Notions of Follower and Admirer

In an unpermissible and unlawful way people have become knowing about Christ, for the only permissible way is to be believing.   (Now) ... one became a Christian without noticing it and without in the least noticing the possibilty of offence.  .... All became as simple as thrusting a foot into the stocking.  And quite naturally, because in that way Christianity became paganism.  .... One does not know what it is to be offended, still less what it is to worship.  What one especially praises in Christ is precisely what one would be most embittered by if one were contemporary with it .... 

One does not trouble oneself to learn to know in a deeper sense what it was He did, still less to try according to one's slender ability by God's help to imitate Him in doing the thing that is right and noble and sublime and true ...... One is content to admire and praise ....

Christianity has done away with Christianity, without being quite aware of it.  The consequences is that, if anything is to be done, one must try again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.  

.... followers are not adherents of a doctrine but followers of a life, a life which has no adventitious marks of loftiness which would make it presumptuous on our part or mere madness ...  

A follower is or strives to be what he admires

For when no danger is present, when ther is a dead calm, when everything is favorable to Christianity, it is only too easy to mistake an admirer for a follower, and this may pass quite unobserved, the admirer may die in the illusion that the relationship he assumed was the true one.  Attention thereofre to contemporaneousness. 

An admirer holds himself personally aloof, consciously or unconsciously, he does not discern that the object of his admiration makes a claim upon him to be or to strive to be the thing he admires.   .... what a dreadful thing it is to admire the truth instead of following it.  

The admirer is only ... selfishly in love with greatness; if trouble comes or danger, he draws back; and if this is not possible, he becomes a traitor, as a way of liberating himself form the one-time object of his admiration.  And so ti si likewise when the admirer has beheld and expected in something and from something, or in somebody and from somebody.

Soren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity