The famous Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a fascinating little book called The Sickness Unto Death in 1849. In it he defined "sin" in a way that is rooted in the Bible but also is accessible to contemporary people. "Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God. ... Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God." Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.
What does this mean? Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something. Kierkegaard asserts that human beings were made not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above anything else, and build their very identities on him. Anything other than this is sin.
Most people think of sin primarily as "breaking divine rules," but Kierkegaard knows that the very first of the Ten Commandments is to "have no other gods before me." So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.
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