The Anarchē of Spirit^261(Aufheben) of Hegelian Geist in history or the sublimation of
Feuerbachian humanist atheism.
However, the decisive point of departure for Kierkegaard’s re-
lational theism from Proudhon’s antinomous anti-theism is found
in Kierkegaard’s account of divine omnipotence expressed in
love’s irrevocable gift of freedom—a freedom which, nonetheless,
sustains the possibility of anti-theism as the freedom of “offence”.
In other words, the freedom to negate the idea of “God” in the
name of offence is itself an expression of a God-given freedom
which the divine itself refuses to negate. God’s refusal to negate
the one who struggles against God expresses a notion of divine
omnipotence opposed to the a/theistic projection of human ideas
of “power” as “mastery over the other”. Instead, divine omnip-
otence becomes a kenotic expression of God’s love for an other
who remains free to refuse the very love which creates its being
and its freedom. The human individual, as freely-created ex nihi-
lo (out of nothing), is ultimately free to refute the cause of its own
being (since it depends upon nothing). As ex nihilo the creature is
free to will itself; or even to will its own nothingness. It is free to
not be. What is more, as Kierkegaard describes in one of his most
extensive and remarkable journal entries from 1846, this ground-
ing of divine omnipotence in kenotic love implies a redefinition
of the relationship between God and evil—one which contrasts
profoundly with Proudhon’s assertion of the God of Providence
as the God of evil:
The whole question of the relation of God’s omnipotence and
goodness to evil (instead of the differentiation that God accom-
plishes the good and merely permits the evil) is resolved quite
simply in the following way. The greatest good, after all, that can
be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do
for it, is to make it free. In order to do just that, omnipotence
is required. This seems strange, since it is precisely omnipotence
that supposedly would make [a being] dependent. But if one will
reflect on omnipotence, one will see that it also must contain the
unique qualification of being able to withdraw itself again in a
manifestation of omnipotence in such a way that precisely for this
reason that which has been originated through omnipotence can
be independent.^93