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My Journey with Kierkegaard Adult Forum at the United Lutheran in Red Wing, 3/4/2018 Andrés Albertsen

At least three Danish figures from the cultural world of the 19th century earned international renown, Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig. The most famous of the three outside the borders of are Andersen and Kierkegaard; Grundtvig, on the contrary, is less known outside the borders of the Denmark, but he was and still is the most influential of the three in Denmark.

Andersen (Photo 1) (2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) is known for his fairy tales for children that are also worth reading and listened to by adults.

Kierkegaard (Photo 2) (May 5, 1813 - November 11, 1855) is known for his appeal to each individual to constitute him or herself as a single individual and become a Christian. This could seem easy to accomplish in a country where everybody supposedly was Christian, as it was the case in Denmark back then, but not for Kierkegaard. On the contrary, that fact was for Kierkegaard the evidence that the of the had disappeared from the world. Particularly in Denmark he accused the state of having employed 1000 officials (the pastors of the ; today this number is the double and pastors are still state officials in Denmark), who in the name of proclaiming Christianity (and this was for Kierkegaard a greater danger than a deliberate intent of hindering Christianity) were interested in having people call themselves Christians—the larger the flock of sheep the better, and in letting the matter rest there, so that they didn’t come to know what Christianity in truth was. You could say that for Kierkegaard becoming a Christian would necessarily collide with being a responsible citizen of a certain country. 2

Grundtvig (Photo 3) (September 8, 1783 - September 2, 1872) is perhaps mostly known as a hymn and songwriter. Seven of the hymns in our red ELW hymnal are from Grundtvig (Bright and Glorious is the Sky, O Day Full of Grace, Built on a Rock the Church shall stand, among others). But Grundtvig was also a pastor and a reformer of both society and the church. He was a promoter of popular education, and the father of the school model called “folk school.” The folk school is a school that adults can attend at any time of their lives, not mainly to be trained for a certain trade nor to learn a certain skill, but to discuss what it means to be Dane and thereby become a responsible citizen, without any testing, neither before nor after the course, and without any certificate issued after the course. And let me make a digression to mention that although this aspect of Grundtvig’s heritage is little known outside Denmark, it was recognized by former president Barack Obama. I will quote on length what Obama said about Grundtvig at a state dinner hosting presidents and prime ministers of the Nordic countries on May 13, 2016:

And many of our Nordic friends are familiar with the great Danish pastor and philosopher Grundtvig. And among other causes, he championed the idea of the folk school -- education that was not just made available to the elite but for the many; training that prepared a person for active citizenship that improves society. Over time, the folk school movement spread, including here to the United States. And one of those schools was in the state of Tennessee -- it was called the Highlander Folk School. At Highlander, especially during the 1950s, a new generation of Americans came together to share their ideas and strategies for advancing civil rights, for advancing equality, and for advancing justice. We know the names of some of those who were trained or participated in the Highlander School. Ralph Abernathy. John Lewis. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They were all shaped, in part, by Highlander and the teachings of a great Nordic philosopher -- and they ended up having a ripple effect on the Civil Rights Movement, and ultimately on making America a better place. We would not have been here had it not been for that stone that was thrown in a lake and created ripples of hope that ultimately spread across an ocean to the United States of America. And I might not be standing here were it not for the 3

efforts of people like Ella Baker and others who participated in the Highlander Folk School.1 Impressive, don’t you think? Grundtvig did consider that being a good Danish citizen could go hand in hand with being a good Christian, and that you should be fully human before you become a Christian. Grundtvig postulated a form of Christianity that affirmed life and the goodness and beauty of ordinary life, in close connection with nature, and with the will to engage in lifelong learning. Grundtvig supported the church structure that the church of Denmark has today as a state church or an established church: with freedom for every parish council to decide on activities in the local context and to select the pastor of the parish in consultation with the corresponding bishop, and with the Danish monarch as the supreme authority when it comes to organisation, liturgy etc.,2 and the national parliament (Folketinget) as the de facto deciding body with regard to church legislation. Grundtvig believed as well that pastors should have a high degree of freedom to practice their personal interpretation of Christianity, and different views on Christianity should be able to coexist within the church. This is also a reality today. There is a wide variety of interpretations of Lutheran Christianity within the Danish church, and some within the church even name themselves after Grundtvig, as Grundtvigians.

