
