ABSTRACT
Although the most thorough discussions of dying to are located in Kierkegaard’s later work-after 1848-brief references can be found in earlier writings, such as The Concept of Irony, The Concept of Anxiety, and the early upbuilding discourses.2 Even when the term itself does not appear, however, there are still other early inklings of something like dying to. For example, one might suggest that Johannes de silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, has dying to the world in mind when he says that “infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity.”3 Using Abraham as the model for such faith, de silentio explains that it is only in the willingness to give up everything one holds most dear in life that one can become ready to trust in the possibility that God will provide.4 One way of putting this might be that one must
so that one can allow all such meaning to be bestowed by God. When one’s meaning comes from the right relationship to God, then it no longer relies on the transient temporal self, but is, rather, grounded in the eternal.
