Peering into the abyss
Exploring the difference between myself and God in a conversation with Kierkegaard
“For He is the friend of sinners: When it is a question of a sinner He does not merely stand still, open His arms and say, ‘Come hither’; no, He stands there and waits, as the father of the lost son waited, rather He does not stand and wait, He goes forth to seek, as the shepherd sought the lost sheep, as the woman sought the lost coin. He goes—yet no, He has gone, but infinitely further than any shepherd or any woman, He went, and sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.” — Søren Kierkegaard
1An infinite distance, over an infinite abyss, He goes—and has gone, all the way to incarnation. For me.
Who am I?2
A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.3
I am only a self, a spirit, before God. My essential existence is to stand before the throne of Yahweh, and yet to be aware of this is to become aware of that “infinite qualitative difference” between myself and God and thus, in light of any increase in understanding, to despair. “It is at the edge, facing the abyss, that the self must begin.”4 What constitutes this abyss, and is there a cure for despair?
As a child in a world where penal substitution is the first word in atonement, I had an inchoate understanding of sin as the essence of the chasm between God and I. On some level, I still believe that.5 Sin did separate me from God, but it does no longer, and I am still not God or fully with God. The abyss is not merely sin; or rather, sin is the part of the abyss that God overcame “by grace” and “through faith” (Eph 2).
Sin is: before God in despair not to will to be oneself, or before God in despair to will to be oneself.6
This is my condition, far from unique to me. And yet, to be cured by letting this “sickness unto death” kill me is to become something greater:
Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto death. As a Christian, he gained a courage that the natural man does not know, and he gained this courage by learning to fear something even more horrifying. This is the way a person always gains courage; when he fears a greater danger, he always has the courage to face a lesser one; when he is exceedingly afraid of one danger, it is as if the others did not exist at all. But the most appalling danger that the Christian has learned to know is ‘the sickness unto death’…7
The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness or sublimity, that he is spirit. The possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness.8
The fear of the Lord really is the beginning of wisdom—there’s no need to whitewash it as mere “reverence.”9 I think to be aware of this despair and to be aware of its cure is to become something the rest of the world cannot fathom. And yet virtue (or “works,” or “deeds,” or Kantian ethics) does not lead through the abyss, says Paul, “for whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”10
Faith is: that the self in being itself and then willing to be itself rests transparently in God.
[That the opposite of sin is virtue] is a pagan view, which is satisfied with a merely human criterion and simply does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith, as it says in Romans 14:23: “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” And this is one of the most decisive definitions for all Christianity—that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.11
So, the abyss of sin is can be conquered, and yet I am not God or fully with Him after Christ’s triumph over sin. The abyss must contain something else; something else must make God the Wholly Other besides sin. After all, if “it is enough for ‘God’ to be the name of the absolutely other,” then the “name of God, of the biblical God of Abraham and Isaac, need not be God for us;” after all, “God’s mind is wholly other to Abraham, as is the mind of every other, my friends and my family, who are as transcendent to me as Yahweh.”12 It is impossible to be one with our friends and family, our fellow others, though we can each of us be cleansed of sin.13 No, God must be something other than the Wholly Other, something also.14
Our leap of faith is our theosis, our becoming one with the Wholly Other, for our leap of faith into Him is His leap of grace into us. This transaction—and truly the most heretical word I will speak today is that one, that false reduction of this paradoxical miracle to mere transaction—equally maintains God’s nature as Other from us, though no longer Wholly Other, for He is then known to us, but a Holy Other.15 Via the words of Simon D. Podmore, the missing element of otherness constituting the abyss is revealed:
when the self, becoming itself before God, perceives itself through the eyes of God as forgiven, the Wholly Other reveals itself as the Holy Other: the God who loves, suffers, and graciously creates the gift of selfhood. In other words, God as Wholly Other results from and is asserted by sin and the consciousness of sin. God as Holy Other is that which overcomes the estrangement of the “infinite qualitative difference” of sin and reveals a forgiveness which invites the self to a communion predicated upon heterogeneity. It announces: “Be holy as I am Holy” (Leviticus 11:44).16
Forgiveness is the essence of the chasm when sin is destroyed—put to death! And our oneness with the One remains paradoxical, yet biblical, since it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.17
As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmic qualitative abyss. In turn, of course, God is separated from man by the same chasmic qualitative abyss when he forgives sins. If by some kind of reverse adjustment the divine could be shifted over to the human, there is one way in which man could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving sins.18
And let us not forget Kierkegaard’s definition of faith as rest, for we who have faith “enter that rest,” as God has said, “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God”.19 When we cease to despair and enter into the rest of faith, we are on our way to becoming contemporaneous with Christ just as we are already with Him.
