Sometime in the late 90s, when I was an undergraduate, one of my classes assigned the book Fear and Trembling by the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. It was (and is) a dense book, rewarding readers who parse it closely and come to their reading with a great deal of thought—which I did not do. I was (and still am) a poor reader of theology and philosophy; the sometimes-technical language stymies me, and I cannot always figure out what is at stake. Reading theology and philosophy sometimes feels like doing math, with each step needing careful planning and delicate movements. So Kierkegaard wasn’t really for me. But at the front of that book, Kierkegaard included a section that captivated me. In a series of exordiums, the theologian told and retold the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, from different perspectives and with different concerns at the front of mind. He focused on what the biblical account leaves out—the perspective of Sarah, the reaction of Isaac, the mindset of Abraham as the story unfolds. In telling and retelling the story this way, Kierkegaard brings out the horror of the tale, which is easy to miss in the biblical text. He pulls to the forefront questions of God’s character, and whether something as straightforward as right and wrong could be flexible to suit God’s needs. Can God do a wrong thing for a right reason? Can God demand a bad thing, as long as God knows (but the humans do not know) that the wrong thing God demands is in the service of a higher purpose? What kind of God had Abraham discovered, anyway?
The lectionary for this week includes this story, sometimes called the Binding of Isaac or the Sacrifice of Isaac, from Genesis 22. It’s one of those stories that’s like a stick of dynamite—useful in the right hands, disastrous in the wrong hands, and always pretty dangerous. In Jewish tradition, it’s called the Akedah, “the binding,” with a deep tradition of exegesis, in oral, textual, and visual forms. In Christian tradition, it’s often understood as a prefiguring of Jesus’ death, with a suite of theological justifications to go along with it. (More on that in a moment).
For me, reading Kierkegaard in the late 90s was like pulling the pin out of a grenade. Once I grasped what he was getting at, I was left with the full horror of this story, which I had always understood as a story about faithfulness. Kierkegaard showed me that God was not the hero in the story, and neither was Abraham; there were no heroes to be found, only victims. What gets cast as a tale about giving one’s self over to God and being rewarded with God’s faithfulness begins to look more like abusive gaslighting, and far too many people willing to go along with it. Once I began to read that story differently, I became suspicious of the whole enterprise—the bible, theological traditions, religious organizations, and the rest. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole trajectory of my life, including pursuing theological education (twice) and becoming a scholar of the bible and the Christian tradition, was begun by pulling that particular pin from that particular grenade.
I remember being at the evangelical camp and retreat center where I worked all through high school and college, riding in a pickup truck with a trusted administrator who was quite a bit older than me. Conversation turned to my college classes, and eventually to this class in which we were reading Kierkegaard. I shared how much it had shaken me—how I could no longer accept easily this divinity who demanded the sacrifice of kids, even if he didn’t follow through with it. This administrator, who was not himself theologically trained but who was very well studied and quite wise in his way, responded with a bit of confusion. “But the ram was always in the thicket waiting,” he said. “Even before God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the ram was ready, and Abraham was never going to have to do it.”
Yes, but Abraham didn’t know that, and neither did Isaac. They thought a bloodthirsty god had demanded a blood sacrifice, and Abraham was ready to fulfill the demand, and Isaac was faced with the realization that his father would have gone through with it.
In Christian traditions, especially ones that rely heavily on a sacrificial understanding of Jesus’ death, this story is often told as a kind of prefiguring of Jesus’ death on the cross. I have heard many versions of “God didn’t ask Abraham to do anything that he wasn’t willing to do himself,” suggesting that while God asked a father (Abraham) to sacrifice a son (Isaac), God did indeed sacrifice a son (Jesus). This story in Genesis becomes a template or a dry run for Jesus’ death, and a kind of handbook for interpreting it as a sacrifice and as an act of faithfulness on God’s part. This in turn became the bedrock of many forms of Christian soteriology (salvation theory), which understand Jesus’ death as a sacrifice both demanded and offered by God for the forgiveness of sins.
The language my professor used to talk about Kierkegaard’s point in Fear and Trembling was “teleological suspension of the ethical.” I can’t remember whether that was her language or Kierkegaard’s language, and I’m not going to be revisiting the book anytime soon to find out. (I still don’t like reading theology or philosophy, or doing math). But what we meant by that was the question of whether ethics—questions about right and wrong, and how we should live—could be suspended or cast aside for some higher end or purpose. (“Teleological” just refers to ends or purposes; it’s a play on the Greek word “telos” which means those things). Murder is wrong, we are told, but can it be right when God demands it? Did Abraham commit murder simply by intending to commit it? Did God commit murder by asking Abraham to do it? Does the fact that the ram was always there waiting make any of this more palatable?
Once a grenade explodes, there’s no putting it back together, and that’s how this question and this passage from Genesis has worked for me. Even as I was hearing the camp administrator in the pickup truck explaining why it was never a problem for God to demand such a thing, because the ram was always already provided, I knew I didn’t buy it, and that I never would again. And if I didn’t buy the theological explanations my traditions had given me, then I didn’t buy my theological traditions anymore either—at least not in any innocent kind of way. This story set me on a path of critique and study, what people often call “deconstruction” (though I don’t love that term), that consumed most of my young adulthood. The result is that I now do that kind of thing for a living, quite happily, and help others who have similar questions find the resources for thinking through them. It’s satisfying work, helping people find the words to ask their questions and find the resources to think them through.
When it comes time to preach this passage—as it may be for many churches this Sunday, since it’s in the lectionary—I urge you not to preach it as a straightforward parable about God’s willingness to kill Jesus. I urge you not to preach it as a justification for any bloodstained theology of substitutionary atonement. I urge you not to preach it as a story about God’s providence taking precedence over God’s problematic instructions. I urge you not to preach it as a story with any kind of happy ending.
Instead, I hope you’ll preach it as a set of questions, the way Kierkegaard used it and the way the Akedah tradition in Judaism uses it—as a way to wonder about the nature of God, the limits of ethics, and the way the bible poses questions to us in stories that don’t necessarily tell us everything we want to know. Treat it as dangerous, like the pin in a grenade, but be willing to pull the pin. Be willing to use this story to break something open, to ask bigger questions, and to challenge people to think through the implications of the theological language we use. This is a beautiful story, in its own terrible way, and in the right hands it’s a tool that can both tear down and build up theological structures. Treat it that way, as dangerous and beautiful at the same time, and see what comes out of it.
What I love best about Kierkegaard is his understanding of the absurdity of grace, and that to accept that absurdity, the believer, standing on the precipice of the question of God’s grace, can only experience it by leaping into it. The absurdity is, of course, that *it doesn’t exist* until you step out on it. It’s not something that’s just invisibly always there - someone just wandering by ignorantly will neither see nor experience it. Only the unsure believer will.
I was good at math but not good at Kierkegaard. Fortunately, I did not have to read much of his writing. This is a very helpful perspective on what, for me, is one of the most troublesome stories in the Old Testament.