Kierkegaard On Guilt

As I was reading Adolph Koberle’s The Quest For Holiness, I stumbled upon this Kierkegaard quote in a footnote. In the penitential address Pureness of the Human Heart, he wrote, “It is ever untrue that the guilt becomes changed [by time] even though a century should pass. To affirm anything of the sort is to exchange the eternal for what is least like the eternal, namely human forgiveness.” Although we love to think that the passage of time washes away guilt since over time we push out the guilt with a host of our thoughts, in reality time erases no guilt; our sins remain just as dire and deadly fifty years later as they were the day of their commission. Time and our other fabricated remedies for sin cannot cleanse the guilt which we rightly feel for our sins; instead Christ’s blood is the only means by which sin and its guilt can be cleansed from our hands, and the true remedy for guilt is only found in the Word preached and distributed by His church.

P.S. Kierkegaard is really fascinating to me.