Attack Upon Christendom

The immediate trigger was Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen's funeral oration for the recently deceased Bishop J. P. Mynster in early 1854, in which Martensen called Mynster a 'witness to the truth' . For Kierkegaard, this was an outrage. A witness to the truth, in his reading of the New Testament, is someone who imitates Christ's life of suffering, poverty, and abasement—not a comfortable, worldly bishop who enjoyed the privileges of the establishment. Kierkegaard had known and respected Mynster personally, which made the conflict agonizing. He wrote of the emotional conflict of attacking a man he had loved, but insisted that Christianity committed him to it . The attack was thus both a theological protest and a deeply personal rupture with the church of his youth.

For Kierkegaard, 'Christendom' is a pejorative term denoting the modern Danish state's attempt to appropriate Christian categories for its own support—a confusion of church and state that eliminates the essential imitation of Christ . The State Church had made Christianity into a 'triumphant church,' treating truth as a result to be enjoyed rather than a way of life to be followed . This produced the illusion that 'we are all Christians' simply by being born in Denmark. Kierkegaard's counter-claim is that New Testament Christianity is a way of life defined by suffering, sacrifice, and discipleship, and that the comfortable, bourgeois religion of the State Church is not a diluted version of this but its direct contradiction. The attack is not a call for reform within the church but a declaration that the church as constituted is anti-Christian .

The Moment was Kierkegaard's own self-published broadsheet, which he wrote and distributed in the final months of his life, continuing the attack he had begun in the newspaper The Fatherland . The style was deliberately different from his earlier philosophical works: he abandoned the indirect communication, pseudonyms, and elaborate prose of his authorship and wrote in a direct, journalistic, and sometimes deliberately coarse manner addressed to 'the people.' He admitted that he had turned himself into a journalist against his own inclinations, believing that the voice of a 'bad journalist' was stronger than that of an honest thinker because it could reach the ordinary individual where they were . The tenth and final issue was finished on September 1, 1855, but was not published until 1881; Kierkegaard collapsed in the street the following month and died in November .

Interpretations have been sharply divided. Some, like Bruce Kirmmse, have characterized Kierkegaard as 'anti-ecclesial,' suggesting he did not believe Christian civilization was a good idea at all . Others have read the attack as a necessary corrective, a prophetic protest against the complacency of state religion that has ecclesiological value beyond its immediate Danish context. Theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer found in Kierkegaard's insistence on the absolute distinction between Christianity and the world a resource for their own critiques of liberal theology and the German church . A Korean study argues that the attack should be understood as a 'one-man revolution' that runs through all of Kierkegaard's writings, not as a late aberration . The disagreement reflects the book's radicalism: it is difficult to domesticate or to read as a moderate call for renewal.

The standard English translation is by Walter Lowrie, published by Princeton University Press in 1944 and reprinted by Beacon Press in 1956 . Lowrie was an Episcopal priest, and his introduction famously registers the strangeness of translating an attack on the church from within the church . The Princeton edition has been the primary route by which Anglophone readers have encountered the Attack, though it is a compilation of the newspaper articles and The Moment rather than a single unified book. Readers should be aware that the original publication was serial and polemical, not a systematic treatise, and that the tone is deliberately provocative and at times vituperative. The attack was also translated into German early on by two former pastors, Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, one of whom credited Kierkegaard with helping him leave the church .