The Danish church in Buenos Aires I served as a pastor for nearly 20 years is a Grundtvigian congregation founded in 1924 by Danish immigrants to Buenos Aires (Photos 4, 5, 6 and 7). So close was the relation to Grundtvig that one of the founders, Johannes Bennike, had attended as a child the congregation of Vartov (Photo 8) in Copenhagen where Grundtvig served as a pastor in his older days and

1 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/05/13/remarks-president-obama-prime-minister- iceland-and-prime-minister 2 It is only in some church matters that the monarch maintains a little bit of absolute authority. 4 had been confirmed by Grundtvig. Before emigrating to Argentina, Bennike had studied to become a school teacher in a folk school and he had later worked as a teacher at another folk school. Bennike went Denmark to Argentina, invited by the Danish pastor in Tandil to establish a school based on Grundtvig’s pedagogy. That project failed, and therefore Bennike moved to Buenos Aires where he became the editor of a Danish newspaper and years later one of the founders of the Danish Church. The founders of the church connected themselves with the Danish Church Abroad, an organization that had been formed in Denmark to help outside Denmark and their descendants to be part of a Danish congregation. The Danish Church Abroad helped the congregation for decades to have a pastor from Denmark and to be under the supervision of a Danish bishop. And when the congregation decided in 1988 to call me instead of getting another pastor from Denmark, the Danish Church Abroad helped me complete my theological education and get ordained in Denmark.

To be a Grundtvigian congregation meant to be a place where the frontiers between being a church and being a Danish cultural center and club were blurred, and it has been a long tradition that Danish congregations outside Denmark help their members preserving and cultivating the Danish heritage. In a country like Argentina where most of the people are descendants from immigrants, to cultivate our Danish roots was not contradictory with being integrated Argentine citizens. Another aspect of the Danish Grundtvigian heritage is the belief that God doesn’t look at our credentials before making God’s promises, and this is why everybody is welcome in a Grundtvigian congregation, also with their doubts and questions. However, there was a problem. Our Danish Church in Buenos Aires had traditionally been a congregation for Danish immigrants and their descendants, and people feared that it would lose its identity if it opened its doors to everybody. But 5 it was a contradiction in terms to proclaim and enact God’s unconditional acceptance of everybody within a little homogeneous community worshiping behind secure walls at a safe distance from any stranger. We realized that our tradition should be a foundation rather than a fortress. Therefore, we decided to open the doors of church, both for the cultural and the ecclesial activities, to everybody in the city and in particular in our neighborhood. We were (are) fortunate also that the church was located in the neighborhood visited by people from the whole city and by tourists, both from other parts of Argentina and foreigners. In addition, during some years the local government helped us letting us announce all our activities without charge in a monthly free magazine widely read by locals and foreigners. People who were not of Danish descent began to come, as well as people of Danish descent who didn’t know of the existence of the church, or at least didn’t know that it was still open. We experienced that the opening of our doors strengthened rather than evanesced or dissolved our best traditions. Even our enrollment to Danish classes grew when we announced them to the public. I was one of the teachers.

It was in 1999 that two Philosophy instructors at the university and a friend of them, thanks to the publicity we were getting for our activities, contacted me to ask if I could teach them Danish so that they could begin reading Kierkegaard in Danish. They had already been reading and studying Kierkegaard for some time in the limited (and not always good) translations of his work into Spanish they had been able to access. I would of course not say no to such a request and opportunity. Soon a couple of other friends of them joined the group.

