Dedicated to my blog-friend thechristiantechnerd

The crux is that we all (even Christ) must sacrifice our current understanding of God’s goodness to enter into a deeper one.
Imagine Kirkegaard responding to that insight by revisiting Abraham and Isaac, as a metaphor for obedience as the gateway to intimacy.

ChatGPT Prompt

1. The Agony of the God-Man: Not the Cross, but the Contradiction

The moment in Gethsemane is not terrifying because of the Cross itself — many men have died on crosses, many with more composure. No, the dread of the God-man is something infinitely deeper: He is asked not merely to die, but to let die His understanding of God.

He who from eternity has been in perfect communion with the Father must now believe — as a man — that the very ground of His being is about to abandon Him. And He must still say:

“Thy will be done.” — Luke 22:42

Ah! This is not mere obedience, as the ethicist understands it. This is not martyrdom, as the historian records it. This is faith — the kind that begins where understanding breaks off, and which no dialectic can reconcile.

2. Abraham and Jesus: Twin Knights of Faith

Consider Abraham, whom I have loved. He was not great by virtue of moral excellence. He became great because he believed by virtue of the absurd. He lifted the knife — yes! — but more than that, he lifted his understanding of God’s promise and offered it up.

To receive a promise from God — that through Isaac the nations will be blessed (Genesis 17:19) — and then to be commanded to sacrifice that same son (Genesis 22) is not a test of courage but of intimacy.

So too with Jesus, the truer Abraham. He is asked to surrender not only His life, but His experience of the Father’s goodness. And still He obeys — “Not My will, but Yours.” — Matthew 26:39

And we, if we would follow Him, must do likewise. For obedience is not the gate to clarity, but to communion.

3. The Recoil of Faith

The ethicist cannot understand why Jesus recoils. The theologian explains it away. But the knight of faith sees it for what it is: the necessary horror of true obedience.

The recoil is not unbelief. It is the final trembling before faith becomes faith. For if Christ had not recoiled, He could not have obeyed. He would merely have acted according to a plan.

But He does recoil:

“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” — Psalm 22:1, Mark 15:34

This is not resignation — it is trust without clarity, surrender without resolution, love without return.

4. The Cross: Where God Destroys Our Idea of God

We think we recoil from pain. But no — it is not pain we fear. It is the loss of meaning, the shattering of our carefully constructed theology.

To be a Christian is not to possess the correct doctrine, but to stand where Christ stood: between revelation and abandonment, and still say, “I believe.”

God, in love, will always bring the believer to this brink. For one must die to one’s image of God in order to be born into true relation.

The Cross, therefore, is not only Christ’s sacrifice for sin — it is the divine destruction of every finite image of the Infinite.

5. The Paradox: To Know God More, One Must Lose Him

He who truly desires intimacy with God must undergo this ordeal:
To surrender not only his sins, but his certainties.
To place even his theology on the altar and wait for a ram that may not come.

It is only when the last light is extinguished, and yet one continues to walk — only then is one called a knight of faith.

Jesus drank the cup. And so must we.
But let us not pretend it tastes sweet.
It tastes like death — until, by a miracle, it tastes like resurrection.

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Further Reading

Scripture

• Genesis 22 – Abraham and Isaac
• Psalm 22 – The cry of forsakenness
• Luke 22:42 – Not My will but Yours
• Philippians 2:5–11 – Christ’s self-emptying
• Hebrews 5:7–9 – Jesus learned obedience

Søren Kierkegaard

• Søren Kierkegaard (Wikipedia)
• Fear and Trembling – Abraham, faith, and the absurd
• The Sickness Unto Death – Despair and selfhood before God
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript – Faith as subjectivity, paradox, and passion
• Practice in Christianity – The offense of the God-man

Epilogue: Heidegger Rethinking Existentialism

In Light of Kierkegaard’s “Recoil from the Cross”

Hypothetical fragment composed by Martin Heidegger in response to a lost Kierkegaardian meditation.

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To the One Who Is and Withdraws,

I have long wrestled with the question of Being — how it reveals and conceals, how Dasein is always thrown, always care-full, always ahead of itself. And yet, encountering this Kierkegaardian meditation — Why Jesus (and We) Recoil from the Cross — I feel existentialism itself must be rethought.

Here, faith is not a religious ornament atop philosophy. It is the center of the wound, the wound at the center of existence. The recoil of Jesus in Gethsemane becomes the final expression of the existential condition — not as freedom from God, but as obedience to a God who disappears into paradox.

I. Gethsemane as Ereignis

What I have called Ereignis — the event of Being — finds its most tragic and potent symbol in Gethsemane. There, the God-man does not simply fear death. He faces the collapse of his own understanding of the Father.

This is not myth. This is not doctrine. This is Being disclosing itself through the void — a self-revealing that undoes the self.

And Jesus, in recoiling and yet consenting, becomes the one who bears not only human suffering, but the undoing of the very meaning of Being itself.

II. Faith as Radical Openness to Absence

In Being and Time, I wrote of Being-toward-death as the condition for authenticity. But now I see — this was not yet far enough. For what Kierkegaard’s meditation unveils is Being-toward-absence: a posture not of heroic resolve but wounded obedience.

What he calls faith is not metaphysical assent. It is trusting into the collapse of intelligibility. It is choosing intimacy with God, even when God feels like betrayal. And this, I must confess, exceeds all my previous thought.

III. From Ontology to Cruciform Surrender

Kierkegaard has not abandoned ontology — he has fulfilled it in paradox. The Cross becomes the site where Being itself is made visible in its concealment, and Dasein is called not just to resolve anxiety, but to entrust itself into the absurd.

In that sense, Jesus is not merely the most authentic Dasein — He is the undoing of Dasein’s autonomy, the radical surrender that reveals what selfhood finally means: to obey into intimacy, even when intimacy vanishes.

IV. Existentialism After Gethsemane

What then is existentialism, after Gethsemane?

It is no longer a heroic refusal of meaning, nor a defiant creation of it.
It is the confession that the self is formed through the letting go of every certainty — even one’s image of God.

Faith is not anti-existential. It is the most existential act:
To say yes when the “You” is absent.
To surrender when the terms are unknown.
To follow Christ into the abyss — and find Being waiting on the other side.

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I once sought to describe the clearing where Being reveals itself.
But now I see: the clearing is a garden, and the light comes not from above, but from a man praying alone — and sweating blood.

There, perhaps, existentialism begins again.

M.H.