Timothy Baker '08
Rollins Chapel
17 May 2007
In Chapel this term faith and reason have been discussed primarily in one of
two ways: as a dichotomy or as a syzygy. I would like to suggest
something different, a completely different allocation of categories, in which
faith is a spectrum with two ends: reason on the one side, absurdity on the
other. By absurdity, I mean, of course, the virtue of the absurd
in the Kierkegaardian sense – what else could I possibly mean?
Kierkegaard, as the conflicted Johannes de Silentio, presents a meditation on
the story just read from Genesis that I think is important for our discussions
here at Chapel. If you have had the pleasure of reading Fear and
Trembling I think you will already understand what I mean. I would
like to discuss his thoughts today, but fear not: for those you who may have
not yet read the book, I will do my best to keep some of the most profound bits
from being spoiled – Johannes is a better story teller than I anyway – and for
those who have read it, I hope that I will make enough connections to other
material so as to keep my words distinct.
Johannes asks us to think about the Akedah, the binding of Isaac,
in a number of ways. One way is an articulation of what the story is
saying to the reader almost subconsciously, another way is to examine what the
story does not say and to ask ourselves, “why not?” Abraham is apparently
the hero of this story. We are introduced to Abraham before this episode,
have traveled with him for awhile, have gone through his trials and
tribulations, and are privy to the birth of his two sons: Ishmael and
Isaac. In fact, when we meet Abraham leading his favorite son, Isaac, up
Mount Moriah we are convinced that he is doing the right thing because God has
spoken and Abraham is simply obeying. We feel Abraham’s pain as he goes
to slaughter Isaac on the altar and we rejoice when the angel says,
“Stop!” All is well, the episode ends, and everyone goes home to Sarah …
Right? Johannes, like the angel, says, “Stop!” but, while the angel
looks ahead to Abraham’s descendants, Johannes looks back at the poor,
helpless, frightened child who was just about to be slaughtered by his own
father because his father thinks that God told him it was the proper thing to
do. To paraphrase one of Johannes’ most memorable comments, “How do you
think Isaac felt that day and ever after walking down the hill next to his
father who just attempted filicide?”
Johannes, in good Kierkegaardian fashion, does not end his little meditation
there with condemnation of Abraham, the man who killed his son in spirit though
not in deed. He continues to speak of Abraham’s faith in God and muses
that it must have been a faith so profound, so absurd, that it cannot help but
fill the careful reader with fear and trembling. After all, Abraham is
the father of our faith! Abraham’s relationship with God was such that he
was willing to sacrifice everything at God’s call: his life, for he would be a
murderer and murder is forbidden; his joy, for Isaac was the happiness of his
old age; and his future, for immortality in the Hebrew Bible is through
children not through heavenly repose. Everything gone in three words:
“Here I am.” Isaac comes from the Hebrew root for laughter since Sarah
“laughed” at the news of Isaac’s conception. Abraham has climbed Moriah
to kill Isaac, his laughter, to turn his life to mourning for the rest of his
days. How could he, how dare he, agree to do such a horrible thing to his
son!? Johannes says, “he didn’t… he had no choice in the matter… Abraham
leapt beyond the boundaries of reason and broke through the normal confines of
faith to a place where only he and God dwell, this man was called to live by
virtue of the absurd before the Divine and he accepted with “Here I am.”
Abraham’s story is well known and I am sure you have all heard the
Akedah before listening to me today. The story resonates in all
three of the sometimes-called “Abrahamic faiths”: Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. In Judaism, we have Abraham’s son Isaac who becomes the
next-in-line of Israel’s great patriarchs. In Islam, we are told the
story of the binding of Ishmael and God’s choice of Hagar’s son. In
Christianity, the story also focuses on a central father-son relationship that
I think you might have heard of: the Father is called God, and his Son is known
as Jesus. Jesus is clearly and specifically a second Isaac in the gospel
accounts as much as he is in their later interpretations. Look at the
Gospel of John for instance, Jesus is textually and theologically equated with
the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, the sacrifice of Passover, the sonship
sacrifice from the Exodus story. In Exodus the children of Israel are
spared by the blood of a lamb, just as Isaac’s “slaughter” ensured that
Abraham’s descendants would “numbered the stars.” Isaac does not die, of
course, but Jesus does and John is telling his readers that God has not changed
from the very beginning: he required human blood for sin then, he
wants it now, and Jesus’ blood comprises the blood of the world’s
sinfulness.
The juxtaposition of Isaac and Jesus is present in the gospels but – forgive
me – the power is not. Jesus’ self sacrifice – and it is most
emphatically a self sacrifice in John – does not even come close to
the emotional power contained in Abraham’s anguished task and the nightmares
that Isaac must have suffered from his ordeal. Yes, Jesus does, in fact,
die and Isaac does not, but whose life is less disturbing? The man-God
who chooses to sacrifice the flesh in his divine and cosmic will or the scared
little child who has to watch as his father draws a knife over his head in
order to plunge it into his own son’s heart? I am not trying to be
facetious and as a practicing Christian I am not trying to disavow the
importance of Jesus’ death. I am merely trying to say that on a
practical, and not a cosmic, level Abraham’s story in Genesis is much more
compelling that the parallel story of Jesus in the Gospels. Why is
that?
I think we must return to Johannes’ remarks that Abraham causes the reader
fear and trembling because his relationship with God, his absurd
relationship with God, is much more profound that we can imagine and is
incommensurable with our daily lives. This is especially true today and
here is where I think the difference lies in our modern, American
culture. Faith has become an economic commodity and none is more
economically traded and abused as Christianity. The world, disenchanted
by the rise of Protestantism, has accepted, at least in the West, the
Protestant value of sola scriptura and turned it into modern science
with its burning desire to rationalize everything. It has taken sola
fides and has made investment banking, corporate finance, Las Vegas, and
other venues to will and wish and hope for success. Protestantism has
enabled a culture of consumers who consume based on what makes sense to them
and on what they hope could, read should, be theirs. Take, for example,
the vogue of Christian communities, which can establish themselves based on
varying forms of biblical tenets and which then establish a social networking
group that essentially serves the purposes of individuals looking for their
place in society. Do you see that in figures like Abraham, Elijah, or
Jesus? Of course not!?
Our heroes, our biblical models, are all people who stood up for what
they believed to be right based on their absurd, and inconceivable, leap into
the void where God dwells. There is nothing of the well thought out ways
of showing faith and hope and love that we find in Paul and the church after
him. There is drama and there is confusion and there is a bunch of
scribes writing bizarre and awkward stories in an attempt to capture the
incommensurable and inarticulatable relationship that these individuals have
with God. There is nothing more rational, more reasonable, more devoid of
the divine than a faith community. People who go to church regularly and
go no further on the journey are completely and utterly grounded. Of
course that is what some people want – that assurance that they get from being
told that they are right on some things, wrong on others (though mostly right
of course, or, at least, “saved”) and that the church will always be there to
give them an anchor in the world, a home wherever they go, and a family of
believers with whom they can share a common bond, in faith, based a certain key
convictions. Abraham would be an awful parishioner. How often are
you told of Jesus sitting in a synagogue or joining a quorum for prayers?
I seem to recall, and correct me if I am wrong, that in the synoptic gospels
Jesus prays alone the prayer in Gethsemane, does that seem
right to any of you?
There is nothing wrong with going to a church and using it as a resource for
social and emotional support. That is what it is there for and some do an
excellent job. Many help the community at large as well. But
please, next time you grow comfortable with your church friends at lunch or
coffee hour, remember Abraham and realize that there is more to faith than
reason, by virtue of the absurd.
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