I just finished a three part sermon series on radical discipleship at CrossWalk. I have leftovers that didn’t make it in the sermons. Here’s one from Søren Kierkegaard on the imitation of Christ:
Is God’s meaning, in Christianity, simply to humble us through the model (putting before us the ideal) and to console us with “grace,” but between God and humanity there is no relationship, that we must express our thankfulness like a dog to a man, so that the adoration becomes more and more true, and more pleasing to God as it becomes less and less possible for us that we could be like the model? Is that the meaning of Christianity? Or is it the very reverse, that God’s will is to express that he desires to be in relations with us, and therefore desires the thanks and the adoration which is in Spirit and truth: imitation. The latter is certainly the meaning of Christianity. But the former is a cunning invention of us men in order to escape from the real relation to God.
- Søren Kierkegaard
1938/1951, p. 474 [Item 1272]
I found this in David Augsburger’s book, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor. Prior to the quote, Augsburger talks about how to be radically attached to Jesus Christ—-imitate him. For Augsburger the soul of imitating Jesus Christ is participation. He writes:
Participation is something we do, just as imitation is something we become. Participating is the soul of all active imitation of Christ. Radical attachment … is observable. It is visible connectedness with Christ and with others lived out in identifiable, recordable, measurable relationships. Our actual daily relationships… We are connected to Christ, to others, to the world we inhabit. We participate in Christ’s life by reflecting him to our world, and through this we are participants in the lives of others who reflect him, so we join with them to participate in all of life as fellow participant disciples. We’re not observers, not spectators, not admirers, not onlookers, not conceptualizers, but participants.
- Daniel Augsburger
Dissident Discipleship, p. 26-27
The final sentence of Kierkegaard’s thoughts struck me most. One of the problems I see in contemporary Christianity (and my own life) is a tendency to spiritualize following Jesus. By that I mean we have faith about Jesus himself, but not in what he says about life. So we love to attend church and sing all about Jesus (How its all about him), but we leave church and don’t follow him. So church actually can be a way to distance ourselves from taking him seriously. If I understand Kierkegaard, the way I love God, worship God, follow God, is actually doing the things of God, i.e. participating in the ways of Jesus Christ. Like self-giving love to others, even my enemies. That’s true worship.
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