ABSTRACT
It seems fair to say that despite the depth, breadth, insight, and verve of Søren Kierkegaard’s biblical imagination, his reputation as an interpreter of Scripture remains obscured by his renown as a writer of literary, philosophical, theological and, not least, edifying works. Ironically, most of these literary, philosophical, theological, and edifying works can justly be read as exercises in biblical interpretation. As a rule, Kierkegaard’s signed writings (both the explicitly Christian variety and the edifying discourses generally) read as meditations on various biblical passages and themes. So, too, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship unfolds the world of the biblical in a variety of imaginative ways: Fear and Trembling explores the relationship between faith and understanding through an engagement with the narrative of Abraham’s binding of Isaac; Repetition contains a refracted reflection on Job’s ordeal; The Concept of Anxiety is a study of the Genesis story of Adam and the Christian notion of sin; Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript both focus on the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation; The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity seek to develop a conception of selfhood appropriate to a life lived in the light of the gospel; and so on with the later signed works, among which we find in For Self-Examination a programmatic statement of how Kierkegaard thinks one should read the Bible if it is to become for the reader “God’s Word.” Even Either/Or (although less concerned with biblical interpretation) concludes with a sermon on Luke 19:41-8, and in Stages on Life’s Way Kierkegaard has the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus write: “The Bible lies on my table at all times and is the book in which I read the most.”1 One can well imagine Kierkegaard could have said the same thing in his own voice.
