“Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility of offense and accept Christianity on any terms. So it goes; then forget the understanding; then you say: Whether it is a help or a torment, I want only one thing, I want to belong to Christ, I want to be a Christian.”

— Sören Kierkegaard

Source: 1850s, Practice in Christianity (September 1850), p. 115
Context: When in sickness I go to a physician, he may find it necessary to prescribe a very painful treatment-there is no self-contradiction in my submitting to it. No, but if on the other hand I suddenly find myself in trouble, an object of persecution, because, because I have gone to that physician: well, then then there is a self-contradiction. The physician has perhaps announced that he can help me with regard to the illness from which I suffer, and perhaps he can really do that-but there is an "aber" [but] that I had not thought of at all. The fact that I get involved with this physician, attach myself to him-that is what makes me an object of persecution; here is the possibility of offense. So also with Christianity. Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility of offense and accept Christianity on any terms. So it goes; then forget the understanding; then you say: Whether it is a help or a torment, I want only one thing, I want to belong to Christ, I want to be a Christian.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update March 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility …" by Sören Kierkegaard?

Sören Kierkegaard 309

Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism 1813–1855

Related quotes

“I want you to believe… to believe in things that you cannot.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

“If you don't want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying that you want a country based on Christian values. Because you don't.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

The correct attribution http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/carterpoor.asp is comedian John Fugelsang, on the TV program Viewpoint (29 May 2013)
Misattributed

“I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Intellectual Yoga

“I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Or the direction of your life.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 53e

“Attlee: I'm one of those people who are incapable of religious feeling.
Harris: Do you mean you have no feeling about Christianity, or that you have no feeling about God, Christ, and life after death?
Attlee: Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can't believe in the mumbo jumbo.
Harris: Would you say you are an agnostic?
Attlee: I don't know.
Harris: Is there an after-life, do you think?
Attlee: Possibly.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

To his official biographer Kenneth Harris two years before his death. In Kenneth Harris, Attlee, pp. 563-4.
1960s

“If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want.”

Paulo Coelho book The Fifth Mountain

Source: The Fifth Mountain

“And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion — be you Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim, I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

“I don't want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard.
I just want someone
that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Just the Way You Are.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

“Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

We the People interview (1996)
Context: Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Sören Kierkegaard 309

Related quotes

Related topics