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Cadzao Posted 19 years ago
Grammar

The reckoning point

"As the modem world moves onward, it becomes more and more secularized in every department of life; faith consequently becomes attenuated, and Protestant man begins to look more and more like a gaunt skeleton, a sculpture by Giacometti. A secular civilization leaves him more starkly naked than the iconoclasm of the Reformation had ever dreamed. The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness. In this sense Kierkegaard, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was the reckoning point of the whole Protestant Reformation that began three centuries earlier: He sees faith for the uncompromising and desperate wager it is, if one takes it in all its Protestant strictness; and he cannot say, like his Catholic counterpart Pascal, “Stupefy yourself, take holy water, receive the sacraments, and in the end all shall be well”—for Protestant man has forsworn the sacraments and natural symbols of the soul as the snares and pomp of the devil." (Irrational Man by William Barrett)

1. Please tell me what the reckoning point is in the context.

2. Please rephrase the red sentence.

Thank you so much in advance

Cadzao
  

Top answer

The blue part means something like this: Kierkegaard gave a final account of ( or judgment on) the whole Protestant Reformation. The reckoning point is the point in time when everything is totalled up, calculated (reckoned) -- the pros and the cons -- and we have a final account of the situation. It suggests the day of final judgment.

— CalifJim

  • The blue part means something like this: Kierkegaard gave a final account of ( or judgment on) the whole Protestant Reformation.
  • The reckoning point is the point in time when everything is totalled up, calculated (reckoned) -- the pros and the cons -- and we have a final account of the situation.
  • It suggests the day of final judgment.
  • Proverbially, it's when the "chickens come home to roost"!
  • The red part: Kierkegaard believes that if you take the idea of faith as it is strictly defined in Protestantism, you must consider faith as a wager -- a bet, a guess with high stakes.
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2 Answers
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The blue part means something like this:
Kierkegaard gave a final account of (or judgment on) the whole Protestant Reformation.

The reckoning point is the point in time when everything is totalled up, calculated (reckoned) -- the pros and the cons -- and we have a final account of the situation. It suggests the day of final judgment. Proverbially, it's when the "
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Thank you, Calif Jim, very very much for your helpful explanation.

Cadzao
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