Abraham & Isaac as seen by Kierkegaard

Abraham has a message from God. It is truly awful one: he must sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham is in emotional torment. He loves his son, but he is also a devout man and knows he has to obey God. …..

……. For Kierkegaard, it is not a simple decision to believe in God, but one that requires a kind of leap into the dark, a decision taken in faith that may even go against conventional ideas of what you should do.

If Abraham had gone ahead and killed his son he would have done something morally wrong. A father has a basic duty to look after his son, and certainly shouldn’t tie him to an alter and cut his throat in a religious ritual. What God asked Abraham to do was to ignore morality and make a leap of faith. In the Bible Abraham is presented as admirable for ignoring this normal sense of right and wrong and being ready to sacrifice Isaac. But couldn’t he have made a terrible mistake? What if the message wasn’t really from God? Perhaps it was hallucination; perhaps Abraham was insane and hearing voices. How could he know for sure? If he had known in advance that God wouldn’t follow through on his command, it would have been easy for Abraham. But as he raised the knife ready to shed his son’s blood, he really believed that he was going to kill him. That, as the Bible describes the scene, is the point. His faith is so impressive because he put his trust in God rather than in conventional ethical considerations. It wouldn’t have been faith otherwise. Faith involves risk. But it is also irrational: not based on reason.

Kierkegaard believed that sometimes ordinary social duties, such as that a father should always protect his son, are not the highest value there can be. The duty to obey God trumps the duty to be a good father, and indeed any other duty. From a human perspective, Abraham might seem hard-hearted and immoral or even considering sacrificing his son. But it is as if God’s command is an ace of trumps that wins the game, whatever it is that God commands. This is no higher card in pack and so human ethics are no longer relevant. Yet the person who abandons ethics in favour of faith makes an agonizing decision, risking everything, not knowing what benefit there could possibly be for doing so, or what will happen: not knowing for sure that the message is truly from God. Those who choose this path are totally alone. ~ Page 152/153