Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.
Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.
Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.
Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.
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.