Church

The church militant is a normative ideal for the church within temporality to which the nineteenth-century Danish State Church failed to strive, let alone achieve. Anti-Climacus calls Christ’s church “the Church militant.”8 He begins to clarify his notion of the church militant by contrasting it with the church triumphant. Treating the temporally existing church as a triumphant church involves three fundamental mistakes: first, it interprets the truth of Christianity as a result rather than as a way.9 Expressing truth claims and propositions do not express the essence of Christianity. Rather, Christianity is a way of life that emulates the life of Christ. This mistake allows for a second mistake, namely, that in Kierkegaard’s Denmark we “are all Christians.”10 This is, perhaps, the chief criticism in the attack literature, and it is informed by a conception of the church militant as well as a critique of the church triumphant. Third, treating the current existing, temporal church as the church triumphant is an attempt to take hold of what can only be achieved through a lengthy process of discipleship, suffering and sacrifice. “[T]his illusion, a Church triumphant, is linked to the human impatience that wants to take in advance that which comes later….”11 In short, conceiving of the church in temporality as the church triumphant abolishes Christianity because it “assumes that the time of struggling is over, that the Church, although it is still in this world, has nothing more about or for which to struggle.”12 Over time, the idea of the church triumphant manifests itself as “established Christendom.” An established church stands on an assumed victory just as the church triumphant does,13 but in established Christendom, the church disdains external show and promotes “hidden inwardness.”14 According to Anti-Climacus, the church triumphant is appropriate outside of temporality in the eschaton,15 but the established church or established Christendom is the ultimate result of thinking of the temporal church as triumphant in this world.16 In the church triumphant, the proclamation of one’s Christianity is greeted by the world with

that all are Christians, proclaiming one’s Christianity is like making “a special claim that he is a human being; since that, after all, is wanting to bring to consciousness a presupposition that is once and for all and by all assumed and underlies everything.”17