The Binding of Reason
Abraham and Isaac and Kierkegaard
For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Romans 6:14
God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.
When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”
Genesis 22:1-14
For three long days, Abraham walked with his miracle child Isaac. For three long days, Abraham held the most terrible secret. One of history’s greatest philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, imagined those three long days because this story—the Akedah, the “binding of Isaac”—disturbed him so. In his work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard helps us imagine Abraham’s walk up Mount Moriah. Imagine how utterly awful and confused Abraham must have felt, the weight of the knife in his hand, the paralyzed numbness of his thoughts, how he must have looked in anguish at his son, the miracle, the son by whom God said Abraham would bless nations.
If we have wrestled with this story, we may, like Kierkegaard, eventually conclude that our attempts to tie this story in a theological bow don’t work. How is God testing Abraham by asking him to do such an awful thing that would directly violate his own promise that he made? What kind of nightmare has he put Abraham into to make sure his pledged allegiance was true? And why would Abraham do this? Our Christian brother Kierkegaard admits that we can’t really make logical or ethical sense of Abraham’s devotion. Even the story is ambiguous; was he lying to his servants when he said, “The boy and I will come back to you”? Or did he know? Did Abraham know he wouldn’t have to kill Isaac when he told Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering”? Then why did he raise the knife? We can’t bind this story up into an easy lesson any more than Abraham could keep the first child of the covenant bound.
If we can’t imagine how Abraham felt climbing that mountain with a knife in hand and his son in the other, maybe we can imagine Jesus walking up a hill called Golgotha with giant wooden beams on his back. We can imagine Jesus in the garden, crying, was this cup really necessary? How does sacrificing a Messiah make any sense? Was he not the very person to deliver God’s promise?
Kierkegaard scholars have theorized that he was so haunted by the story of Abraham because he felt the stakes in his own life when he felt God calling him to break off his engagement to fully pursue the philosopher’s life. How that must have hurt him to know that he had to break someone else’s heart and his own to follow God’s call. He was not a theoretical nerd who asked these big questions in academic frameworks, but a man who wrote from what he lived. You may have shared a moment with him if you’ve ever driven down the road in anguish, okay God, you better be real, because I’m really, really trusting you! If you can relate to that kind of heartburn, that “fear and trembling,” you can maybe relate to brother Søren and brother Abraham.
The week before I arrived in Vermont, after a year of wrestling with what I heard God calling me to do, I had to speak out on a bunch of former friends and colleagues involved in my old spiritual community. My whole theology had been coming apart for over a year, and I thought I was being asked to sacrifice the very things that had made me feel sacred, blessed, and loved by God. I had a whole career ahead of me that somehow fell into place, where an average middle-class kid like me wound up at Harvard, a place I never imagined going (and where I would not recommend going), a place where I so did not deserve to be that it must have all been a grace of God. I knew when I became a whistleblower that I would upset many people. I knew the career I had been blessed with was over, this perfect, against all odds opportunity gone. On the very morning I drove here from my old apartment in Cambridge, I hit “post” on my last public statement, jumped into the U-Haul as my dad drove behind me, and then somewhere in New Hampshire had a panic attack on I-93. I had no idea what was ahead of me other than some nice people in the most beautiful middle of nowhere I’d ever seen.
And all year I had been thinking of Abraham. I was so haunted by this story and haunted by what I heard was God telling me to sacrifice that I almost added one last tattoo to my mostly forgettable collection, a ram drawn in the words of a prayer (then I got the quote from the artist, and decided I could just hold that tattoo in my heart). Here God was, I thought, asking me to sacrifice the “child,” the very blessings God had given me.
But I came to realize that the true means of grace was not the child Isaac himself, and for me, not the idols that I thought were God. No, the real gift from God was faith itself. As the author of Hebrews tells us, the true heir of Abraham’s covenant was not his family or those who keep the law, but anyone who also has faith. At its core, the deepest grace of God is not the wonderful things he’s given us, but God himself.
