 Kierkegaard’s relation to Luther and Lutheranism is complex, and remains a matter of some  controversy.[24]  On balance, though, it seems that while Kierkegaard was clearly a critic of the established Danish Lutheran Church, he was not so critical of Luther himself, and partly returned to him in order to challenge his Lutheran contemporaries, even suggesting that he might turn out to be Luther’s “true  successor”.[25]  At the same time, he held that some of Luther’s original doctrines were partly responsible for the contemporary malaise, and so must be re-thought in the context of new challenges to genuine Christian life and spirituality as conceived by Kierkegaard, thereby applying “a corrective to Luther’s own corrective”, as Kim and Rasmussen nicely put it (2009: 197). His attitude is therefore well-summarized in his remark: 