Kierkegaard's Sense of Divine Authority and Christian Freedom

Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of Divine Authority was a counterpart to 19th century liberal treatments of human freedom. German idealist philosophers and theologians—including Hegel and Schleiermacher—were striving to overcome oppositions between divine and human authority, especially to reconcile naturalistic causal accounts of the universe with Divine action. These have been key points of retrieval by contemporary theologians. But Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of the attempt to reconcile contradicting claims of agency. Instead, he offered an  account of absolute and rigorous Divine Authority. And yet Kierkegaard’s account is so interesting because it pairs with an equally rigorous account of human agency and free choice before this authority. Both  are found in Kierkegaard’s signed religious discourses and later-life polemics. I  conclude Kierkegaard’s high sense of Divine authority serves, rather than detracts from, a high sense of human freedom and a general ontology of dynamic engagement between God and world.