Abstract

Ever since the work of Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, English-language Kierkegaard scholarship has struggled to do justice to the literary-poetic as well as theological-philosophical aspects of the Danish authorship. The first part of this paper traces the development of this debate, noting how Kierkegaard, often in the journals and papers, comments on specific intellectual and doctrinal claims of the Christian faith. The debate between these two ways of reading and understanding is frequently viewed as an impasse. In a second part, the paper endorses and makes a case for a way of reading Kierkegaard neither as “a non-doctrinal literary provocateur” nor as a “non-literary dogmatist.” For all of the difficulty that they pose to interpreters, Kierkegaard's literary stratagems are designed to challenge a reader to wrestle with doctrinal claims amid the struggles of personal existence.