I had learned from my Greek and German professor at the seminary that the first thing you have to learn when you are studying a new language is to read, and that you should begin with a text you are very familiar with in your own language. In 6 both my Greek and German classes at seminary, we had started with according to John, and this we chose to start with the gospel of John in the Danish class with the Kierkegaard scholars as well. I don’t remember how many chapters of the gospel of John we read in Danish in our weekly two hours class. We had not gone through the whole gospel when we decided to change to a Kierkegaard text, , which already existed in Spanish in at least 3 different translations. Fear and Trembling was published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes De Silentio. It contains a discussion of the relationship between faith and ethics based on the story of the binding of Isaac. In the voice of the pseudonym De Silentio, Kierkegaard gives up perfection and offers a path to selfhood different from the fulfillment of the ethical responsibilities, which he calls the double- movement of faith: first, the movement of infinite resignation, accessible to all, by which we distance ourselves from the world and give up the claim to possess the things and persons we love, and second, the movement initiated by God by which we receive those things and persons back as gifts of God and become capable of living in this world with joy. This is what happened with Abraham and the reason why he is the father of faith. It was because he had been willing to sacrifice Isaac and was already holding the knife to kill his son in his hand, that the angel stopped him and gave him his son back. Kierkegaard himself was very confident about the qualities of Fear and Trembling and in 1849 he wrote in his journal: “Once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well.”3

What we did in our class with Fear and Trembling was to read a little portion of the text in Danish and then read the different Spanish translations and decide which one was the most correct.

3 Kierkegaard’s Writings VI, xxxii. 7

I had already been working with the group for more than one year when in a little break from one of our sessions, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation of the two Philosophy instructors in the class. They were talking about a seminar on Kierkegaard they wanted to offer, but they had not found the place yet. There was a private university, I remember which one it was, the Popular University of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, that had shown willingness to host the seminar, but my students were not sure that they would have all the freedom they wanted to teach the seminar their way. So I timidly meddled into their conversation and asked if they would consider teaching the seminar they were planning at the Danish church. I was sure that they would answer no to my offer. But, on the contrary, to my surprise, they immediately said that this was a great idea. And it made me proud that they didn’t ask for any reassurance that they would have the freedom they wanted. They already knew that they would have it. Perhaps I had already mentioned more than once why I thought and still think that the church (at least a Lutheran one) is the best setting for a free discussion. In the church we don’t have any self-image to preserve and there is not any image of others we can damage, because our true image is the one we have as God’s chosen and loved children. Nothing can threaten this true image, and therefore we can honestly engage in the discussion, and expose others and ourselves to fierce criticism, without the fear of ridicule or rejection, without the fear of asking a silly question, without the fear of showing ignorance in a remark, and without having to take anything said as personal. A few weeks after that conversation, we were launching the first seminar on Kierkegaard at the Danish church in Buenos Aires.

And because of that seminar, a few more people joined our class. And I don’t remember how much time passed before we decided to convert our class into an interdisciplinary translation team and chose to begin translating Kierkegaard’s last 8 work, The Moment. A series of pamphlets, humorous at times, where Kierkegaard argues again and again that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was false, and that the least the leaders of the church could do was to admit that what they “represented was not the Christianity of the New Testament, but a pious mitigation, a toning down in many ways shrouded in illusion.”4 Kierkegaard managed to publish nine issues of The Moment and had the tenth issue ready for publication when he collapsed on the street, and was taken to the hospital with paralysis. He died a few weeks later on November 11, 1855, only 42 years old.

It took us years to translate The Moment, since we only met once a week. And we spent a lot of time discussing the text apart from doing the translation. During the first years of work, we didn’t think about publication, but when we were getting close to the end, we decided to explore the possibilities of publishing our translation. And we resolved that the first publishing house we would submit the proposal to would be the most prestigious one we could think of, Trotta of Spain. Trotta accepted to publish our translation. The seven members of the team are mentioned on the title page (Photo 9). The book came out 2006. Later we translated another book, For Self-Examination: Recommended to the . It was also published by Trotta in 2011 (Photo 10). A smaller book, a collection of three sermons, published by Kierkegaard under his own name in 1851, and that Kierkegaard asks his dear reader to read aloud, if possible. He says: “By reading aloud you will gain the strongest impression that you have only yourself to consider, not me, who after all, am ‘without authority,’ nor others, which would be a distraction.”