I’m learning to simultaneously appreciate and unlearn the views I inherited; where there is human truth, there is incompleteness. In the words of Simon D. Podmore, who undertook a book on the anatomy of Kierkegaard’s infinite qualitative abyss:
this project commenced under the belief that the meaning of Kierkegaard’s “infinite, radical, qualitative difference” (uendelig svalgænde qualitativ Foskjel) between humanity and God was essentially sin. Mercifully, it concluded with the conviction that the true meaning of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity is expressed through forgiveness.20
Think I’m wrong? Please tell me! I’m serious—being offensive is only worthwhile when matched with humility.
Opening quote from Training in Christianity (1850) by Anti-Climacus (Søren Kierkegaard), translated by Walter Lowrie.
The questions asked in this post are not easily answered, and any attempt at truth will be offensive to some. See last week's post for some discussion on that reality.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, by Anti-Climacus (Søren Kierkegaard), translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, pg 13. Princeton University Press, 1980.
Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss by Simon D. Podmore, pg 48. Indiana University Press, 2011.
That the abyss, or difference, between oneself and God is sin is the anthropocentric subset of its essence. It is true subjectively (and biblically), but it is not the full picture (biblically)—what a wonder that our Bible is both subjectively man’s perspective and objectively Truth! Mark it down on the list of paradoxes in our intellectually untenable faith.
The Sickness Unto Death, pg 81.
Ibid, pg 8-9.
Ibid, pg 15.
Psa 111:10, Prov 1:7, 9:10, cf. Job 28:28. Once, going on a decade ago now, someone searching for God asked me about this biblical idea. If memory serves, it was a hangup for him; I regrettably informed him that the “fear” in these passages was mere reverence. Now, I see this fear as a stepping stone to true bravery.
Rom 14:23, KJV. Emphasis mine.
The Sickness Unto Death, pg 82.
Instants and Singularities: Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida by John D. Caputo, In: Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, pg 222. Ed. Martin J. Matuštík & Merold Westphal. Indiana University Press, 1995.
In the biblical view, we do become one with another just as we, impossibly, become one (or, as Kierkegaard would put it, “contemporaneous”) with God. However, we are still not someone else after becoming one with them, just as we are not God after becoming one with Him. The paradoxes here are numerous, and the OT & NT authors seem well aware when they scandalously suggest that we will reign alongside God, as beney' ha-Elohim (teknōn Theou).
John D. Caputo expounds: “saying, ‘God is wholly other’ is a textual operation, a work of hyperbolic excess, that depends upon its textual, contextual base, a piece of hymnal, holy excess.” (God Is Wholly Other—Almost: 'Différance' and the Hypebolic Alterity of God, In: The Otherness of God, pg 191. Ed. Orrin F. Summerell. University Press of Virginia, 1998).
On this point, I am indebted to systematic & philosophical theologian Simon D. Podmore. I find the language helpful, but I did not come up with it—though, I suppose, neither did he.
Kierkegaard and the Self Before God, pg 48-49. Emphasis mine. The paradox is maintained, since we are to become holy like the One we can never be one with.
Gal 2:20.
The Sickness Unto Death, pg 122. Certainly, we are all called to forgive sins, but none of us can wash them away—none of us but One.
Heb 3-4.
Kierkegaard and the Self Before God, pg xi.
For the maturing Christian, this idea of the unmatchable Holy Other is far more encouraging and less reductive than the wall of sin we sketch to demonstrate our unforgiven state, but that simple sketch remains an important idea for the unsaved unbeliever to grasp first. It's part of the story of the chasm, but not the whole. I appreciated the way you attempted to flesh it out more deeply.