The Absurd Faith of Abraham
Abraham’s faith allowed him to do something on Mt. Moriah with respect to the sacrifice of Isaac which defied all reason, logic and moral sense. But Abraham, because of his faith in God above all, believed in that absurd instruction and was prepared to do it based solely on faith. Obviously, to any reasonable definition, this was blind faith since there were no available justifications in the sense-perception realm.
In his little book Fear and Trembling, the opening part of which addresses Abraham’s faith on Mt. Moriah, the Danish theologian Kierkegaard used the much misunderstood and maligned phrase, “the Impossibility Possibility.” By this, Kierkegaard meant that the promise had to come through Isaac and that would obviously be impossible if he sacrificed Isaac. But Abraham believed in the possibility of this impossibility.
If this had to be done, God could raise Isaac from the dead, because that was where Abraham got him from to begin with. That this was Abraham’s reasoning is verified by St. Paul in Romans 4:16-21. It is simply nonsense for anyone to claim that this request, or obedience to it, was not absurd from the rational, logical, mortal point of view. Abraham could only do this because his belief in God (as to His wisdom, His goodness, His love and His character) took precedence over every other consideration. Of course it was impossible and required a blind leap of faith. But this leap was not into the blackness and despair of nihilism; it was into the arms of a loving and faithful God.
Age of Reason Theology Denies the Biblical Concept of Faith
In denying this and by taking an adamant stand against any concept of a blind leap of faith no matter how it is defined, Apologetic Theology has failed to face up to the real issues here.
Neo-Orthodoxy
But this phrase meant something quite different when Barth and the Neo-Orthodox crowd got through with it. They saw their dialectic theological views as being advanced by the phrase “Impossibility Possibility” and twisted Kierkegaard’s views to make them conform to their own. It is not necessary to try to justify Kierkegaard’s stream of consciousness in the rest of his book (things which can hardly be understood much less accepted) in order to observe that in commenting on Abraham’s faith, he never had anything in mind like that which as been attributed to him by Barth and the Neo-Orthodox.
The Philosophical Apologists
Philosophical Apology, that seeks to rationalize away the transcendental reality of God (In Orthodoxy God is transcendental in that He can only be known by revelation and not by reason), has fared little better. To them, truth is a truth of philosophy, reason, science, religion, and experience. A case can be made for belief in the existence of God and His actions as revealed by the Bible without involving a faith in revelation–a faith that believes thought it cannot see or understand why.
It hardly needs to be said that Kierkegaard’s view of Abraham’s faith on Mt. Moriah was at complete odds with Philosophical Apologetics. For this he has been unfairly condemned by religious humanism. Apparently Francis A. Schaeffer never was able to comprehend Kierkegaard, though he did acknowledge, in How Should We Then Live, that he may well have misunderstood Kierkegaard. The real problem lay in the fact that Schaeffer subscribed to a theology that was a truth of reason, science, and philosophy and did not require a faith that could believe without sight. Unfortunately for the modern church which found his books so very attractive, Schaeffer’s theology, like that of C.S. Lewis before him, had its roots in the Enlightenment and Western thought and was not Orthodox.
