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Chapter 5 considers Kierkegaard's complaint with the ‘world historical’ influence on Christian thought. Critics often charge Kierkegaard with radically separating the individual from all meaningful relation to history. Instead the chapter argues that a right historical orientation is crucial to Kierkegaard's project. Christian nationalisms depend upon a belief in the divine unfolding expressed in the development of national cultures, and hence presuppose a change in the essential ethical task facing persons over time. Kierkegaard challenges these notions with his attack on the ‘world‐historical’ point of view. He does this not by abstracting persons from history but rather by heightening the importance of the place of individuals in their immediate surroundings. The chapter focuses on Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Two Ages, demonstrating Kierkegaard's conviction that while the trappings of culture change over time, what is essential about the human condition does not.

What bothered Kierkegaard about modern democratic culture, chapter two argues, was the discursive shift from speaking (tale) to counting (tælle) that it ushered in. Individuals began counting each other’s statements, calculating their combined meanings, and aggregating the results, as well as themselves, in an abstract social sum Kierkegaard calls “the gallery-public.”As a totalizing entity, the gallery-public is thought to be logically superior to any and all of its constitutive elements, and thus fit to serve as their common denominator—a numerical figure of their total population in terms of which the statistical value of each can be expressed. Shoring up this modern social arithmetic, Kierkegaard notes, is a curious form of chatter, in which general orders of significance are made to appear greater than the sum of their parts. Kierkegaard attributes this fuzzy math to several interrelated habits of mind -- notably prudence, reflection, common sense, and equivocation -- but he ultimately traces its origin to sorites reasoning, a spurious line of thought extending from Aristotle to Hegel and premised on the two-part belief that quantitative accumulation can yield qualitative change and, more archaically, that wholes are always greater than the sum of their parts.

Chapter 4, “Theodore of Mopsuestia: The Twelve as Christian Scripture,” considers the meaning Theodore draws from the texts of the Twelve Prophets as Christian scripture. Whereas scholars have largely denied any Christian value to Theodore’s Old Testament interpretation, this chapter demonstrates that Theodore offers a self-consciously Christian reading of the Twelve. In Theodore’s reading, the texts bear witness to the continuity of God’s providential guidance of history that has Christ as its telos. Additionally, Theodore finds the prophetic and typological correspondences between the Two Ages established by God in order to highlight the superiority of the benefits secured by Christ and thus increase the faith of those who live after the inauguration of the Second Age, awaiting its consummation at the general resurrection. Finally, Theodore affirms the ongoing catechetical value of the prophets’ foundational teaching of monotheism and the absolute distinction between Creator and creation.