Forgiveness as the Way to Salvation: A Soteriological Account of Forgiveness in the Religious Writings of Kierkegaard and Its Meaning for Immanent Ethics

Abstract

This paper attempts to draw a strict Christian vision of forgiveness from Kierkegaard’s religious writings and to present its possible meaning for immanent ethics. The starting point of the considerations presented herein is the presupposition that forgiveness, as an essentially Christian phenomenon, does not refer to immanent interpersonal relations, but has its own deep, transcendent dimension. In this view, forgiveness is founded on the spiritual understanding of love of one’s neighbour as an act in which God always mediates in the relation between two people. It is He who really forgives and, in this act, reconciles and equalizes the one who loves and the sinner with each other. Such forgiveness does not concern some particular sinful act, but the sin of life—living without God in the world. In this sense, forgiveness is a creative work of love which transforms the being of man and recreates it in the new reality of love, opening before the individual the way to salvation. At the end of the text, I argue that such forgiveness may have great importance for immanent ethics if only the epistemic and moral distance between temporal and eternal reality is kept.

Keywords

• forgiveness
• love
• soteriology
• christianity
• kierkegaard
• transcendent ethics
• immanent ethics