The Knight of Faith: What the story of Abraham and Isaac has to do with Christian Existentialism (CFM HB 2/20/22)

 

God the Absurd

Then we come to the Akedah–the story of the binding of Isaac by his father, Abraham, in which God commands Abraham to “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2). At this point, the LORD has told Abraham so many times he’ll have innumerable posterity through Isaac so many time it’s almost annoying to a reader. Like, WE KNOW. Abraham is going to have posterity outnumbering the sand of the seashore and the stars of the sky. We know they’ll possess the land of Canaan. We know they’ll bless the earth. And we’ve been through quite a bit of fuss over the right bloodline generating this ever-expanding family tree. We also know that shedding human blood is strictly and universally forbidden (Genesis 9:6). In fact the prohibition of human sacrifice is one of the things that the Pentateuch writers seem to claim sets God’s chosen people apart from other ancient near-east civilizations. And God says to Abraham, essentially, “nevermind all of that. Kill the boy. Tie him up on top of a mountain and slaughter him like an animal on an altar to me.” 

God gives no explanation. As readers, we know this is a test, but for all Abraham knows, this is just a command from the God who has so far promised much and delivered verifiably little. And it’s absurd. It’s a three-way paradox between a universal law (don’t shed blood), a promise (you’ll have innumerable posterity through Isaac), and an individual command (offer him there as a burnt offering). 

But, as argued by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in the book Fear and Trembling, “Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior.” 

I’ll break down what that means, but first I want to provide the context for why Kierkegaard elaborates the Akedah in this way. In Fear and Trembling, he (writing pseudonymously as Johannes De Silentio) laments that preachers always talk their way around the paradox of Abraham and Isaac. He has his own examples, but here are some I see frequently today: 

• Abraham never intends to kill Isaac, understanding that God only commands him to “lift” or “offer” him as a burnt offering, not actually do the deed. 

• Somewhere outside of the text, God promises to resurrect Isaac after the sacrifice, and this Abraham believes. 

• Isaac was a willing sacrifice, requiring no binding and understanding the meaning of the event as well as its end-result. 

• The story is merely an allegory of the future sacrifice of Jesus Christ, not meant to be read as a literal command to a literal person. 

Kierkegaard argues that all of the ways of talking around the paradox stretch the story beyond what is actually present in the text. Instead, it should be read as a story of a man who is given the absurd command to slay his son and who obeys that command unhesitatingly and fully, and is rewarded for his faith. And in Kierkegaard's analysis, he makes a case that faith is a higher form of intellect than reason–an argument directly opposed to another philosopher, Hegel, who wrote that all intelligent people eventually outgrow the need for faith and instead rely solely on reason. 

So back to his paradox. Kierkegaard says that faith is a paradox where the “individual” is made superior to the “universal.” By the universal, we’re talking about ethical standards that can be universalized, or applied to everyone and still be true. “Don’t kill” is a good example of a universal ethical standard. By individual, we mean an action required of an individual that doesn’t conform to the universal ethical standard. True faith, Kierkegaard says, is a successful navigation of the paradox between the universal and the individual without cheapening or disregarding any of its elements, but through which the universal ethic is suspended while the individual boldly takes the individual action. One who does so, Kierkegaard deems a “knight of faith,” which is an archetype of the greatest possible life. 

One way Kierkegaard explains what he means is by contrasting the actions of a knight of faith, like Abraham, to another, more common archetype: A tragic hero. He writes, 

“The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is clearly evident. The tragic hero still remains within the ethical. He lets one expression of the ethical find its telos in a higher expression of the ethical; the ethical relation between father and son, or daughter and father, he reduces to a sentiment which has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of morality. Here there can be no question of a teleological suspension of the ethical itself. ”

Two things to help with understanding this: First, “telos” is Greek for “purpose.”  Second, a good example of this kind of tragic-hero reasoning is what the Spirit tells Nephi about slaying Laban–that another ethical principle trumps the command not to kill. 

