ABSTRACT
The Joy of Soren Kierkegaard is distinctive and breaks new ground, however, by providing Kierkegaard scholarship with a single-author text that explores Kierkegaard's multifaceted engagement with the biblical texts. The Joy of Kierkegaard pulls together a rich collection of essays that were written between 1992 and 2010 by biblical scholar and Kierkegaard expert Hugh Pyper. Pyper's volume is striking in the way that it invites questions and stimulates conversation. There is no sense of an agenda or intention to impose a distinctively Pyperian reading of Kierkegaard. As Pyper demonstrates, Christian joy is, for Kierkegaard, the manifestation of being passionately and rightly related to God. Christians rejoice when they live, by grace and choice, in alignment with the grain of God's creative purposes––and this will require Christians to live and struggle against the grain of the world. While The Joy of Kierkegaard pulls its reader in a number of very different directions, the essays successfully manage to complement one another.
