Practice in Christianity

Abstract

Of many works he wrote during 1848, his richest and most fruitful year, Kierkegaard specified Practice in Christianity as the most perfect and truest thing. In his reflections on such topics as Christ's invitation to burdened, imitatio Christi, possibility of offense, and exalted Christ, he takes as his theme requirement of Christian ideality in context of divine grace. Addressing clergy and laity alike, Kierkegaard asserts need for institutional and personal admission of accommodation of Christianity to culture and to individual misuse of grace. As a corrective defense, book is an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for established order, which would involve order's ability to acknowledge Christian requirement, confess its own distance from it, and resort to grace for support in its continued existence. At same time book can be read as beginning of Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom. Because of high ideality of contents and in order to prevent misunderstanding that he himself represented that ideality, Kierkegaard writes under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.

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