 One such issue concerned the question of justification, and the central Lutheran view that this comes through unmerited grace as forgiveness rather than through works. While expressing sympathy with Luther’s central claim, Kierkegaard was fearful that in his contemporary world, it had become an excuse for an ethical and spiritual indolence, so that people now “applied grace in such a way that they freed themselves from works” (Kierkegaard 1851 [1990a: 17]). Relatedly, Kierkegaard acknowledged and respected the spiritual seriousness of the anxieties (Anfechtungen) and sense of sin which had led Luther himself to adopt this position (see Podmore 2006 and 2013); but this was a seriousness which Kierkegaard’s contemporaries had lost, so that for them the turn to grace becomes a superficial optimism rather than a renewal of hope in the face of anxiety and despair. Moreover, like Luther, Kierkegaard closely connected our relation to God in faith with our relation to the neighbour, so that it is through the former that the latter as works of love are made  possible.[28]  In this way, Kierkegaard could claim to be correcting an exaggeration of Luther’s position, which tried to do away with works altogether—much as Luther himself had rejected this exaggeration in his Treatise on Good Works. In re-affirming the importance of works, Kierkegaard gave a greater role to the imitatio Christi tradition, again arguing that while Luther had been rightly critical of this idea in his own context as feeding works righteousness and a kind of pseudo-piety, it nonetheless needs reviving in Kierkegaard’s context, to provide a challenge to the complacent self-conception of his contemporaries by raising Christ up as an ideal, and to re-focus our attention on him as a radical figure (Kierkegaard 1876 [1990: 192–209]).