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for upholding the voice of anti-theism, even though it is a voice
he ultimately identifies as a cry of despair. The fact that the last
word goes to Kierkegaard discloses the notion that this nascent
vision of anti/theology operates within a provisionally theolog-
ical framework. It is as if anti-theism is finally viewed via the
diagnostic lens of theism itself—albeit a form of theism which
privileges human and divine freedom as related in Love rather
than Power. While I conclude here with this sense, it is important
to regard such a view as provisional, as potentially anarchic, as
open to the struggles with a higher anti-theism—which in turn
drives both onwards in Love.
From Kierkegaard’s avowedly theological perspective, the pos-
sibility of anti-theism is itself implicitly sustained by an account of
divine and human freedom grounded in the nature of God’s om-
nipotence as love. This is an account of divine omnipotence as the
Love of God which is itself critical of both theistic notions of di-
vine Providence and of human constructs of power. That is not to
say that Kierkegaard evokes an image of harmony. As Proudhon
urges an eternal struggle against God, Kierkegaard elicits the pres-
ence of an inexorable struggle between the human and the divine
at the genesis of his own dialectical vision. This struggle is itself a
symptomatic expression of the relationship between both divine
and human freedom: freedom understood as a divine gift of om-
nipotent love which God, even in God’s unfathomable grief, will
not violate. Kierkegaard seeks to evoke and also to provoke this
existential tension by declaring that “God is man’s most redoubt-
able enemy, thy mortal enemy; He would that thou shouldst die,
die unto the world”.^91
If one is only willing to gaze deeply into the abyss of existence,
then we will see that the world does not express the Providence
of God transmitted through benign ecclesial hierarchy. Rather, we
should discern the ancient and perennial struggle between “Spirit”
(Ånd) and “spiritlessness” (Åndløsheden) which promises to
awaken us to the realization that “there is a life and death battle
between God and man; God hates man just as man hates God.”^92
In eliciting a struggle of alterity at the heart of this relationship,
Proudhon and Kierkegaard each regards the relation between
the divine and the human as irreducible to either the sublation