What is a Christian Striver? “The Christian Striver is a person who sustains a positive relation to Christ and believes in the possibility of forgiveness through him, but one becomes a Christian Striver by recognizing and expressing one’s need for forgiveness for being a sinner” (Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence). In other words, God opens our eyes to our hopeless situation (i.e., despair, sin, the consciousness of sin) and then the recognition of the negative becomes an indirectly positive aid in the movement to and expression of faith for those striving for our Savior. The Christian Striver is being changed slowly, glory to glory, from a sinner to a saint and is striving, by God’s grace, toward Christ everyday in between.

1 John 3:1-3

1See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 3And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.