ABSTRACT
In the collection of essays entitled Radical Orthodoxy, S0ren Kierkegaard is lined up as one of the 'great Christian critics of the Enlightenment' (RO, p. 3).1 It is asserted that these critics 4in different ways saw that what secularity had most ruined and actually denied were the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community' (ibid.). In light of this, Kierkegaard and others claimed that only a transcendence which interrupted the self-contained realm of enlightened reason could really secure these worldly values. To assert the independence of the world and the secular realm ultimately rendered it unprotected against the violence of nihilism. Only as created, as gift, could the world discover its worth.
