Timothy Keller in his book “The Reason for God” shared:
The famous Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a fascinating little book called The Sickness to Death in 1849. In it he defined “sin” in a way that is rooted in the Bible but is also accessible to contemporary people.“Sin is: in despair, not wanting to be oneself before God. . . . Faith is : that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”3 Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart form him.
What does this mean? Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something. Kierkegaard asserts that human beings were made not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above anything else, and build their very identities on him. Anything other than this is sin.
Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking of divine rules” but Kierkegaard knows that the very first of the Ten Commandments is to “have no other God’s before me.” So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.
In the movie “Rocky,” the title character’s girlfriend asks him why it is so important to “go the distance” in the boxing match. “Then I’ll know I’m not a bum,” he replies. In the movie Chariots of Fire one of the main characters works so hard at running the hundred-yard dash for the Olympics. He says that when each race begins, “I have ten lonely seconds to justify my existence.” Both of these men looked to athletic achievement as the defining force that gave meaning to their lives.
Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, “The Denial of Death.” He begins it by noting that a child’s need for self worth “is the condition for his life,” so much so that every person is desperately seeking what Becker calls “cosmic significance.” He immediately warns the reader not to take this term lightly.4 Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially “deify.” We look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think of ourselves as highly irreligious. He uses romantic love as an illustration: The self-glorification that [modern man] needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. Spiritual and moral needs now become focused on one individual.5
Becker is not saying that everyone looks to romance and love for a sense of self. Many look not to romance but rather to work and career of cosmic significance: [Sometimes] his work has to carry the burden of justifying him. What does “justifying” mean?. . . He lives the fantasy of control of life and death, of destiny.6
But all of this only sets the stage for continual disappointment: No human relationship can bear this burden of godhood. . . . If your partner is your “All” then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you . . . . What is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to this position? We want to be rid of . . . our feeling of nothingness . . . to know our existence has not been in vain. We want redemption—nothing less. Needless to say, humans cannot give this.7
This is exactly Kierkegaard’s point. Every person must find some way to “justify their existence,” and to stave off the universal fear that they’re “a bum.” In more traditional cultures, the sense of worth and identity comes from fulfilling duties to family and giving service to society. In our contemporary individualistic culture, we tend to look to our achievements, our social status, our talents, or our love relationships. There are an infinite variety of identity bases . Some get their sense of “self” from gaining and wielding power, others from human approval, others from self discipline and control. But everyone is building their identity on something.8 ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New Your, N.Y., Penguin Books, 2016,2018), 168-70
(Continued in “The Personal Consequences of Sin.”)
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