We were in the initial part of our first translation project when we also decided to create the Kierkegaard Library Argentina. It happened in December 2002. Only a

4 The Moment and Late Writings, 28. 9 very informal organization. It is the only organization in Argentina I’m still engaged with in a direct way. The Danish Church would host it. The initial idea was to collect the books we could find of Kierkegaard and on Kierkegaard in Spanish, but soon we also started collecting Kierkegaard´s works in Danish (in different editions), and works of and on Kierkegaard in English (Photos 11,12, 13, and 14). And we made them available to everybody who wanted to come to the church and consult them. We established a relationship with the at St. Olaf College in Northfield and with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. We committed ourselves to spreading the knowledge of Kierkegaard in Argentina and to creating opportunities for the discussion of his thought in the light of the challenges we are facing in today’s world. All the seminars, workshops, study groups, lectures, would now be hold as Kierkegaard Library activities (Photo 15). A member of our group, one of the two Philosophy instructors who first had contacted me, mentioned in the first years that he dreamt with having a big Kierkegaard event in 2005 in Buenos Aires, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s death. This was also an idea we took upon ourselves to realize and we did it organizing a Kierkegaard conference together with the ecumenical seminary where I had pursued my MDiv in Buenos Aires and where I at that time was serving as treasurer on behalf of the Danish Church. ISEDET is the name (Photo 16, 17, and 18). ISEDET used to be an ecumenical Center of higher education located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Was founded in 1969 as the result of a fusion of two prior schools: an Evangelical School of Theology and a Lutheran School of Theology. The Evangelical School of Theology, founded back in 1884, had brought together Waldensians, Methodists, the Church of the Disciples of Christ first, and the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches. The Lutheran School of Theology, founded in 1955, had brought together the two main Lutheran Churches in Argentina: the United 10

Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Evangelical Church of the River Plate. After ISEDET was created in 1969, first the Anglican church and later the Danish- Argentine Lutheran Church (in 1996 long after I had been a seminarian there) joined the seminary. Unfortunately ISEDET was liquidated mainly for financial reasons in 2015.

The economy of the seminary back then was good, and the seminary paid the ticket for an Argentinean Kierkegaard scholar to come to Argentina from Denmark where he resides and be the main speaker and lead a workshop at that first conference in November 2005. ISEDET would not only offer us a great space to have our conferences, but also give us its academic sponsorship. This meant that that university students or scholars could present papers and get certificates for them that would count in their CVs and promotion packets. Here some pics from the last annual conference I was able to attend in person (Photos 19, 20, 21, and 22).

That started a tradition. We had an annual conference at ISEDET every year after that first one in 2005 until the seminary’s closing in 2015. Fortunately we were able to find one that could host and give academic sponsorship to our annual conferences. We already have the date for the current year’s conference.

As I said, we established a relationship with the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield. To talk about the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf means to talk about Edna and Howard Hong (Photo 23). Howard and Edna Hong graduated from St. Olaf College in 1934 and 1938 respectively. Howard earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and was on the faculty of St. Olaf College, Department of Philosophy, for 40 years formally retiring in 1978. The Hongs married on June 8, 1938, the year Howard received the PhD and one day after Edna graduated from St. Olaf. It was four months after their wedding, when 11

Howard already had been appointed to the St. Olaf faculty, and after Edna had typed her husband’s dissertation, that they hitchhiked to New York and took a ship to Copenhagen, where they studied Kierkegaard and the Danish language. It was in Denmark were Edna discovered, as she used to put it, that she had become a “bigamist,” a woman married to two men, Howard Hong and Søren Kierkegaard. So she learned Danish too and their life work in partnership with each other began.

The Hongs’ first large-scale Kierkegaard project was the seven-volume Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, published between 1967 and 1978. Their other monumental accomplishment was the 26-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings, completed in 2000 and published by Princeton University Press. The Hongs were the editors of the whole series and the translators of all but 4 of the volumes. Each volume contains a historical introduction, the text with cross- references to the pagination of the Danish edition, extensive notes, a supplement with a selection of material from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers, and an index. The 26th volume is a Cumulative Index that provides wide-ranging navigation to the preceding twenty-five volumes.

