The teacher becomes the teaching

in certain essential respects, the contemporary of Jesus has no advantages over those of us who live two thousand years later. It offended then as it does now that God should come to speech not as a philosophical teaching but through a man executed for blasphemy and sedition. It offends the moral sense that human redemption should come as sheer gift in so unattractive a packaging.

Colin Gunton's summary of Kirkegaard in contrast to Kant, Schliermacher, and Hegel The Actuality of Atonement. (p 24)