ABSTRACT
In an age when it has become fashionable to declare oneself a Christian and when Søren Kierkegaard has become a good brand, used for more or less anything at all, it is once more appropriate to bring out the big critics of religion. In this context it is interesting to consider what use the Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) made of his reading of Kierkegaard, who not only counts as a religious poet but also as an energetic critic of the church. Thus Pontoppidan’s speech about The Church and Its Men from 1914 sounds like an echo of Kierkegaard’s struggle against the State Church’s “official Christianity” in 1855.1
However, the common criticism of the church also represents a fork in the road, which, for Pontoppidan, leads away from the Christianity which Kierkegaard wants instead to proclaim with all the strength that the church has deprived it of. Pontoppidan can certainly respect this kind of passion and honesty vis-à-vis the “tradesmen-like” clergy’s opportunism, but in his authorship one also seems to find a criticism aimed against Kierkegaard’s melancholy troll nature.
