“Kierkegaard saw himself as a religious author. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he argues against the superficial reading of his work as an ‘aesthetic’ author (an author whose basic concerns are literary in nature) who eventually became religious. It is true that many of Kierkegaard’s early writings, beginning with Either-Or, are pseudonymous and have a rich aesthetic flavor, and it is true that Kierkegaard’s later writings tend to have a more pronounced religious, and specifically Christian, content and tone. However, Kierkegaard asserts that the best explanation for this is not that he began as an aesthetic author and changed to a religious one. Certainly his religious faith changed and deepened over the years, but he was from the beginning a religious author. The early aesthetic writings are themselves religiously inspired, part of a strategy Kierkegaard had adopted.
“This strategy was tailored to Kierkegaard’s mission, which was, he claimed, ‘the reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom.’ He considered ‘Christendom’ — the assumption that ‘we are all Christians’ — a monstrous illusion that blocked people from an understanding of true Christianity and therefore effectively prevented them from becoming true Christians. As Kierkegaard saw it, the majority of people in Christendom, while imagining themselves to be Christians, actually live in what he called aesthetic categories. That is, their deepest concerns in life are pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune. People like this cannot be expected to be directly interested in the kinds of spiritual issues Christianity regards as crucial, so Kierkegaard begins with a kind of pious deception.
“In a variety of ways Kierkegaard attempted to engage his readers aesthetically, though the works have an underlying moral and religious purpose. The ‘deception,’ as he called it, could be viewed simply as sugarcoating the medicine, but it really is more than this. If Christianity is the medicine, Kierkegaard saw it as his job to help his reader develop the capacities that would enable the medicine to work. Through his aesthetic authorship, he attempted to develop those qualities — which he termed ‘seriousness’ and ‘inwardness’ — in his readers, qualities that are the essential preconditions for understanding Christianity and becoming a Christian. Thus he claimed that the whole of his authorship, not just the obviously religious section, was ‘related to Christianity, to the problem of becoming a Christian, with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom.’
“Therefore Kierkegaard is best understood, not primarily as a philosopher, psychologist, theologian, literary critic, or poet, but as a missionary to the pagans in Christendom, those who took it for granted that they were Christians. Of course, he was also a psychologist, but we must understand that role in light of his primary mission.”
— from C. Stephen Evans, Søren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology: Insight for Counseling and Pastoral Care (Zondervan, 1990)