ABSTRACT
In a field with so many resources dedicated to the examination of every aspect of Kierkegaard’s life and writings, it is remarkably surprising how few scholars have analyzed the significant influence of Paul upon that corpus. Even those who have set out to explore Kierkegaard’s use of Scripture explicitly, in particular Timothy Polk and Joseph Rosas, seem not to deal with Kierkegaard’s use of Paul to any great extent. Polk, in The Biblical Kierkegaard, does not treat Kierkegaard’s use of Paul extensively, except to notice, several times, that in Works of Love Kierkegaard feels free to intercalate a chapter on a passage from 1 Peter into the middle of five other chapters based on 1 Corinthians 13.1 This observation functions for Polk as evidence of his hypothesis that Kierkegaard’s primary engagement with Scripture was canonical.2 Later, he observes that Kierkegaard seems to disregard the higher criticism of his day, citing deutero-Pauline epistles seamlessly with other epistles that were regarded as “authentically” Pauline.3 Other than these references, however, he gives no close examination of Paul’s impact on Kierkegaard’s thought. Rosas, whose book Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of Scripture, claims with certainty that Kierkegaard had a personal preference for the Synoptic Gospels and the Letter of James and hardly mentions Kierkegaard’s extensive use of Paul.4 However, while Rosas is right about Kierkegaard’s preference for the Synoptic Gospels, references to Paul and the Pauline epistles clearly outnumber references to James in Kierkegaard’s literature. Rosas does not attend to the many and significant ways that Paul prominently figures in many of Kierkegaard’s directly Christian works, particularly in his edifying discourses and in Works of Love, both of which utilize references to Scripture more than any other of Kierkegaard’s works. Given Rosas’
1 Timothy H. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1997, p. 97. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 150.
