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Kierkegaard published Two Upbuilding Discourses three months after the publication of his book Either/Or, which ended without a conclusion to the argument between A, the aesthete, and B, the ethicist, as to which is the best way to live one's life. Kierkegaard hoped the book would transform everything for both of them into inwardness. [1]
Kierkegaard was interested in "how" one comes to acquire knowledge. Adolph Peter Adlers experience may have influenced him. He identified his audience as the "reader" and the "listener," [18] but now he speaks of the "seeker". He says, "No man can see God without purity,” and “no man can know God without becoming a sinner.”
Kierkegaard explores two simple verses from the Old Testament, "Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshiped, saying: Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord.", [6] and delivers a message to his "reader" about gratitude.
The paradox and the absurd are ultimately related to the Christian relationship with Christ, the God-Man. That God became a single individual and wants to be in a relationship with single individuals, not to the masses, was Kierkegaard's main conflict with the nineteenth-century church. The single individual can make and keep a resolution.
These discourses or conversations are intended to be "upbuilding", building up another person or oneself. Kierkegaard said: "Although this little book (which is called 'discourses,' not sermons, because its author does not have authority to 'preach', [4] "upbuilding discourses," not discourses for upbuilding because the speaker makes no claim to be a teacher) wishes to be only what it is, a ...
How do we know "when" we love God? He's not talking about fanatical love he says, "Woe to the presumptuous who would dare to love God without needing him!" (p. 188). He wrote another discourse on December 6, 1843, titled, To Need God Is a Human Being's Highest Perfection. Kierkegaard thinks we show our love for God "when" we need him. [29]
The same day that he published Repetition he published Fear and Trembling which showed Abraham as an individual who was alone with God as he considered whether to follow his commands. He continued writing until he came to the concrete human being named Christ and wrote about the joy there is in following Christ.
Kierkegaard says, "every person has heaven's salvation, only by the grace and mercy of God, and this is equally close to every human being in the sense that it is a matter between God and him; and let no third person, [20] himself having been restored to grace, forfeit this by unwarranted interference. If there was a person who embittered my ...