ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard’s authorship leads the reader through these various senses of belief and faith, from the epistemological (whose opposite is “doubt”), through immediate religious faith, immanent pagan and paradoxical Jewish faith, to a thoroughly dialectical notion of faith (whose opposites are “sin” and “offense”) to be found only in Christianity. Christian faith is a passion, whose intentional object is a person; but this person is paradoxically both an individual man in history and the eternal God. A further article of Christian faith is that the self-sacrifice of God in the person of Jesus Christ atones for the sins of humankind. Because Christian faith is dialectical, it evolves from the preceding senses-but also subsumes them all.