There are implications for this that shape how we live and how we worship. If we try to fully understand God through any of our preferred ways to reach God—our favorite theological systems, our spiritual experiences—we no longer worship God, we just worship our favorite ways to reach God. If we try to love him simply by loving the blessings he’s given us, we don’t love God, we only love what he’s given us. The paradox of faith that lives by grace is that if God calls us, we can let go of the very ways in which God’s grace first found us.
For many of us, one of our favorite ways to reach God is through our reasonableness; what “makes sense.” But our human reason is fallible, broken, and self-interested. In fact, Kierkegaard taught that sometimes the way to grace is in “the crucifixion of understanding.” Don’t be mistaken; we need reason and rationality to navigate the world and keep us from idols, but reason by itself cannot navigate the divine. Reason by itself will never call us into faith. But what is miraculous is that in faith, our reason reaches its fullest potential because it is no longer relying on ourselves alone but walks in hand with God. The crucified understanding becomes resurrected in faith. As Saints Augustine and Anselm said, credo ut intelligam, “I believe so that I may understand.”
The story called the “binding of Isaac,” which ends with the living Isaac, teaches us that we cannot bind God with our reason; no, it is our reason that must be bound in order to live by faith, not that we become irrational, but that reason may fully live too. We do not walk up Mount Moriah by sight, but by faith. Binding up your reason, one of the most precious gifts God has given you, may feel like you’re raising up the knife on your own intellect. But in truth, you will walk back down the mountain with reason in hand. Then we can know by faith that God will never truly ask you to sacrifice that which is truly sacred, especially another human being. Faith tells us that whatever of our own lives we give up, God gives us back far more life in return.
We can’t make sense of this story without starting from the same faith Abraham had. And even before belief, faith starts with trust. You can’t believe in God if you don’t trust God. We can’t listen to what God is calling us to do if we can’t trust him. As Hebrews tells us, “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son,” for “he considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.” (Heb 11:17-19)
Like Abraham, we can only trust God if we can trust that his commands are in service of his love. And because he trusted, when Abraham was ready to follow through God’s terrifying command, he learned without a doubt that God’s commands are always in service to his promises. His law is not meant to bind us to the law for the law’s sake. The law is not glorious in a vacuum; it would be hard to find a lawyer in America who would sing about how wonderful the law is. But the psalmist in Psalm 119 can sing over and over the wonders of God’s law, because God’s commands are only there to deliver us more and more into grace that completely surpasses human understanding. But as the Pharisees couldn’t learn, the law does not bind the covenant. Instead, as Jesus Christ revealed to us in his life, death, and resurrection, and as our brother Paul taught us again (today in Romans 6), the only way to make sense of God’s law is to trust that it is bound by God’s grace.
But the paradox is not done. We can only fully experience his covenantal love if we are willing to sacrifice when God commands it. Faith calls us over and over again to step out of what we can intellectually understand, sometimes right into what our friends and family completely don’t understand, and become fully vulnerable in trusting God. Walking in the Way of Jesus may sometimes even mean giving up things we once connected deeply with God, trusting that if they are truly of God, he will intervene. And he will intervene with the blood of his own sacrifice, the blood of his son. He told Abraham, “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And we know he loves us, for he has not withheld his son from us.
As our old brother Søren said, “All that time [Abraham] believed — he believed that God would not require Isaac of him, whereas he was willing nevertheless to sacrifice him if it was required. He believed by virtue of the absurd.” Abraham had such an absurd belief that he knew that if it was in God’s will, he could even raise Abraham’s son from the dead. God didn’t do that. Instead, God raised his own son.
So brothers and sisters, your faith may someday call you into the most emotionally intense places of your life. Your faith may call you into the hardest decisions you’ve ever had to face, like Christ all the way to the cross, who poured out blood more life-giving than any ram’s. Just as he trusted his Father, you can trust in God in the hardest decisions of your life. We may never be able to fully trust other humans or our reasoning or our favorite plans. But we can trust God. Abraham said, “The boy and I will come back.” And we can step into the impossible knowing that God will bring us back with his promise in our hand. For in the darkest moments, the deepest anguish, when you feel the pull between what you’d rather do and what God is calling you to do, trust that God did not withhold his own begotten son from us. He provided. And in your darkest hour, you can trust that he will always provide. Amen.
For more on this week’s readings:
