Problema II — Is there an absolute duty toward God?

Problema II begins by examining the structure of ethical duty. On the standard ethical account, every duty is fundamentally a duty toward God — but only as expressed in duty toward the neighbor, the community, the family. God, taken abstractly, becomes "an invisible, vanishing point, an impotent thought." His power is only in the ethical; the ethical is what fills out existence. This is the Hegelian account, and Kierkegaard grants it its force: it is a coherent view, and on it, the individual who thinks he has a special direct duty to God is either confused or self-aggrandizing.

The Problema then turns to Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and his mother, and his wife and his children, and his brothers and his sisters, yes, even his own soul, he cannot be my disciple." Kierkegaard refuses the softening exegesis that translates "hate" as "love less." The passage means what it says, and the attempts to domesticate it — to find a grammatical loophole — are what he calls "polite and sentimental" maneuvers that make Christianity into "one of the most pitiable things in the world." If the sentence means nothing dreadful, it means nothing at all.

The argument closes with the paradox of faith formulated as cleanly as anywhere in the book: there is an absolute duty toward God, and this duty is such that the love of God can bring the knight of faith to give his love of the neighbor the opposite expression to what is, ethically speaking, duty. The duty-relation here is one in which the single individual relates absolutely to the absolute. It cannot be mediated back into the universal — the moment it is mediated, it is annulled. Abraham's relation to the absolute duty is precisely this: he cannot justify himself in any public vocabulary; faith is this paradox, and the single individual cannot make himself understandable to anyone.