He belongs to our
race, sharing our propensities and temptations, bearing our
human responsibilities and enduring our
human weakness; yet in him the
sin of Everyman, the inward - looking self - centeredness which bars the way to communion with God because it tries to establish and justify itself over
against God, is overcome.
Kierkegaard defends himself
against the apparently Pelagian implications of this thought by stressing that even though each individual
sins through his own disobedience (
sin is not a category of necessity), nevertheless, in this act of disobedience he reveals his solidarity with Adam and Eve and all other persons in history, who together make up the collective
human race which, in Adam, stands guilty before God.