De religieuze existentie en de beweging van de herhaling bij Kierkegaard

This thesis examines the importance and urgency of Kierkegaard’s work for our present time, based on an oft-forgotten and overlooked religious concept in his authorship: Repetition. Although Kierkegaard’s remarks on repetition are relatively scarce considering his body of work in its entirety, I argue that repetition is the single most crucial category of what Kierkegaard calls ‘religious existence’. Kierkegaard decisively links repetition to individual freedom and the individual’s reconciliation with eternity. This thesis demonstrates that what Kierkegaard means by this, is that God not only confronts the individual with the love that he harbors for mankind in the possibility of a new self through the forgiveness of sins, but also with the individual will towards the absolute task of repeating the love and forgiveness he reveals, in relation to all mankind. Based on this confrontation with the will towards the absolute task of loving one’s neighbor, this thesis aims to illustrate what religious existence truly means for Kierkegaard, and what this in turn could and should mean for our relation to Christianity in our present time, and for our relation to Christianity in the future.