ABSTRACT
Soren Kierkegaard lived in Copenhagen, Denmark from 1813 to 1855, in the backwaters of European culture. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Kierkegaard and Pious Nietzsche are the indispensable thinkers for nineteenth-century theology and religious studies. Kierkegaard is a pestering, provocative, elusive and seductive Socrates. Surely Kierkegaard knows the danger of postulating a God who expects us to act unethically. His treatise of 1844, Philosophical Crumbs or a Crumb of Philosophy, mocks weighty tomes: he offers only crumbs swept from the high table. Kierkegaard’s “subjectivity” is not the subjectivity of statements or reports, where “subjectivity” means defect or bias. His university dissertation was The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. He was by and large an anti-theologian. His Socratic sting punctured the pretensions of formal abstract philosophy, and abstract theology too.
