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The central argument of this dissertation is that Sharon Krishek’s faith-like model of love has a fundamental problem. By treating romantic love as structurally identical to Abraham’s faith as Kierkegaard sees it, her interpretation of Kierkegaard collapses a crucial distinction between faith and love. Faith, as is demonstrated, is the individual’s relationship to the absolute, while love is the commanded relation of oneself to the neighbor. Through a charitable and critical analysis of Krishek’s seminal work, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love, this dissertation shows that collapsing these two categories ultimately undermines the integrity of Kierkegaard’s vision for faith as well as the universal nature of commanded neighbor love. Authentic Christian love must be grounded in God’s command to love the neighbor and not in existential authenticity.
This dissertation uses a distinct methodology that establishes a constitutive-manifestive framework for reading Kierkegaard. This framework is then applied as an evaluative tool for contemporary readings of Kierkegaard. This approach showed that Abraham’s faith is first constituted by God’s command to sacrifice Isaac as well as God’s promise that Isaac is the child of promise. The promise and command are constitutive for Abraham and not Abraham’s existential movements of resignation and repetition. These movements are manifestations. This analysis is employed across six chapters, culminating in an examination of Krishek’s work. The constitutive-manifestive interpretative framework is a key original contribution of this dissertation. This framework, developed in the dissertation, serves to demonstrate the inadequacy of Krishek’s model. Further, this dissertation argues that approaches to Kierkegaard that overemphasize the phenomenological aspects found in Kierkegaard are inadequate. These iv approaches that overemphasize subjectivity fail because they locate authority in human achievement and not in God’s command, forfeiting an objective foundation.
The principal conclusion is that either the structural conflation of faith and love must be abandoned, or the theological foundations of Kierkegaardian ethics require fundamental reconsideration. The dissertation concludes by demonstrating how a properly theocentric reading preserves what contemporary interpreters value: authentic existence, meaningful relationships, and spiritual transformation, while avoiding the anthropocentric reductions that characterize existentialist approaches. This framework recognizes faith and love as distinct but complementary aspects of Christian existence. Ultimately, grounding for both faith and love find their grounding in the commands and calls of God and not in human spiritual abilities. This respects the theological vision of Kierkegaard in ways that purely phenomenological interpretations cannot.