After Kierkegaard died in 1855, his library was sold at auction and a catalog of that auction was published in 1867. Howard Hong, consulting that catalog and his own index of the books Kierkegaard owned and used, attended book auctions and scoured antiquarian bookshops throughout Europe in an attempt to recreate Kierkegaard’s library. The books he bought over many years, together with microfilms from the Royal Library in Copenhagen and other Kierkegaard material, including secondary works, were given by the Hongs to their college in 1976, to become what is today the Howard V. and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library (Photo 24). 12

I visited the Library for the first time in 2009, on August 19th, when I was attending the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly at the Convention Center in Minneapolis. It was the same day this happened to the steeple of Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis (Photo 25). Around 2 pm on the afternoon a tornado came down on 12th Street between the Hilton Garden and Central Lutheran Church. Luckily no one was injured, but about 150 slate tiles blew off the roof of Central Lutheran and the cross on the top of the steeple was left dangling upside down. When the tornado came, the Assembly was in session and it kept meeting. The meeting hall of the Assembly in the bottom floor of the Convention Center was the safest place of the whole building. The Assembly was discussing the social statement on human sexuality which would open the door to full inclusion in the church of LGBT members and their families. A 2/3 majority was required to adopt it, a 66,66% of the votes, and when it was put to the vote, it obtained an exactly 2/3rds majority vote, 676 of the 1014 votes cast, a 66,67% of the votes, not one vote more than needed, not one vote less than needed. I was not there to witness that historical moment (although I was there on Friday 21st, when the assembly changed the ministry policies in order to allow the calling of pastors in publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same gender relationships). On noon of August 19, I had been picked up by the then secretary of the Hong Kierkegaard Library Cynthia Lund and a good friend from the Kierkegaard Library Argentina and member of our translation team María José Binetti, and under heavy rain we had driven to Northfield to visit the library (Photos 26 and 27, busts). Edna Hong had died in 2007, but Howard Hong was alive. I only saw him from a distance. He died 97 years old in 2010.

In 2009 I was spending a sabbatical semester from my work as pastor in Buenos Aires in Chicago (it was from Chicago that I had come to Minnesota), and I 13 returned to Argentina in January 2010. But already in June of 2010 I came back to Minnesota and to St. Olaf to attend the Sixth International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College, and especially its Seminario Iberoamericano, a gathering of scholars interested in the translation of Kierkegaard texts into Spanish and Portuguese. That was the occasion when I visited Luther Seminary and got to know that they offered scholarship to international students. So I went back to Argentina and began the process to apply to come to Luther Seminary for my PhD, a journey that has not finished yet, and that brought me back to Minnesota in August 2011.

After coming to Luther, I visited the Kierkegaard Library many times. These photos are from the International Kierkegaard Conference in 2013 (Photos 28 and 29). An unimagined dream came true when I applied to become the Kierkegaard House Foundation Fellow in the academic year 2017-2018, and was accepted. I live in the Kierkegaard House (Photo 30), in the first two months in the basement and on September 1st, I moved up to the house. Strictly speaking, my time as Fellow started on September 1, 2017, but having been able to move to Northfield earlier, I got the chance to meet the young scholars from all around the world who had come to St. Olaf and the library in the summer. The Library receives a similar group of young scholars every summer. This is a photo in the backyard of the Kierkegaard House (Photo 31). From September 1st, I also have my own office in the library (Photo 32).

When I moved into the basement of the Kierkegaard House, there was already another Kierkegaard scholar living there, a Dane (who didn’t like pictures), who stayed in the house from June to the end of December. When I moved up the house, a scholar arrived from Brasil who took over my still warm bed in the basement, Lucas (Photo 33). Lucas returned to Brasil right after Thanksgiving and 14 in December his place was taken over by a Chilean scholar, Matias, who was joined by his fiancée Natalia right after New Year and after the Danish scholar left (Photo 34). Natalia and Matias went back to Chile yesterday, and already last Sunday, a scholar from Poland, Andrzej Slowikowski arrived, and I don’t need to show you a picture because he is here with us today.

