Kierkegaard, Nones, and Encountering the Eternal for the Development of Authentic Selfhood Outside of Institutional Forms of Christianity

This paper explores how those who no longer identify with a religious tradition or community may encounter the paradox of the eternal in time in edifying ways that foster the development of authentic selfhood. For one could easily argue along with Kierkegaard that becoming a self before God is certainly not guaranteed simply because a person might belong to a religious community, etc. In light of this assertion, it is argued that the individual may encounter the paradox of the eternal outside of any formal religious community and come to receive oneself as a single individual in relation to the eternal through the existence-communication of Christianity as communicated through the inverse witness and how this encounter with the inverse witness may lead an individual into the ongoing reception of one’s concrete particular self via the inward self-reflexive relational dynamics of coming to exist as a self before God.