The Case for Christian Anarchism - Part VI

6. In running up against the non-Christian as a Christian, the Christian acts kerygmatically.

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I. What is the kerygma? It is the proclamation, not a preaching; the Word sounding, not spoken.

II. What is it to act kerygmatically? It is not to proclaim, because the proclamation has already sounded. It is to hear, to act, and to obey in a way which makes the proclamation resonate through reality—when the “infinitely qualitatively different” is turned from a mere ideal into a fact of reality, where the Word once again finds itself incarnated and opposite the incarnated.

III. What does it mean for the world to “run up” against the kerygma? The world doesn’t recognise the “reason for” and the “in order to”—to meet the kerygma as the kerygma is to meet Christ as He is, contemporaneously and simultaneously. Where once a German theologian declared that Christ is dead, the proclamation is His resurgence felt again in time; the eternal, once more, enters into reality to both refract through and lift up the believer in “the moment” of faith.

Against the Christian Individual

There is always a certain temptation, when one decides to write down their ideas and decide that they’re clever enough and correct enough to share with the world, to believe that we are somehow praiseworthy merely for collecting information, filtering it through a life, and then presenting it in a way which—at the very least—isn’t distasteful to the reader. In presenting ourselves, through the written word, to the other, we enter into the delicate and often caustic process of being afforded authority, i.e., someone looks at you as a teacher. We can be quick to lose ourselves in the adulation of praise and the torment of critique, leading us into similar situations, despite the aesthetic difference between these two opposite approaches, that force us into a situation that lies at the very heart of faith: will we allow ourselves to do as any particular desire forces us to or will we be able to hold ourselves back [at holde igjen paa sig selv]1? The teacher—or, rather, the one who allows himself to be mistaken for a teacher—is a particular individual with a particular responsibility now; will they be able to say merely what needs to be said, regardless of who will hear it or will they find that they dance in the temptation too ...