Fear and Trembling in the Postmodern World: Part Two - Anfechtung
Søren Kierkegaard wrestles with the test of Abraham
NOTE: This is the second part in a long-form essay. It is recommended that you read them in order for maximum clarity.
Copenhagen was not the center of philosophy in mid-19th century Europe. That distinction surely belonged to the universities of what was soon to become the nation-state of Germany. There Immanuel Kant had attempted to save the sinking ship of Christianity from the crashing waves of the Enlightenment by jettisoning the notion that faith and reason had a share in one another, or so the story is often told. (This characterization is not entirely accurate.) It is true that Kant saw a difference between knowledge and faith, the former being rooted in our sensory experience and the latter in something supersensory but nonetheless rational. Coming shortly after Kant was the philosopher Georg Hegel and his concept of the “Absolute Mind”. Some of his followers made it to the University of Copenhagen and announced that they were going beyond Kant, which some interpreted as going beyond faith itself.
Into this world, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was born and pursued the path of philosophy. Although he disdained the national Church of Denmark, he also saw flaws in the thinking of these new Hegelians. Thus, in the year 1843, an anonymous work titled Fear and Trembling went on sale in Copenhagen: one wholly unlike the scientific bestsellers of the day. Even as Charles Darwin was developing his thoughts about natural selection, Kierkegaard appealed to the philosophy of the ancients.
In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, and kept his faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows—unless he somehow manages at the earliest possible opportunity to go further.1
Here Kierkegaard introduced the primary themes that were to govern his work. He posited that faith was not the beginning of rational thought, but its end. This is not to say that reason must be maintained and faith discarded, but that faith is something higher than reason: the product of a lifetime of fear and trembling. According to Kierkegaard, faith achieves its highest quality in struggle and a willingness to confront our fears. In the trial of faith, the individual moves beyond the realm of traditional social mores to engage with the absolutes of divinity, thus experiencing a kind of ethical paradox.
The prime example of such a trial of faith, according to Kierkegaard, was the biblical patriarch Abraham. He was fascinated by God’s command for Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Here was something that seemed to be a great moral evil: the killing of an innocent boy by his own father. What made it more abhorrent was that it had been demanded of Abraham by God.
In a sequence where he reimagines the story in four different ways, Kierkegaard remarks at one point, “From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before: but Abraham’s eye was darkened, he saw joy no more.”2 In another instance, he writes that “as he turned away Isaac saw that Abraham’s left hand was clenched in anguish, that a shudder went through his body—but Abraham drew the knife. Then they turned home again and Sarah ran to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith.”3
Kierkegaard presented Abraham’s dilemma to the 19th century world, but it is especially applicable to our own age. Man began by fearing that nature might have evil intent. Having conquered much of the world around him, he found another source of evil in himself. But the greatest fear of all and the one that has driven our postmodern society to madness is the possibility that God himself is evil.
This is hardly a new concern. For as long as human beings have believed in a single, omnipotent deity, they have doubted that being’s goodness. Neither is the problem particularly novel to Christianity. You cannot embrace the Christian way without dealing in paradoxes and theodicies. Is there any other religion on earth that holds up as its central event an action which appears to turn God into a monster? For what else can we say of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? Here was a man who lived for love and still found himself nailed to a stake, crying out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?”4 As the prophet Isaiah put it almost perversely, “But the Lord was pleased / To crush Him, putting Him to grief…”5
The supreme test of Abraham’s faith, related in the 22nd chapter of Genesis, is usually interpreted in relation to the atonement of Jesus Christ. Isaac, like Christ, is said to be an innocent victim sacrificed by his father. Not all biblical scholars accept that Isaac is a type of Christ, and the thought probably did not pass through Abraham’s mind when he was told, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”6 Instead, Abraham was forced to grapple with two heinous possibilities: that God was evil for commanding such a thing, and that he was evil for choosing to obey.
It was not the typological element of this event but Abraham’s struggle of faith that interested Kierkegaard. He said of those who are great in this world, “They shall all be remembered, but everyone was great in proportion to the magnitude of what he strove with. For he who strove with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who strove with himself became greater by conquering himself; but he who strove with God became greater than all.”7 Then finishing his line of reasoning with a flourish, he wrote that “greater than all was Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self.”8
Long before Isaac was born, the Lord had made a covenant with Abraham in two parts, which are described in Genesis chapters 15 and 17. The first account relates the grim ceremony of covenant initiation. It was the custom in those days for two parties to a contract to cut various animals in half and walk between the pieces, the implication being, “So be it to me if I should violate the terms of our agreement.” Yet when God made a covenant with Abraham, he moved through the pieces alone in the form of a smoking oven and flaming torch. He did not ask Abraham to place himself in danger of the curse.
Then in chapter 17, God returned to Abraham, this time demanding that he and all his male posterity should be circumcised. Here for the first time came a curse: “But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”9 Did Abraham tremble in fear at this revelation? The Lord had sworn by himself, but then attached conditions. This was a paradox without easy explanation.
Abraham saw the goodness of the Lord when he was spared the burden of walking through the pieces, but then he must have been struck with fear by the divine law that says, “Do this and live.” Knowing himself to be evil, he likely sensed that he could never do that and live. The command of the Lord was therefore death to him, or so it must have seemed. And when the Lord demanded the life of Isaac, the very blessing that was promised, Abraham may well have thought the Almighty capricious, arbitrary, and cruel—a God with no sense of love or compassion. As he marched to Moriah, Abraham faced his greatest test. Was the God of chapter 17 also the God of chapter 15? Was the one who called him to sacrifice his son…good?
Martin Luther gave much consideration to such trials of faith. He called them Anfechtungen, a term that famously defies easy translation into English, with both “temptation” and “trial” being employed to capture part of the meaning. Describing the German word, David P. Scaer has written, “In this temptation the Christian is given the opportunity by God to overcome Satan personally, but there can be no suggestion that God is the origin of sin or provokes the Christian to sin…Through the trial God puts the Christian to the test to measure the depth and sincerity of faith and to bring it to a higher level.”10 Surely no saint has experienced a harsher instance of Anfechtung than Abraham did when he was commanded to sacrifice his son, and yet he passed the test.
Abraham’s fear of nature and even his fear of the evil within himself was subsumed by his fear of God, but this was something different from standard anxiety. You see, fear is not so different from faith, and that was certainly the case with Abraham. Faced with the possibility that God himself was evil, his faith allowed him to comprehend that God could raise the dead, as related by the author epistle to the Hebrews.11 Thus, his fear of nature was removed along with his fear of becoming a murderer, and when his faith proved to be justified, he could not help but stand in awe and marvel at the one who is truly worthy of fear. He feared God in the sense of submission rather than simple anxiety.
But why do I go on about Abraham? Because he is not just some ancient man of clay—a myth conjured to give purpose to the wandering souls in Sinai. He is you and me. He is akin to postmodern man and yet he rises above postmodern man. He is the faithless one who became the father of the faithful. And what makes Abraham great? The same thing that made his grandson, Jacob, great: he wrestled with God, not as one without hope, but seeking the divine blessing.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
“Johannes Agricola and the Distinction Between Law and Gospel” at 1517
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1985. 42.
Ibid, 46.
Ibid, 47.
Matthew 27:46. The New American Standard Bible. Updated edition. The Lockman Foundation, 1995. (All biblical quotations are from this source.)
Isaiah 53:10
Genesis 22:2
Kierkegaard, 50.
Ibid.
Genesis 17:14.
Scaer, David P. “The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought”. Concordia Theological Quarterly. Vol. 27. No. 1. January 1983. 15.
Hebrews 11:17-19