Why Kierkegaard Should Have Affirmed Universal Salvation

I argue that Kierkegaard could and should have been a proponent of a radical form of universal salvation that construes every human as saved here and now. This is part of the soteriology advanced by Marilyn Adams, who interprets Jesus as abolishing the power of the curse of sin by becoming the curse himself. While this line of thinking is at work in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writing Philosophical Fragments, he tends to find the solution to the human problem of sin in divine forgiveness, which he characterizes as a kind of forgetting by God. But this raises the question of whether we can forget our own sinfulness when it keeps manifesting itself, and we see Kierkegaard struggle intensely with this question in his journal entries. I take this to show that his focus on divine forgiveness should have been complemented by the affirmation of universal salvation à la Adams.