He continues, 

“With Abraham the situation was different. By his act he overstepped the ethical entirely and possessed a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former. For I should very much like to know how one would bring Abraham's act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection whatever between what Abraham did and the universal … except the fact that he transgressed it. It was not for the sake of saving a people, not to maintain the idea of the state, that Abraham did this, and not in order to reconcile angry deities. If there could be a question of the deity being angry, he was angry only with Abraham, and Abraham's whole action stands in no relation to the universal, is a purely private undertaking. Therefore, whereas the tragic hero is great by reason of his moral virtue, Abraham is great by reason of a purely personal virtue. In Abraham's life there is no higher expression for the ethical than this, that the father shall love his son. Of the ethical in the sense of morality there can be no question in this instance.”

What does the knight of faith do in the face of such a paradox? 

First, she or he resigns, infinitely to the hopelessness of both sides of the paradox. In the case of Abraham, he had to fully comprehend what he loses by obeying God and infinitely resign to that result. He had to understand completely that by slaying Isaac, he is giving up all of God’s promises relating to Isaac’s lineage, and he resigns to slay Isaac because he is also fully resigned to the fact that it is an absolute requirement on him from God. Those who do only this, Kierkegaard calls “knights of infinite resignation.” He writes, 

“The infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith, so that one who has not made this movement has not faith; for only in the infinite resignation do I become clear to myself with respect to my eternal validity, and only then can there be any question of grasping existence by virtue of faith.”

Second, the knight of faith moves beyond infinite resignation into joy, in spite of all logic and reasoning. And she or he finds this joy, and trusts in it, by virtue of the absurd. Here’s Kierkegaard: 

“Now we will let the knight of faith appear in the role just described. He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love which is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes still another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, "I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible.” The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. At the moment when the knight made the act of resignation he was convinced, humanly speaking, of the impossibility. This was the result reached by the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it. On the other hand, in an infinite sense it was possible, namely, by renouncing it; but this sort of possessing is at the same time a relinquishing, and yet there is no absurdity in this for the understanding, for the understanding continued to be in the right in affirming that in the world of the finite where it holds sway this was and remained an impossibility. This is quite as clear to the knight of faith, so the only thing that can save him is the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. So he recognizes the impossibility, and that very instant he believes the absurd; for, if without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and with all his heart, he should wish to imagine that he has faith, he deceives himself, and his testimony has no bearing, since he has not even reached the infinite resignation. Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence.”

Phew! Okay, enough Kierkegaard quotes. Let me tell you how I understand this. Good ‘ol “existentialist philosophy according to Josh.” Have you ever been told that there are some elements of church doctrine or history that you should “put on a shelf” and wait upon the Lord for resolution? Maybe there are two ideas that you believe, but they apparently contradict, and so you tuck those contradictions neatly away until you receive further light and knowledge. When you do this, I think you’re sort-of like the knight of faith, suspending one aspect of the contradiction in favor of another. 

But I think that Kierkegaard wouldn’t like this analogy and say that there’s something missing. I think he would agree with those who have taken the icky parts of the church down from the shelf and fully resigned to their reality–even resigning from the church entirely. And if that’s where the journey for them ends, I think he would call these people Tragic Heroes or Knights of Infinite Resignation. To be clear, both of these are noble states of being, and they are essential to the state of being Kierkegaard elevates above all others. Knights of faith must do all of that, including infinite resignation, and then exercise infinite faith in the absurdity of the human condition. 

That movement of faith is by definition an elevation of the individual over the universal, and that means that what it looks like will be different for different people (this is actually what classifies Fear and Trembling as an existentialist work–maybe the first existentialist work–which posits that subjective meaning trumps objective meaning, which maybe doesn’t even exist)

I think that the following individuals all count as knights of faith–though only they themselves can truly make that assessment: 

• A mother who believes with all her heart that heterosexual marriage is essential to God’s plan for his children, but who also believes that her gay son’s sexual orientation is noble and authentic and fully supports him and his husband with unqualified, unconditional love. 

• A faithful returned missionary with an undaunted testimony of the restored gospel who decides to take action to align their physical characteristics with their sensed gender identity, even though such action risks their membership status in the church they hold dear. 

• A black member who totally resigns himself to the church’s racist past and doesn’t talk himself around the systemic racism still affecting the church today but who nevertheless feels called to stay within the church, hopeful beyond evidence in drastic social change. 

