Practice in Christianity

Practice in Christianity (also Training in Christianity) is a work by 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was published on September 27, 1850 under the pseudonym "Anti-Climacus", the author of "The Sickness Unto Death". Kierkegaard considered it to be his "most perfect and truest book". In it, the philosopher fully exposes his conception of the religious individual, the necessity of imitating Christ in order to be a true Christian and the possibility of offense when faced with the paradox of the incarnation. "Practice" is usually considered, along with "For Self-Examination" and "Judge for Yourselves!", as an explicit critique of the established order of Christendom and the need for Christianity to be (re-)introduced into Christendom, since a good part of it consists in criticism of religious thinkers of his time. [Hong, Howard V. & Edna H. "The Essential Kierkegaard". Princeton University Press, 2000.]

The book discusses in detail notions like "leap of faith" (or, to be more precise, "leap "to" faith") and "indirect communication". In other words, Kierkegaard emphasizes the idea that belief in God cannot and should not be rational in the sense that it cannot possibly be proved inconclusively that God exists or that Christianity is true. In fact, Kierkegaard discounts the idea that a systematic Christian theology is possible. In this sense Kierkegaard (to the extent we could claim that he shared the views of the book's pseudonymous author) shared the anti-rationalist stance of Kant, who famously disproved the validity of the Quinquae viae, or the five traditional proofs for the existence of God. He was fiercely opposed to Hegelian attempts to construct all-encompassing metanarratives. Kierkegaard attacked the notion, popular in his day in Protestant societies, that one became a Christian by simply accepting intellectually some supposedly rational set of proofs for the validity of Christianity. To Kierkegaard, this was the epitome of hypocrisy. He argued that Christ's words were merely a collection of unrelated parables with ambiguous meanings and not fitting into a coherent system. Even miracles like turning water into wine or even the Resurrection according to him do not conclusively prove anything but are simply a tool to attract one's attention to the need to decide, on basis of a "leap of faith", whether to believe or not. A "leap to faith" is necessary because God, as transcendent and "other", is unknowable, and any revelation to humanity can therefore only be in the form of "indirect communication".

The above ideas have been enormously influential in Western culture. They not only dealt a severe blow to the naive rationalism prevalent in Christian theology in the 19th century - and, in fact, still prevalent nowadays in fundamentalist varieties of Christianity - but were also important in the development of Christian Existentialism and Postmodern Christianity, as well as of Existentialism and Postmodernism in general.

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