Talk by
| Charles Sinutko | Faith Like That of Abraham |
Do You Have The Faith Of Abraham? Are You Willing To Kill Your Son If You Hear Voices Telling You To?
by frankiespeakin 9 Replies latest jw friends
-
frankiespeakin
-
blondie
Child needs blood transfusion, will parent let them die instead? At least God stepped and stopped Abraham (so it says)
-
Tameria2001
If I were hearing voices to tell me to do that, I would tell them to bugger off, and to get the bleep out of my head.
-
frankiespeakin
Tam,
As would I. Appearently we both don't have the note worthy faith of Abraham.
-
frankiespeakin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/29/kierkegaard-philosophy-abraham-isaac
In his lectures on the Book of Genesis in the 16th century, Martin Luther praised Abraham for his uncritical obedience to God – for the "blind faith" exhibited by his refusal to question whether it was right to kill Isaac. In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant took the opposite view, arguing that Abraham should have reasoned that such an evidently immoral command could not have come from God. For Luther, divine authority trumps any claim on behalf of reason or morality, whereas for Kant there can be nothing higher than the moral law.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard follows Kant in emphasising that Abraham's decision is morally repugnant and rationally unintelligible. However, he also shows that one consequence of Kant's view is that, if nothing is higher than human reason, then belief in God becomes dispensable. Unlike both Kant and Luther, Kierkegaard does not promote a particular judgment about Abraham, but rather presents his readers with a dilemma: either Abraham is no better than a murderer, and there are no grounds for admiring him; or moral duties do not constitute the highest claim on the human being. Fear and Trembling does not resolve this dilemma, and perhaps for a religious person there is no entirely satisfactory way of resolving it.
The dilemma is not unique to Abraham's situation. Kierkegaard was writing for 19th-century readers who regarded themselves as Christians – that is to say, as people who believed in the authority and goodness of God. By emphasising the difficulty of understanding Abraham's response to the divine command, he emphasises the difficulty of faith itself. Implicit in his analysis of the story of Abraham is the question: would you do what Abraham did? How could you do such a thing? It seems unlikely that anyone who really thinks about these questions would conclude that he or she would have acted as Abraham did. Just as Abraham's faith is tested by God in the Book of Genesis, so the reader's own faith is tested by personal reflection on the biblical story.
Kierkegaard's point in Fear and Trembling is not to recommend blind faith in God, but to unsettle his readers' blind faith in themselves. That is to say, he seeks to challenge their complacent assumption that they are Christians. Only when this assumption was abandoned, he thought, could people embark on the task of becoming a Christian.
However, Kierkegaard's Abraham does not just provide a paradigm of religious faith. If he is an admirable figure in spite of his murderous intentions, this is because he confronts with courage the loss of the person whom he loves most dearly. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham is a hero not by virtue of his obedience to God's command, but because he maintains his relationship to Isaac after giving him up.
When Abraham raises his knife over Isaac's body, this symbolises the fact that every human relationship is haunted by the prospect of death. Love always ends in loss, at least within this life. One response to this existential fact – perhaps the most common response – is to avoid the issue of mortality as much as possible. An alternative response is to face up to the inevitable pain of loss and to relinquish the beloved in advance, so to speak, by giving up hope of enjoying a happy relationship within this lifetime. (This "movement of resignation" is described as "monastic", although it does not literally entail becoming a recluse. It is an internal movement, an adjustment of expectations.) In Kierkegaard's view, this is more noble than the first option, but it is very far from the courage of Abraham, who continues to love Isaac and enjoy his relationship to him in full awareness of the suffering that his death would bring. This aspect of the interpretation of Abraham offered in Fear and Trembling suggests that, far from being an individualist, Kierkegaard regards human relationships as essential to life.
-
RubaDub
I may not kill my son, but I've got my neighbor on the short list if he doesn't stop his dog from barking at the first hint of light in the morning.
Rub a Dub
-
snare&racket
Maybe god had a bag of cows blood and a miracle (vascular surgeon) hidden in another bush....
-
frankiespeakin
‘Daddy, why was Abraham holding a knife to Isaac’s throat?’
How could God traumatize Isaac by having Abraham nearly sacrifice him?
http://understandingbooksbible.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/0125/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac
sacrifice Isaac. [ 16 ]
Francesca Stavrakopoulou has speculated that it is possible that the story "contains traces of a tradition in which Abraham does sacrifice Isaac. [ 17 ] Richard Elliott Friedman has argued that in the original E story Abraham may have carried out the sacrifice of Isaac, but that later repugnance at the idea of a human sacrifice led the redactor of JE to add the lines in which a ram is substituted for Isaac. [ 18 ]
Richard Dawkins wrote about the ' binding of Isaac ', " A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: ' I was only obeying orders ' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions." [ 19 ]
The Binding also figures prominently in the writings of several of the more important modern theologians, such as Søren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling and Shalom Spiegel in The Last Trial. Jewish communities regularly review this literature, for instance the recent mock trial held by more than 600 members of the University Synagogue of Orange County, California. [ 20 ] Jacques Derrida also looks at the story of the sacrifice as well as Kierkegaard's reading in The Gift of Death.