• A woman who’s moral code is indelibly linked to her LDS upbringing, who discovers details in church history that challenge the authenticity of of the church’s truth claims, and though she remains grateful for and faithful to much of what she has gained in the church, she chooses after careful self-reflection to remove her name from church records, hopeful that she will find alternative, non-Mormon meaning in life. 

Now our friend Søren Kierkegaard might have taken issue with some of these examples, and I think that it’s only in the details of these lives where the movements of the knight of faith can play out. (I’m actually thinking of writing some short stories or maybe a novel about these kinds of people, so LMK if that’s something that interests you) And being a knight of faith is really difficult. Kierkegaard openly admits that if he were in Abraham’s situation, he would not be the knight of faith. He simply can’t understand how Abraham did what he did. But I think that’s kind of the point of the Akeda. It’s an archetype. And like all profound archetypes it’s the perfect, ideal version of something the author is trying to illustrate. And when it comes to biblical archetypes, they are, as the saying goes,” often imitated, but never (or rarely) duplicated.” But they can be taken as standards to strive for, even if never reached. 

Am I a knight of faith? Absolutely not–at least yet. But I do find in this idea a path forward in my own faith journey. I am mostly resigned to the fact that the founder of my religion, Joseph Smith Jr., was a bad dude in many ways. I am mostly resigned away from the idea that the Book of Mormon came about literally in the way Joseph said it did. I am quite certain that the priesthood and temple ban in place for so many years against people of color in my church was wrong, not God-inspired, and that the rhetoric around it still harms people to this day. I cannot accept the church’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and the supposed doctrines that support it. Yet, I am committed to staying the course for the time being, with wavering, inconsistent hope that “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering,” so to speak, as I continue as I am in the church and the gospel it preaches. 

Something that Kierkegaard touches on, but, like him, I didn’t focus on, is the idea that doubt isn’t subordinate to reason either. As I see it, doubt is really just a movement from certainty to faith. When you doubt, your testimony goes from “I know” to “I believe,” and I think most people–myself included–have often placed the former above the latter in a hierarchy of mental statuses. But the scriptures speak very little about the power of certainty, and much about the power of faith. Maybe as faith is higher than reason (at least according to Kierkegaard), doubt is higher than certainty. 

Other characteristics of God in this week’s reading

The Akeda wasn’t the only story in the reading this week. I focused much of my study on the characteristics of God in the text. So here are some of them: 

God the negotiator 

In Genesis 18:26-33, God negotiates with Abraham over the destruction of Sodom. We’re accustomed to thinking of God’s will being set in stone and our duty to align with it, but for the God of the Bible is not so. God changes his mind, matures, and takes into account the will of those who worship him. We should follow Abraham’s example and negotiate with God for better outcomes for ourselves, our families, and our society. 

In Genesis 19:18-22, God allows Lot to negotiate with him as well, even though Lot demonstrates less-than-prime decision-making skills. 

God the rescuer 

In Genesis 19:15-17, God rescues Lot from Sodom. He does so even though Lot, in verse 16, is slow to respond to the call to leave the city. I think we often focus on the importance of not being slow to obey, but this story is comforting to me in it’s message that God can stil rescue you even if you are not the quickest at catching his message. 

God the progressive protector

There are several stories of ancient patriarchs playing the “this isn’t my wife, its’ my sister” ruse on various kings. Each time, it seems like God gets better at protecting his faithful daughters who are caught up in these weird ploys of their husbands. 

In Genesis 12, God is reactive, sending plagues to free Sarah from sexual slavery in Egypt. 

In Genesis 20, God is proactive, telling Abimelech in a dream not to harm Sarah. 

In Genesis 26, God’s proactivity with Abimelech 

Does God progress in these stories or does society? I think it’s a bit of both–or maybe God meets society where it’s at, updating how he interacts with his children based on their particular circumstances. 

God the heart-knower

One verse in the Abimelech stories stuck out to me in particular, Genesis 20:6:

“Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you did this in the integrity of your heart; furthermore it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.” 

God knows the integrity of our hearts, even when it is not clear to others. 

