Søren Kierkegaard was fascinated by the idea of repetition: in 1843 he devoted a short book to the idea, and the following year, in The Concept of Anxiety, he wrote of the ‘originality in earnestness’ that protects repetition from the degradation of habit and allows it to be free and productive. Perhaps George Pattison reflected on this thought as he wrote Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, for this is not his first book on Kierkegaard. It follows Kierkegaard on Art and Communication (1992), Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (1997), Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (1999), Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (2002), Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (2002), and The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (2005) – and this is not an exhaustive list. Furthermore, some of the chapters in Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century have previously been published elsewhere. The table of contents reflects this: chapter 2, ‘Speculative theology’, is devoted to an intellectual movement; chapters 1 and 3, on Schleiermacher and Strauss respectively, focus on a single figure's influence on Kierkegaard; chapter 4 considers the broad theological theme of ‘Immanence and transcendence’.

The core of the book, however – chapters 5, 6, and 7 – consists of new material, and here in particular is some of the finest writing on Kierkegaard to be found in the vast scholarly literature devoted to him. And it is both illuminating and convenient to have the already published pieces, all excellent, brought together in a single volume. Indeed, the slightly eclectic character of the text as a whole gives it greater breadth and richness than a monograph written from start to finish would usually offer. These qualities combine with a genuine coherence and integrity: the older chapters have been revised to fit the new framework, and throughout the book Pattison takes time to show the reader how the diverse elements of his deepening interpretation of Kierkegaard come together.

The book's structure is threefold. The opening chapters are primarily contextual. We are used to hearing about Kierkegaard's position within the history of philosophy – his response to Kantian and Hegelian thought in particular – but less scholarly attention is given to his theological milieu. Pattison corrects this imbalance in his first three chapters, where he begins by examining the significant influence on Kierkegaard of Schleiermacher – taken as marking ‘the beginning of modern theology’. This provides a strong foundation for the book as a whole, for Pattison frequently returns to his thesis that ‘Kierkegaard is essentially operating within a Schleiermacherian and more broadly modern view of the world as a unitary whole’, which means that ‘the religious challenge is not so much how to get out of the world but how we are and how we are to be in it’ (p. 210). Pattison goes on to consider Kierkegaard's engagement with D. F. Strauss, and with the so-called ‘right-wing’ Hegelians – a group that here includes the Danish theologian Hans Lassen Martensen as well as Karl Rosenkranz, Karl Daub, J. E. Erdmann, J. Schaller, and Philipp Marheineke. In summer 1838, for example, Kierkegaard studied in some detail Schaller's recently published book, The Historical Christ and the Philosophical Criticism of the Basic Idea of the Work The Life of Jesus by Dr. D. F. Strauss, and Pattison's careful scholarship allows us to look over Kierkegaard's shoulder as the 25-year-old theology student writes notes on Schaller's critique of Strauss. Pattison examines the ‘properly theological issues at play’ (p. 34) in Kierkegaard's increasingly critical response to these ‘speculative theologians’ – issues which complicate the standard story about Kierkegaard's response to Hegel. Many of Kierkegaard's modern readers are not well versed in nineteenth-century theology, and Pattison's extensive discussion of this material is both historically and theologically illuminating.

The middle of the book discusses issues that remain at the heart of Christian theology: creation, redemption, and sin. Pattison traces Kierkegaard's engagement with these issues through a wide range of his works. His approach is distinctive in giving at least as much attention to Kierkegaard's ‘upbuilding’, explicitly Christian discourses as to the more philosophically oriented pseudonymous works, which are the primary focus of most contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. This approach offers a view of Kierkegaard's thought that may be quite different from what we are used to. According to the more familiar view, Kierkegaard was philosophically radical but theologically conservative: he endorsed the Augustinian-inspired classical Protestantism of the Augsburg Confession, and focused his intellectual creativity on overcoming the errors and inadequacies of modern philosophy. Pattison argues that, on the contrary, Kierkegaard develops a ‘nuanced’ theological position that is inseparable from his engagement with German idealism. Essential to this position is the conviction that the fallen human condition is not thoroughly corrupt, so that redemption would require an entirely new creation. Rather, writes Pattison,

On this point, Pattison suggests, Kierkegaard's 1843 discourses on the theme of the gift offer a broader and more complete picture of the human relationship to God than that provided in Philosophical Fragments, published six months after these discourses, where the emphasis is on the once-and-for-all gift of the incarnation rather than on the continually repeated giving of ‘every good and perfect gift’. In the fifth chapter of his book Pattison develops this analysis of Kierkegaard's theology of creation by focusing on the series of discourses on ‘the lilies and the birds’ referred to in the Sermon on the Mount. This material seems to grant Pattison a freedom seldom encountered in academic literature: here his own writing is reflective and edifying as well as scholarly and informative.

