The Necessary is Contingent. Kierkegaard’s God and the Modal Categories

‘For God everything is possible.’ This sentence is one of the most central biblical pericopes in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. The article discusses how the sentence is understood by Kierkegaard by analyzing three alternatives: ‘everything’ as really possible, as logically possible, and as logically impossible. The article’s thesis is that according to Kierkegaard, the pericope must be understood as ‘For God, everything, even the logically impossible, is possible.’ The logical contradiction is more closely understood as love. If the human being shall become love, she or he shall become something logically impossible. Becoming love does not involve, for a human being, absolute self-awareness or absolute self-transparency; rather, it means becoming something less and less comprehensible and self-transparent.