The articles in this volume all explore Kierkegaard’s complex use of the Bible, a use that pervades and sometimes even structures his literature. The authors of these essays use source-critical research and the tools of many different disciplines, ranging from literary criticism to theology and biblical studies, to situate Kierkegaard’s appropriation of the biblical material in his cultural and intellectual context.

The essays seek to identify the possible sources that may have influenced his understanding and employment of Scripture, and to describe the debates about the Bible that may have shaped, perhaps indirectly, his attitudes toward Scripture. The authors also pay close attention to Kierkegaard’s actual hermeneutic practice, carefully analyzing the implicit interpretive moves that he makes as well as his more explicit statements about the significance of various biblical passages. This close reading of Kierkegaard’s texts enables the authors to elucidate the unique and sometimes odd features of his frequent appeals to Scripture.

Because the Christian canon with which Kierkegaard wrestled was and is composed of two different testaments, this volume devotes one tome to the Old Testament and a second tome to the New Testament. The canonically disputed literature of the Apocrypha is considered in the volume on the Old Testament.

Tome I: The Old Testament

Although Kierkegaard certainly cited the Old Testament much less frequently than he did the New, passages and themes from the Old Testament do occupy a position of startling importance in his writings. Old Testament characters such as Abraham and Job often play crucial and even decisive roles in his texts. Snatches of Old Testament wisdom figure prominently in his edifying literature. The vocabulary and cadences of the Psalms saturate his expression of the range of human passions from joy to despair. The essays in this first tome seek to elucidate the crucial rhetorical uses to which he put key passages from the Old Testament, the sources that influenced him to do this, and his reasons for doing so.

Table of Contents

As with the Old Testament, Kierkegaard was aware of new developments in New Testament scholarship and troubled by them. Because these scholarly projects generated alternative understandings of the significance of Jesus, they impinged directly on his own work. It was crucial for Kierkegaard that Jesus is presented as both the enactment of God’s reconciliation with humanity and as the prototype for humanity to emulate. Consequently, Kierkegaard had to struggle with the proper way to persuasively explicate the significance of Jesus in a situation of decreasing academic consensus about Jesus. He also had to contend with contested interpretations of James and Paul, two biblical authors vital for his work. As a result, Kierkegaard ruminated about the proper way to appropriate the New Testament and used material from it carefully and deliberately. The authors in the present New Testament tome seek to clarify different dimensions of Kierkegaard’s interpretive theory and practice as he sought to avoid the twin pitfalls of academic skepticism and passionless biblical traditionalism.