Kierkegaard's Kind of Church Reform

Søren Kierkegaard’s requirements for those who would reform the Church are extraordinarily high and are meant to apply to very few people — he expects no such worthy reformers in his own age, though he would gladly be “all bows and deference to him, the extraordinary” (all citations from For Self Examination/Judge for Yourself! trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong ([Princeton, 1990], p. 211). The model he holds up as the true reformer is Martin Luther, “only one solitary man … disciplined in all secrecy by fear and trembling and much spiritual trial for venturing the extraordinary in God’s name” (p. 213). Each aspect of this description is essential to what Kierkegaard requires of the reformer.