First Move in Theology: First Rendition

Soren Kierkegaard thought deeply and for long about the biblical story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. (See, Fear and Trembling.) The philosopher concluded that Abraham was the “knight of faith” because he trusted God in the face of the absurd. This is the great leap of faith Kierkegaard thought was essential to Christian life with integrity.

What was at stake for Abraham? On the other side of a fulfilled sacrifice of his own son, Isaac, Abraham would have experienced not only the death of his beloved child, but also of the promise of God to make of his descendants a great nation. Who knows where God’s failure to provide what God required of Abraham might have led! I believe it very likely that the existential condition of Abraham post-filial sacrifice (literally, holocaust) would have been a world without God: the death of God for him. We see this in post-holocaust Jewish life and thought, in whom Isaac was, in a sense, sacrificed: a widespread agnosticism.

Despite the call of God that is intrinsic to Kierkegaard’s leap, there is agnosticism at its core. After all, one must leap into the arms of an unknown God – a God very different than the God of the promise who caused Sarai to bear Isaac in her old age, unrecognizable as the God who spoke before knife and fire. Those who would pursue Kierkegaard’s necessity must assume the same agnostic posture, divested of any and all specific beliefs. We are given only a possibility in which we may place our trust: the Abyss may be trustworthy. If we take a more confident stance and leap with the firm belief that there will be faithful arms to catch us, then that “abyss” will not be the thing itself, and we will have dived into the shallow end of the pool;  then it is no real leap after all.

In this light, the statement I am about to make may not seem so strange as it might have seemed: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche stood side by side before the same Abyss. For Nietzsche, integrity demanded that we stand before the universe without God. When Kierkegaard stood with Abraham, on the day Kierkegaard divested himself of belief in favor of trust, he stood with Nietzsche.

We cannot know God and know only the g/God we have known. Both philosophers place us where we belong: with the humble recognition that we cannot finally know anything at all about God. We must choose to trust in the possibility of meaning in the face of an un-god-ed universe. This posture, which I imagine is akin to The Cloud of Unknowing of mystical fame, is necessary in order to be ready to receive whatever may or may not be provided.

Daily we must do this, and we do this whenever we have the courage – or is it the faith? – to face the questions that lurk hopefully and anxiously for recognition at the edge of our consciousness. Mined with angst and specific fears, this is, nonetheless, the only way to integrity, and the only way to the bosom of Abraham. Otherwise, we would be as an Abraham with hand held perpetually poised to strike and also waiting for God to provide – frozen without faith or doubt.

DJB