Soren Kierkegaard is an author who, due to his creative use of genre, has been difficult to characterize straightforwardly. His unconventional form of writing has at times been understood as a part of his criticism of German speculative philosophy; however, little work has been done to actually understand the nature of his criticism and his precise objection to the form of presentation traditionally used by systematic philosophy. In this article it is argued that there is a close connection between the form and the content of speculative philosophy, and that due to his disagreements with the content of the latter (specifically concerning the question of faith) Kierkegaard was obliged to make use of a different literary form in order to criticize it.