Chapter 7 discusses the relation between ethics and religion in Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous writings. It is shown that – despite appearances and despite influential commentators – religion cannot possibly conflict with ethics. There is not only strong textual evidence ruling out such conflict but also principled reasons, showing that there is no conceptual room for such conflict, since Kierkegaard is a Christian Platonist who identifies the good with the divine. Indeed, his account of religion is clearly moralized since he takes religion to concern practical questions of how to live morally. For Kierkegaard, religion thus entails ethics and vice versa, although we must distinguish between Christian and non-Christian variants of both. Still, he holds that the former can override the latter to some extent. But this does not involve any break with ethics (as such) or any moral exceptionalism that is beyond or above morality. Instead of suspending ethics, Kierkegaard stresses the overriding nature of morality, seeing what we ought to do all-things-considered as a specifically ethico-religious question. His position is therefore far less problematic than normally assumed.

Chapter 6 argues that it is Kierkegaard, rather than Kant, who denies that religion is anything beyond or above ethics. It thus criticizes the widespread view that Kierkegaard reacted against Kant’s (alleged) reduction of religion to ethics by introducing the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” First, Kierkegaard rules out secular ethics by identifying the good and the divine. Second, he moralizes religion by interpreting natural religion in terms of non-Christian ethics and Christianity in terms of Christian ethics. For Kierkegaard, the first two are necessary yet insufficient, so that Christian ethics may only partially replace non-Christian ethics. As a result, there is no suspension of ethics in general, only a suspension of one variant of it by another variant. Even in the case of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Kierkegaard’s position is far more defensible than normally assumed, since he maintains that it would have been “an error on [Abraham’s] part,” if he were to murder Isaac (SKS 24, 375, NB24:89 / KJN 8, 379). Finally, he denies that anyone could possibly imitate Abraham’s sacrifice by killing someone.