Kierkegaard, ECM Luminary Extraordinaire

In thinking more on the resonance between the ECM and Kierkegaard's existentialism, I ran across this quote in Søren's Wikipedia entry:

Whereas his first authorship focused on Hegel, this authorship focused on the hypocrisy of Christendom. It is important to realise that by 'Christendom' Kierkegaard meant not Christianity itself, but rather the church and the applied religion of his society. After the Corsair incident, Kierkegaard became interested in "the public" and the individual's interaction with it. His first work in this period of his life was Two Ages: A Literary Review which was a critique of the novel Two Ages (in some translations Two Generations) written by Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd. After giving his critique of the story, Kierkegaard made several insightful observations on the nature of the present age and its passionless attitude towards life. One of his complaints about modernity is its passionless view of the world. Kierkegaard writes that "the present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion ... The trend today is in the direction of mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so many uniformly make one individual". In this, Kierkegaard attacks the conformity and assimilation of individuals into an indifferent public, "the crowd".^[12] Although Kierkegaard attacks the public, he is supportive of communities where individuals keep their diversity and uniqueness.

And also note this quote regarding his concept of the "leap of faith":

The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. It is not so much a rational decision, as it is transcending rationality in favour of something more uncanny, that is, faith. As such he thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt that God exists; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought, without which the faith would have no real substance. Doubt is an essential element of faith, an underpinning. In plain words, to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God.

Note especially that Kierkegaard's existentialism was a reaction against the modernism of the 1800s, and connect the dots with the ECM's emphases... Much of Kierkegaard's thinking reads like something from Bell or MacLaren or other ECM-types...

...truly, there is nothing new under the sun...