God the provider

Two stories illustrate this element of God well. One is the Akeda, where God provides a ram to substitute for Isaac in the sacrifice on Mt. Moriah. I found the following interpretation of this event from an early rabbinical tradition inspiring. 

"From that ram, which was created at the twilight, nothing came forth that was useless. The ashes formed the foundation of the inner altar used for the expiatory offering on the Day of Atonement. The sinews of the ram were the strings of the harp on which David played. The ram's skin was the girdle around the loins of Elijah . . . The horn of the ram of the left side was the one which marked the revelation at Mount Sinai . . . The horn of the right side, which is larger than that of the left, is destined in the future to be sounded in the world that is to come a the ingathering of the exiles, as it is said 'And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great trumpet shall be blown' (Isaiah 27:13), and it is said 'And the Lord shall be a king over all the earth' Zechariah 14:19)." (Found in A History of the Bible by John Barton)

Another instance of God acting as provider is his dealing with Hagar. There’s much to say about this story, but I’ve already gone into way too much detail on another story in this post, so I’ll just a little bit about this. 

It’s kind of a bitter insight that God is with both the banished slave (Hagar) and her former enslaver. It’s especially bitter that the story centers on Abraham and Sarah. But there’s some sweetness in it as well. I think we pin too much on God sometimes. We think every instance of divine assistance is an indication of divine approval, or we lament that God doesn’t do more to prevent widespread suffering, but I think God just doesn’t intervene as much as we think he does, and when he does, it is usually through inspiring our actions and the actions of others. Miracles may happen, but usually the miracle is an opening of the eyes (Genesis 21:19). 

Hagar, expelled from slavery only to face additional suffering, is an often-cited archetype for other oppressed peoples, especially Black Americans. In a paper titled “Hagar: An African American Lens” Emily Peecook writes, 

“God promises Hagar survival, freedom and nationhood in her first journey

to the wilderness and the African-American community has always struggled for

these things.(32) The knowledge that such rewards are in store and are a part of

God's plan is comforting and gives them hope. Hagar is their symbol, their

spokeswoman, and if God can provide for her then God will provide for them.

More specifically, Hagar acts as an ideal for black womanhood in her struggle

against all odds to make a life for her and her son in a hostile environment. The

image of Hagar in the wilderness is something black women strive for because it

embodies defiance, risk, independence, endurance, holding up a family without

a mate, making a way through extreme poverty, and having a close relationship

with God.(33) The oppressed do not always experience God's liberating power

but often must draw that power from within them with God's help”

God the useful, made-up method

In the account of Abraham’s servant seeking a wife for Isaac, something is conspicuously missing: God. In the whole story, God doesn’t speak a single time (Please correct me if I’ve missed something). The people in the story come up with the conditions for finding a suitable wife totally independent from God. The servant identifies signs by which he will recognize the will of God, but he chooses these signs–they aren’t revealed. God could have truly been behind every evidence the servant chooses to see, but that doesn’t actually have to be the case for the story to work. God could have just sat back and let the logic-based signs that the servant identifies play out and lead the man to a suitable wife for Isaac. 

I think it’s totally a possibility that the concept of God as a whole is completely made-up and he doesn’t exist at all. I choose to believe in God, but I am absolutely not certain of his existence. But even if God is totally made up, that doesn’t mean that all the good that has been brought about in the name of faith in God was all in vain. It is totally legitimate to make up our relationships with God. If God exists, he can consecrate our contrived methods for living our lives for our good. If God doesn’t exist, we can consecrate our methods for good as well. 

God the comedian

So far, most of what I’ve gotten from Isaac’s life–from his annunciation to the hairy-son switch-up incident–is humor. His name literally means “he laughs” and I find much of his story hilarious. 

Isaac! Why are you fondling your sister?

Isaac! Really, you can’t tell that that’s not Esau?

Isaac! Can’t you just give Esau a similar blessing to Jacob? Like, I know it’s often read as the passing of the birthright, but the text of the blessing is really just a blessing. Did you really have to give Esau a lesser blessing after you were tricked? 

Isaac: “Ah, the smell of my son!” (Genesis 27:27). 

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the Blog.