A Broken Engagement: Reassessing Barth's Relationship to Kierkegaard on the Grounds of Subjectivity and Preaching

Despite B arth's initial appropriations of K ierkegaard, he famously discarded the D ane from the theological ‘canon’ due to the latter's alleged anthropocentric subjectivism. Yet K ierkegaard was himself a preacher and polemical homiletician, seeking merely to appropriate the objective truth of the proclaimed word. B arth's Basel prison sermons reveal this same endeavour to render the eternally significant message temporally significant for his hearers. In K ierkegaard's C hristendom, a corrective focus on subjectivity was the only way to remain faithful to the ‘objective’ truth of the gospel. B arth and K ierkegaard are juxtaposed here not in contrast (as Barth might have preferred) but in affinity, in that both sought to evoke the dialectical subjectivity of objectivity through preaching.