Christianity is a humble and vulnerable invitation from God. The shift here is from Christianity being seen as a matter of status or intellectual ascent, to it being understood as God inviting each and every person into a subjective (i.e., personal) relationship with himself. In order for the individual to understand this in such an intimate way, the form of the gospel becomes the all-important emphasis for Kierkegaard.
This is the theological basis for Kierkegaard’s paying special attention to the form of communicating the gospel. This led him to realize that the form his evangelistic authorship must take was that of hiddenness.
The Hiddenness of the Gospel—God Hidden in Christ
For Kierkegaard, the idea that God became a human being was, paradoxically, a revelation of the hiddenness of God.89 This hidden revelation was not simply a subsidiary characteristic of the Christian gospel.90 As Kierkegaard attempted to demonstrate through Climacus, the means through which God revealed himself in Christ was necessary for God to win humanity (each person as a “single individual”) to himself. What appeared to deeply concern Kierkegaard was God’s love for humanity. He was attempting to explain that God revealing himself directly in all his glory would be incompatible with God’s telos of love.91 Such directness appeals to the ability of human reason to grasp God’s love for the human learner, but this is impossible. Through both Climacus and Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard strove to show how an understanding of God’s love requires the precondition of faith to understand and believe that the particular, lowly human being of Jesus is God.92 Such a fact is paradoxical to human reason. Climacus therefore calls it “the Absolute Paradox” which transcends worldly ways of knowing, and is only recognizable by those who have the eyes of faith.93 It is only through faith that a person can come to know God’s love for herself and this very faith relies on the hiddenness of God.94 Even separated by two thousand years, the same faith is required to recognize God in Christ. As Climacus explores further in Concluding Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, such historical categories of knowing are irrelevant to knowing God “in truth.”95 To be contemporaneous with Christ is not a relationship that concerns history—it is only through faith that a person is made contemporary with Christ.96
Therefore, Kierkegaard understood that the form of the gospel is absolutely vital to it being understood correctly and believed that the particular form intrinsic to the gospel is “hiddenness.” As one who sought to communicate this gospel he endeavored to undertake this form in his own authorship.
Poul Martin Møller
The impact of Professor Poul Martin Møller on the development of Kierkegaard’s interest in the relation between form and content is important to recognize. Møller was an unconventional teacher whose admiration of Socrates was influential for Kierkegaard. Møller sought to embody his belief in the importance of a life’s relation to what was taught, so his philosophy “was lived out in conversations in the market square and with ordinary people.”97 However, this method presented a problem for Kierkegaard as his follower, who “feared, not without reason, that when Møller was no longer able to support his ideas with his own living personality—and thereby demonstrate their legitimacy—posterity would be unable to sense the scope of his contribution to a philosophy of living.”98 Kierkegaard embraced similar convictions to Møller in terms of the importance of form and subjective pathos (passions) in communication but, just as Kierkegaard extended his friend’s Socratic ideas, he also extended Møller’s form of communicating them.99 Kierkegaard sought to improve on Møller’s method of indirect, lived communication, shifting it from being outworked primarily through the medium of live performance to literature.100
Whatever Møller may have encouraged or even initiated in Kierkegaard, it is the New Testament that led Kierkegaard to see a more substantial foundation for understanding the significance of the relation between form and content in the Christian event of the incarnation. This theological foundation gave rise to Kierkegaard pursuing a form of authorship that was characterized by hiddenness.101 By being roused to the importance of form’s relation to content through Socrates and Møller, Kierkegaard found the fulfillment of such congruence in the gospel. The particular shape this congruence took was the hidden invitation of God to the individual.
Being Hidden “In the Truth”
In summary, Kierkegaard saw form (not merely content) as being a vital factor in communication. He ultimately saw such congruence between form and content as being embodied in the incarnation of the God-Man, who came hidden “in the form of a servant.”102 Thus in communicating the gospel, Kierkegaard understood that his communication must likewise be undertaken in hiddenness in order to complement and preserve the subjective invitation of God. Before we conclude this chapter, one final point of clarification is necessary.
Søren Kierkegaard fundamentally understood that his entire life was hidden in Christ, and that Christ himself was the truth.103 Therefore, attempting to undertake his authorial task through the form of hiddenness was not only necessary for his outward communication, but was itself an outworking of his own Christian discipleship.104 Striving after Christ is to strive after the truth, who is also the way: “only then do I in truth know the truth, when it becomes a life in me.”105 For Kierkegaard, the truth is embodied: it is characterized by a congruence between form and content, where the believer strives to be who she is, that is, hidden in Christ.106 And because Christ is the only truly congruent one, the communication of his truth is to be in the truth: that is, to be hidden in Christ.
Thus, this is my thesis:
Through Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel, his authorship took the form of hiddenness.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have sought to establish a link between Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and his own life’s task as an author. Through examining his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, we have seen that this formed the basis for his understanding of the necessity of the congruence between form and content. So we have seen that Kierkegaard’s belief of God being hidden in the particular person of Jesus necessitated Kierkegaard’s own authorial form of hiddenness. Now we turn to look in greater detail at that which Kierkegaard was reacting to.
73. “Kierkegaard’s conception of his authorship and his incarnational view of God in Christ should be understood together . . .” (Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 2).
74. Kierkegaard understood that “The Glory of Being Human” consisted of being an individual. As he explains in his own name, “God set human