Substantial discussions of sin (chapter 6) and redemption (chapter 7) develop and deepen Pattison's account of Kierkegaard's theology. Further helpful context is provided: we are told, for example, how Balle's 1791 textbook of Lutheran doctrine, used in Danish schools until 1856, modifies the uncompromising teaching on sin set out in the Augsburg Confession; that Kierkegaard's notes on H. N. Clausen's lectures on dogmatics (1833–1834) record that the traditional Lutheran doctrine ‘of the Fall as the complete ruination of human nature as a result of Adam's one sin … is alien to scripture’ and that ‘the best current in modern theology [seeks] to unite the recognition of a common original sinfulness (frailty) with belief in moral freedom and its power when God's grace is at work in a human being’ (p. 126); that in 1841 Kierkegaard heard Marheineke argue that the Genesis narrative of the Fall is non-historical, yet its truth ‘is confirmed in everyone's consciousness’ (p. 129); and that such views bear the influence of Kant's analysis of sin in terms of ‘disorder in the relationship between freedom and animal sensuousness’, so that – as Kierkegaard would go on to argue in The Concept of Anxiety – the Genesis narrative ‘is to be understood as the story of each human being and a representation of humanity's continuing moral predicament’ (p. 127). All this sets the scene for insightful readings of The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, and various upbuilding discourses. Pattison considers the account of sin offered in these texts alongside the views of later theologians such as Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, arguing that Kierkegaard saw sin less as ‘the pride of man’ than as human weakness. This, he points out, has pastoral implications: while the Barthian emphasis on pride leads to a pastoral emphasis on humbling and breaking the will, the Kierkegaardian view suggests that ‘the task will be much more to “build up” the weak and to bring them to see the actual possibilities they have for affirming themselves in their existence as God's creatures’ (p. 147).

The final third of the book considers the nature of theological communication and assesses the consistency of Kierkegaard's authorship as a whole. Chapter 8, ‘Proclaiming the Word’, examines the approach to preaching taken by two of Kierkegaard's most prominent Christian contemporaries: Bishop J. P. Mynster, Primate of Denmark and Chaplain to Vor Frue Kirke in Copenhagen (and thus parish priest to the Kierkegaard family), and N. F. S. Gruntvig, leader of a populist congregational movement within the Danish State Church. Pattison highlights points of convergence between Kierkegaard and these charismatic preachers: in particular, ‘the insistence that if the word is to come to life as the Word of faith, it must do so as a spoken, voiced word’ (p. 186). He cites Kierkegaard's unpublished Lectures on Communication, which lament the ‘book world’ that has been produced by ‘the whole mob of publishers, book-sellers, journalists, authors’, not to mention ‘scholarly periodicals’ (p. 188). Opposed to this is what Gruntvig called ‘the living word’. But, suggests Pattison, unlike both Gruntvig and Mynster – who published sermons that were originally delivered orally, in church – Kierkegaard stepped straight into the ‘book world’ in order to ‘start where people actually are: lost in a maze of books … precisely as a means of curing misdirected bookishness’ (pp. 188–189). Chapter 9, ‘Christianity after the Church’, takes a different approach to related issues: here Pattison compares Kierkegaard's keen sense of spiritual crisis with that of John Henry Newman, and analyses the views of both thinkers on questions of ecclesiology and tradition. This comparative approach is then continued in considering Kierkegaard alongside twentieth-century ‘secular theology’ and ‘neo-gnosticism’. At this point Pattison sets the Kierkegaardian ‘attack on Christendom’ firmly against the Radical Orthodox appropriation of Kierkegaard, advocating acceptance of ‘the secularity of the contemporary world as the stage on which Christianity must today bear witness’ (p. 213). This is not mere acquiescence to secularism or nihilism, but rather a commitment to ‘leave the monastery – the regulated ecclesiastical world – and go out into the secular [to] learn what love is asking of [us]’ (p. 213). But Pattison also considers how the pessimism of Kierkegaard's late writings – shaped in part, he argues, by reading Schopenhauer in 1854 – is world-denying. Here he could do more to connect the emphasis on suffering at the end of Kierkegaard's authorship with the intensive focus on the sufferings of Job and Abraham in the 1843 pseudonymous works, and to consider the suggestion, which takes shape there, that the joy in this world that distinguishes the ‘knight of faith’ is difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve.

In his final chapter, ‘Kierkegaard's hands’, Pattison addresses in an original way the old question of the relationship between the pseudonymous and signed writings. In The Point of View for my Work as an Author Kierkegaard explains the ‘equivocalness or duplicity in the whole authorship’ by recalling that ‘With my left hand I passed Either/Or out into the world, with my right hand Two Upbuilding Discourses; but they all or almost all took the left hand with the right.’ Pattison traces the surprisingly plentiful references to left and right hands throughout Kierkegaard's works, ending with the journal note that ‘Christ is God's right hand’. He takes from this the message that, while ‘we must accept that in the circumstances of this life we can know God only as the transcendent goal of an infinite seeking and an infinite longing’, it is also true that ‘what Kierkegaard's right hand points us to is, in the end, not a doctrine but a person: not a God who dwells in remote transcendence, but a God who, for the Christian, is never other than incarnate love’ (p. 227). This fascinating final chapter exemplifies the chief virtues of the book: the depth, erudition, and sensitivity to nuance that come from years of work on Kierkegaard – writing, teaching, translating, editing – combined with a freshness produced by what Kierkegaard called both ‘earnestness’ and ‘passion’.