In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, the literary critic Erich Auerbach considers the Hebrew narrative of the Binding of Isaac, along with Homer's description of Odysseus's scar, as the two paradigmatic models for the representation of reality in literature. Auerbach contrasts Homer's attention to detail and foregrounding of the spatial, historical, as well as personal contexts for events to the Bible's sparse account, in which virtually all context is kept in the background or left outside of the narrative. As Auerbach observes, this narrative strategy virtually compels readers to add their own interpretations to the text.
-
MrFreeze
All the voices in my head never tell me to do anything cool.
-
frankiespeakin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Trembling
Fear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is an influential philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard , published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John the Silent). The title is a reference to a line from Philippians 2:12, "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." - itself a probable reference to Psalms 55:5, "Fear and trembling came upon me..." (the Greek is identical).
Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety [ 1 ] that must have been present in Abraham when "God tested [him] and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on the mountain that I shall show you." [ 2 ]
Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to forget it. He resigned himself to the three and a half day journey and to the loss of his son. "He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eliezer. Who, after all, could understand him, for did not the nature of temptation extract from him a pledge of silence? He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife.” [ 3 ] Because he kept everything to himself in hiddenness he "isolated himself as higher than the universal." Kierkegaard envisions two types of people in Fear and Trembling and Repetition. One lives in hope, Abraham, the other lives in memory, The Young Man and Constantin Constantius. He discussed them beforehand in Lectures delivered before the Symparanekromenoni and The Unhappiest Man. [ 4 ] One hopes for happiness from something "out there" while the other finds happiness from something in himself. This he brought out in his upbuilding discourse, published on the same date.
Teleological Suspension of the Ethical [edit]
"Yes, when in mournful moments we want to strengthen and encourage our minds by contemplating those great men, your chosen instruments, who in severe spiritual trials and anxieties of heart kept their minds free, their courage uncrushed, and heaven open, we, too, wish to add our witness to theirs in the assurance that even if our courage compared to theirs is only discouragement, our power powerlessness, you, however, are still the same, the same mighty God who tests spirits in conflict, the same Father without whose will not one sparrow falls to the ground." Two Upbuilding Discourses p. 7 [ 16 ]What is the ethical? Kierkegaard steers the reader to Hegel's book Elements of the Philosophy of Right especially the chapter on The Good and Conscience where he writes, "It is the right of the subjective will that it should regard as good what it recognizes as authoritative. It is the individual’s right, too, that an act, as outer realization of an end, should be counted right or wrong, good or evil, lawful or unlawful, according to his knowledge of the worth it has when objectively realized. (…) Right of insight into the good is different from right of insight with regard to action as such. The right of objectivity means that the act must be a change in the actual world, be recognized there, and in general be adequate to what has validity there. Whoso will act in this actual world has thereby submitted to its laws, and recognized the right of objectivity. Similarly in the state, which is the objectivity of the conception of reason, legal responsibility does not adapt itself to what any one person holds to be reasonable or unreasonable. It does not adhere to subjective insight into right or wrong, good or evil, or to the claims which an individual makes for the satisfaction of his conviction. In this objective field the right of insight is reckoned as insight into what is legal or illegal, or the actual law. It limits itself to its simplest meaning, namely, knowledge of or acquaintance with what is lawful and binding. Through the publicity of the laws and through general customs the state removes from the right of insight that which is for the subject its formal side. It removes also the element of chance, which at our present standpoint still clings to it." [ 17 ] [ 18 ]
Abraham didn't follow this theory. Kierkegaard says Hegel was wrong because he didn't protest against Abraham as the father of faith and call him a murderer. [ 19 ] He had suspended the ethical and failed to follow the universal. [ 20 ] [ 21 ]
Kierkegaard has a different theory about the difference between right and wrong and he stated it in the little discourse at the end of Either/Or. He wrote, "If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree in the right, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act then when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are? Then we have only the choice between being nothing in relation to God or having to begin all over again every moment in eternal torment, yet without being able to begin, for if we are able to decide definitely with regard to the previous moment, and so further and further back. Doubt is again set in motion, care again aroused; let us try to calm it by deliberating on: The Upbuilding That Lies In The Thought That In Relation To God We Are Always In The Wrong.” [ 22 ]
