In the Old Testament, Genesis 22, we are told that God tests the faith of
Abraham by commanding him to make a burnt offering of his son, Isaac. Abraham
obeys. We are not told in the Bible just how he feels about this, but he tells
his servants to wait while he takes Isaac to the spot God commanded, and that
the two of them would return later. Approaching the spot God picked for the
human sacrifice, Isaac asks “Where is the sacrificial lamb?” Abraham replies
that God will provide the animal. After preparing to kill his son on the alter,
an angel from God stays his hand, saying that he passed God’s test and showed
that he feared God more than offending human ethical standards. Abraham finds a
ram and kills the animal rather than his son as a burnt offering. He is
rewarded for his faith and submission to God’s will.
It is clear that Abraham is ready to kill his son. It is also clear that
every instinct of a loving father would rebel at the thought of such an act.
How could God ask such a thing of his faithful Patriarch? How could Abraham
obey? Does Abraham lie when he tells his servants that he will return with
Isaac, and answers to Isaac that God will provide the sacrificial animal? Or
does he absurdly believe on faith alone that God will not actually make him go
through with the killing?
The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, detects in the story of
Abraham a “Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.” This strange phrase is full
of dire import for today’s world. What it means is that God’s purpose (telos)
trumps conventional human ethics. Kierkegaard argues that there is no other way
to grasp Abraham’s story except as a display of faithful but non-rational
obedience to God’s will. We may look upon Abraham with awe, but we will never
understand him. This is because, for Kierkegaard, the person of faith stands in
an absolute and eternal relation to God, transcending anything merely human,
including ethical imperatives.
Kierkegaard argues that when our ethical principles are contradicted by
the will of God, we ought to suspend them, whether or not, to us, God’s will
appears good or evil. Without doubt, from a human perspective, God’s test of
Abraham’s faith appears cruel and unjustified. There are many occasions in the
Old Testament when God appears to act unethically. He commands his people to
slaughter innocents, raze cities and take slaves. He allows Satan to torment
Job for a bet. God appears altogether too wrathful, jealous and arbitrary to be
judged ethical.
Kierkegaard realizes that the ultimate truths of religion make no sense
to us. He admits that Christianity, in particular, is paradoxical, absurd and
offensive to reason. We must accept dogmatically propositions whose truths are
not revealed to sense perception or understanding, such as the Divinity of
Christ, or the existence and immortality of the soul. So if we are to believe
such things, we must do so in a way that transcends understanding and embraces
the absurd. To believe the claims of religion requires a leap of faith.
What if, today, someone was to explain to the police that he had
sacrificed his son because God commanded it? Is this a reason the law can
accept as justification? Obviously not. If we justify Abraham’s intention to
kill his son on God’s instructions, then we allow the ethical to drop away as
an inessential moment in choosing how to act. In putting faith before ethics, Kierkegaard
opens a doorway to hell on earth. We see it everyday in the actions of zealots
and suicide bombers, as well as in the suppression of humane instincts in the
name of God’s inscrutable will. Instead of the teleological suspension of the
ethical, we should suspend the ‘teleological’ when it transgresses the ethical.
Ethics ought to provide the limits of faith, rather than the other way around.
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