ABSTRACT
Søren Kierkegaard’s dialectical/poetic experiments did not by any means parallel the theological project of Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, a project that by the 1830s had been eclipsed by the more influential work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Nor did Kierkegaard ever deem Bretschneider significant enough to subject his theology to an extended polemical critique. Nevertheless, Bretschneider was important for Kierkegaard’s intellectual development in that he helped familiarize Kierkegaard with two extremely important academic fields: the history of Christian confessional theology and the theological appropriation of a rationalism influenced by Immanuel Kant.
