Postscript to "Part IV"

“The only reason for being Christian... is because Christian convictions are true; and the only reason for participation in the church is that it is the community that pledges to form its life by that truth... I am convinced that the intelligibility and truthfulness of Christian convictions reside in their practical force.”1

As a postscript to:

S. K. was an unusual philosopher in that he often turned well-accepted terms inside out to suit his particular ends. For a thinker as original and multi-faceted as the Melancholic Dane, this meant that language, necessarily unreliable and a potential tool of the enemy towards demonic ends, could be turned over and over throughout the corpus—no, a single text in order to chase down the meaning that was necessary for uncovering Christianity from underneath the tomes of self-indulgent musings on a God held at an objective distance.

At the heart of this, forever unimpressed with the idea that our words could express the fullness of life, was the earnest belief that the only response to a Christianity intent on abstracting itself away is in the active, ethical witness of the “individual of unusual learning and deep Christian character”2. If life must be lived forward and Christianity is a matter of “the existential”3, then there is no scholastic proof or natural theological argument which could ever approach the value of the martyr, the one who is willingly prepared to give his life and all that comes with it in order to exist with the help of Christ.

Necessity as phenomenon

In philosophical circles, the notion of necessity is often tied to a grand statement about a possible reality—in some way or other, the case could not be otherwise. For example, “bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically necessary; for another, the laws of nature mean that it is necessarily impossible to travel faster than the speed of light; for yet another, it might be practically necessarily impossible for someone to travel from Copenhagen to Neptune within five minutes.4 These situations are varied and use necessity is a variety of ways. What is of interest to us, however, is Kierkegaard’s use of necessity:

“When the self in a certain degree of reflection in itself wills to be responsible for the self, it may come up against some difficulty or other in the structure of the self, in the self’s necessity. For

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