by CCW | 24 October 2018 09:00
Two outstanding and profound stories were read in Chapel this week. The first was the intentionally disturbing story of the binding or sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. The second was the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush. Both stories relate to the theme of covenant which we have exploring.
The story of Cain and Abel shows us what human existence looks like on our own without law and order, without an ethical principle. The theme of covenant develops from the Noahic covenant symbolized in the sign of the rainbow apres le deluge, to the Abrahamic covenant of the promised land and promised son, and then to the Mosaic Covenant expressed in the Ten Commandments. The revelation of God to Moses as “I am who I am” is the basis of that covenant. The idea of covenant is rooted in the nature of God who is utterly incommensurable in relation to human experience and life.
That is the strong take-away point of this most disturbing story where Abraham is tested by God, a test of faith, by being asked to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, the promised son through whom “all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves.” It seems perfectly horrible and barbaric and raises a conflict between our relation to God and our ethical obligations towards one another. Yet it does so in order to place the ethical upon its proper divine foundation. That it does so in such a troubling and challenging way is part of the intensity and the point of the story. I fear that we are often only too complacent about it and fail to feel its deeper significance.
A covenant is not the same thing as a contract though it reveals the principle upon which all contracts ultimately depend. Two parties contract with each other about what each owes to the other. That presupposes a principle of rationality, an ethical principle about being held accountable to our words. That principle is presupposed and is prior to us. We don’t create it; we can only recognise it or assume it. The covenant, on the other hand, is that principle as established by God which then informs and underlies the possibility of our ethical duties and obligations towards one another.
The covenant is entirely established by God and cannot be reduced to our own calculations and concerns. That is, I think, the point of the difficult story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. It highlights the transcendent nature of God albeit in disturbing ways. It is not a story about which we can be complacent because it challenges so directly the nature of our duties and obligations; in short, our ethical commitments to our children and our family. It seems to promote human sacrifice though paradoxically the story effectively ends any kind of notion of human sacrifice as practiced by primitive cultures as part of being caught in the wheel of life.
To Isaac’s poignant question about where is the lamb for the offering, Abraham answers, “God will provide himself the lamb for the burnt offering.” We are meant to feel the terror and the horror of Abraham. The Danish Lutheran theologian and father of Existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, was much exercised by this story in his “Fear and Trembling” which is an extended commentary on it. He saw it as challenging the all too soft and easy complacency of 19th century European Christianity which had domesticated divinity, reducing God to the comforts and concerns of our own immediate lives and the little ethical systems which we create. He saw in the story the greater principle upon which all ethical systems properly depend.
He argues for “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” showing that there is an asymmetrical relation between us and God that cannot be reduced to the symmetries of our ethical relations with one another. Most importantly, he argues that we have to feel “the anxiety, the distress and the paradox” of the story in order to properly appreciate it. Abraham both appalls and attracts him – and us. It is a test of faith but disturbingly so. Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstructionist philosophy, was also intrigued by this story. He notes how it reveals “God’s gaze” as that which “sees me without my seeing it looking at me. It knows my very secret even when I myself don’t see it.” In other words, God knows us better than we know ourselves and cannot be reduced to our thinking.
Plato argues that faith as opinion is on the road to knowledge and wisdom or to put it in Anselm’s phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” Kierkegaard notes – and in a way which is also Platonic – that there is a faith which is above our understanding, the God whose will cannot be collapsed into the systems of human thought. For Plato, the Good is not on the line of being and knowing but the transcendent principle upon which every level of being and knowing depends: from images via imaging, from physical things via empiricism, from mathematical entities via deductive reasoning, from the forms or the ideas via dialectic. But what unites them all is the Good which is above both being and knowing. So here with Kierkegaard. We are opened out to the difficult and tough things which ultimately contribute to the real truth and dignity of our humanity.
These stories counter the tendency to want things to be soft and easy. They confront us with tough and hard things to make us more thoughtful. On the aesthetic level, we easily yield to immediate pleasures, to the seductions of drugs such as cannabis that offer us a ‘high’ but at the expense of our own sense of accountability and integrity. Just because something is said to be legal doesn’t make it ethical. We forget this wisdom at our peril and at the expense of our culture. Ethical thinking at its best opens us out to much more transcendent realities, the realities of the things of God, the principle upon which ethical systems properly depend. God provides himself the lamb for the offering.
These readings have profoundly shaped the thinking of Jews, Christians and Muslims. The story of Abraham and Isaac is read by Christians, for example, on Good Friday with an emphasis on Christ who goes knowingly to the Cross in contrast to Isaac who goes unwittingly to the sacrifice. The Hajj ends with the feast of Eid al-Adha which tells the story from an Arabic perspective substituting Ishamael for Isaac. In Chapel, the cross carried in procession bears an image of the lamb signifying Christ as the lamb of God. We are reminded in tough and challenging ways that God will provide himself the lamb for the offering. He is the Good in all and every adversity. Tough lessons.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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