A Self That Is Not One: Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Saiving on the Sin of Selflessness

Green, Deidre Nicole

doi:10.1086/690465

Cited by 2 publications

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“…This understanding of addiction admits the central role of vulnerabilities and the desire to escape the pain of sins done to one, while also maintaining that one cannot dissolve into this pain without committing what feminist theology has called the sin of self-loss (cf. Green, 2017).…”

Section: The Explicitly Theological: the Sin Of Despair Versus The Tr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Addiction, Sin, and the Kierkegaardian Self: On Immanent and Transcendent Goods

Davidson

2021

Journal of Psychology and Theology

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The article analyzes the relationship between sin and addiction in the recent work of Sonia Waters and Kent Dunnington, teasing out an apparently irresolvable tension rooted in their respective understandings of what fuels the addictive process. It is argued that the core divergence lies in their differing interpretations of the good sought in addiction, with Waters emphasizing the immanent good of biological and psychosocial homeostasis and Dunnington foregrounding the transcendent good of ecstatic relation with God. The essay proposes to resolve this tension by rethinking the relationship between immanent and transcendent human goods, with reference to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. In his definition of the human being as a synthesis, Kierkegaard helps resolve the tension between the immanent and transcendent goods sought in addiction, while his conception of sin as the refusal of selfhood allows us to sharpen our understanding of whether and how it makes sense to frame addiction as participating in sin. It is concluded that addiction may be helpfully framed as a means of avoiding the task of becoming a self, and therefore as a means of remaining in the position of sin.

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Section: The Explicitly Theological: the Sin Of Despair Versus The Tr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 3 On the apparent problems as well as the potential constructive significance of these gendered characterizations for feminist theology, see Green (2017), Walsh (1987, pp. 121–134), and Cahoy (1995). …”

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confidence: 99%