The Sickness Unto Death A Christian Psychological...

THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH: A CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPOSITION FOR UPBUILDING AND AWAKENING __________________ A Book Review Presented to Dr. Eric Johnson The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary __________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for 34230 __________________ by Martha A. Stanley SBTS Box 620 April 18, 2016 On my honor, I have neither given nor taken improper assistance in completing this assignment. Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness Unto Death. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1980 According to the editors and translators of Kierkegaard s works, The Sickness Unto Death is a pseudonymous work written under the name, Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard as the editor. Amazingly, the author wrote the manuscript within a three-month period in 1848, likely due to his longstanding concern with the nature and meaning of anxiety and despair in relation to the becoming of the self. In the Gilleleje letter (1835) when Kierkegaard was 22, he wrote, a person must first learn to know himself before learning anything else. During the next decade, he explored psychological topics like anxiety, despair, desires, irony, sin, and faith through critical introspection and observation. His psychology was thoroughly shaped by his Christian faith and brilliant intellect. Influenced by the intellectual context of Kant s and Hegel s philosophies on the mind and theory of knowledge, Kierkegaard commented that genuine anthropological