KIERKEGAARDtraining

Amazing! Thus thou beholdest in nature all about thee the many forces stirring; but the power which supports all thou dost not behold, thou seest not God's almightiness--and yet it is fully certain that He also works, that a single instant without Him, and the world is nothing. So likewise He is invisible on high, yet everywhere present, employed in drawing all unto Himself--while in this world, alas, there is worldly talk about everything else but Him, as though He did not exist.

But the crowd seldom can render a reason for its opinions; it thinks one thing today, another tomorrow. For this cause wise and prudent men are not in haste to adopt the opinions of the crowd. Let us see now hat the judgment of the wise and prudent is as soon as the first impression of surprise and astonishment is past.

He is not, and for nobody is He willing to be, one about whom we have learned to know something merely from history..., for from history we can learn to know nothing about Him, because there is absolutely nothing that can be "known" about Him.--He declines to be judged in a human way by the consequences of His life, that is to say, He is and would be the sign of offense and the object of faith. To judge Him by the consequences of His life is mere mockery of God; for, seeing that He is God, His life (the life which he actually lived in time) is infinitely more important than all the consequences of it in the course of history.

He will have nothing to do with man's pert inquiry about why and why did Christianity come into the world: it is and shall be the absolute. Therefore everything men have hit upon relatively to explain the why and the wherefore is falsehood.

His earthly life accompanies the race and accompanies every generation in particular, as the eternal history; His earthly life possesses the eternal contemporaneousness. And all the professional lecturing on Christianity (which lecturing has its stalking-blind and stronghold in the notion that Christianity is something past, and in the history of the 1,800 years) transforms it into the most unchristian of heresies, a fact which everyone will perceive (and therefore give up lecturing) if only he will try to imagine the generation contemporary with Christ...delivering lectures--but indeed every generation (of believers) is contemporary.

History makes out Christ to be another than He truly is, and so one learns to know a lot about--Christ? No, not about Christ, for about Him nothing can be known, He can only be believed.

...if a man's life is not to be dozed away in inactivity or wasted in bustling movement, there must be something higher which draws it.

Is then Jesus Christ not always the same? Yes, He is the same yesterday and today, the same that 1,800 years ago humbled Himself and took upon Him the form of a servant, the Jesus Christ who uttered these words of invitation. In His coming again in glory He is again the same Jesus Christ, but this has not yet occurred...
And about his coming again in glory nothing can be known; in the strictest sense, it can only be believed.