Apart from working on my own project, I participate in the weekly discussion group with the scholars present at the moment and the director of the library (Photo 40).

I will finish with a quote from a sermon of Kierkegaard that he actually preached. Kierkegaard was never ordained. Once in his life he seriously considered getting a call as pastor in the country parish, but realized that his communication would be more effective if he talked without authority. As a lay person, Kierkegaard could not claim any other authority than the persuasiveness of what he said. “I am without authority; far be it from me to judge any person.”5 “I am an unauthorized poet who influences by means of the ideals.”6

Only a few times in his whole life did Kierkegaard preach live. He did it a couple of times at the Friday communion services at the Church of Our Lady, the cathedral of Copenhagen, and Sunday May 18, 1851, he preached at the Citadel Church (Kastellet). He preached on the changelessness of God out of James 1:17- 21. James was Kierkegaard’s favorite letter, unlike Luther, who considered James as a letter of straw. I will remind you of the first verse of the text Kierkegaard preached about: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (Perhaps you remember a harvest hymn with this verse as

5 Ibid., 17. 6 Ibid., 21. 15 the refrain). It was not easy for Kierkegaard to write a sermon that he actually had to deliver. We know from Kierkegaard’s journal that any task that required him to use his physical person was mentally and emotionally disturbing to him, and to deliver a sermon was such kind of task. Besides, Kierkegaard had been engaged to a woman, Regine, for less than a year between 1840 and 1841, and he had been the one who broke the engagement. However, at the moment of writing this sermon, 10 years after the end of his engagement to Regine, the thought of Regine in the congregation (she didn’t attend) did not make the sermon any easier to write either. We also know that the day after delivering this sermon Kierkegaard felt so enfeebled and weak that he promised himself that he would never take the pulpit again. He wrote: “It went reasonably well, but my voice was so weak that people complained about not being able to hear… On Monday I was so faint and weak it was frightful… Then I became really sick.” Peter Zahle, an author and later a pastor, who was in the Citadel Church that Sunday, had not been the least bit dissatisfied with Kierkegaard’s voice. Zahle wrote: “No one who has heard him preach will forget that extremely weak, but wonderfully expressive voice. Never have I heard a voice that was so capable of inflecting even the most delicate nuances of expression.”

As I said, Kierkegaard preached about the changelessness of God. He started with a prayer addressed to “You Changeless One, whom nothing changes!,” and he made it very clear already in this opening prayer that changelessness didn’t mean impassibility (notion adopted from Greek philosophy according to which God is incapable of suffering and even of emotion), for he said: “You are not like a human being. If he is to maintain a mere measure of changelessness, he must not have too much that can move him and must not let himself be moved too much. But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a 16 trifle [a thing of little or no value or significance] and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love. But nothing changes you, you Changeless One!7 Kierkegaard compares God with a spring. He knows that the comparison is not so good. A spring is water flowing or seeping out of an opening in the ground or hillside and it is sensitive to seasonal changes in groundwater availability and may therefore dwindle during dry periods. God on the contrary always remains changeless: “But you, O God, you changeless One, you, unchanged, are always to be found and are always to be found unchanged. No one, either in life or in death, travels so far away that you are not to be found, that you are not there; you are indeed everywhere –this is not the way springs are on this earth, springs are only in special places. Moreover –what overwhelming security! – you do not remain on the spot like a spring; you travel along. No one strays so far away that he cannot find his way back to you, you who are not only like a spring that lets itself be found –what a poor description of your being! –you who are like a spring that even searches for the thirsting, the straying, something unheard of about any spring. Thus are you unchanged and everywhere to be found. And whenever a person comes to you, at whatever age, at whatever time of day, in whatever condition –if he comes honestly,8 he will always find (like the spring’s unchanged coolness) your love just as warm, you Changeless One!9

7 The Moment and Late Writings, 268. 8 Honesty is another key term for Kierkegaard. It would always be better to have the courage and honesty and truth to say directly to God, “I cannot accept that,” than to resort to hypocrisy and falsify the concept of what it is to be a Christian. (See The Moment, 190). 9 The Moment, 280-81.