I noticed something commonplace in the talks this last conference. By commonplace I mean something that appears in the talks every conference. A few examples will suffice. Todd Christofferson of the Seventy talked about inward conversion. The first step, he said, is putting aside “the attitude that rejects the authority of God to rule in our lives.” We must acknowledge “God’s right to declare the truth and establish the law.” Brother Eyring spoke of the purpose of life. He found from the revelations that it was “to prove them [us] herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.” He continued: “trials in life . . . give us the opportunity to prove ourselves faithful to God.” Why not, I wondered, speak of the opportunity to prove ourselves faithful to the principles of justice and so forth? What does obedience add? I’m wondering about the nature of a complex of concepts: obedience, loyalty, and fealty.
Loyalty and fealty seem alien to modern life (though no doubt they’re under the surface). One of the oddest people I’ve met at church is an old Mexican man who attends regularly. As best as I can make out, he thinks the Catholic church is an improvement on ours (although he always says it so delicately and so reluctantly) but he comes because his patron, or rather his former patron, is a member and he feels obligated. This man is antique. Even a hundred years ago when Kipling wished to write about loyalty he had to go to the past:
We hold that in all disaster
Of shipwreck, storm, or sword,
A Man must stand by his Master
When once he has pledged his word.
But the very age of fealty and loyalty allow us to see that they are not easily reducible to merely love or self-interest or anything else. They have a quality all their own.
And also obedience. There is such a thing as the will to obey. Obedience is not, as our times have accustomed us to believe, merely a fear of the hard work of thinking for oneself or a conditioned reflex wormed into the brain. Nor is obedience nothing but the normal LDS calculation that every good act will bring a blessing or that God is worth obeying because he shares our objectives and has superior resources of knowledge. I do not mean to insult such obedience when I say that it is merely prudence for believers. I do mean to say that your and my experience of obedience is more than this.
I’m no taxonomist of human desires. I can’t say exactly what the additional something is. If I may be allowed to express murkily, what I see only poorly, I would say that additional something is a love of madness. From the credo qui absurdum to the muerte a la inteligencia, something in the human spirit feels lessened by sense and civilization. Something finds joy in shrugging off reason. It likes us not, but there it is, and what are you going to do with it? Perhaps sacrifice is the divine channel for this something, and obedience is the highest manifestation of it. At obedience’s core we cease to sacrifice for the good of a cause or our own good or another’s, or any good at all, yet we sacrifice because our master has spoken. We thrill to say, I know not, save the Lord commanded me.
We know that God has given us passions, skills, desires, a whole treasury of dangerous gifts, which we must learn to subdue, subdue ultimately by learning to forgo entirely in the Savior’s promise that what we would find we must lose. Is reason itself a gift to be subdued? I hardly dare answer. If so, the love of unreason may not be the love of unreason at all, yet a love still, or rather a desire to love. Let us call it the soul’s desire to love something so intensely that nothing, not even sense, can be kept back. Or perhaps this love is really a disgust with self . . .
I can hardly write more. I feel I’ve gone so deep into messy places in the soul that I myself hardly know where I am. Only God knows, and Christ, and maybe Abraham. They’ve gone further down and further in. Brothers, sisters, I don’t know what you make of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. I know like me you treat it as the pinnacle of faith and the model for each of us the fire we must pass through before we are made perfect. But if you’re like me you’ve never heard an explanation of it in words that made more than Sunday-go-to-meetin’ sense and though you felt some half-comprehension in your gut you were afraid—you are afraid—of ever comprehending it more.
A BYU professor has brought this up in First Things, or rather the book he reviews has brought it up.
On Pangle’s account, biblical faith terminates in the following impasse: Abraham’s “unequaled deed” seems to represent the highest possibility of the human soul, a kind of nobility beyond nobility, a truly transcendent orientation of the mind and heart. But as we rationally scrutinize Abraham’s possible motives, we seem to be left with this uninspiring alternative: either Abraham’s deed is completely unintelligible, arbitrary, groundless, and effectively mad—the act of a man who deliberately does what he knows not to be good for him; or it must be explained in terms of rational and egoistic calculation (in terms of what was good for him). In either case, obviously, the biblical promise of transcendence proves to be a pure illusion. The reviewer is able to dismiss the alternatives the author proposes to the Abrahamic faith, but he never proffers a defense of Abraham and his sacrifice.
Postscript:
If obedience is more than a rational deference to superior knowledge, we can understand why Christ can continue obedient to the Father though now the Father’s equal in every way. He obeys precisely because, not needing to obey, his obedience shows love. Because the Father and the Son interact to show love and respect and hierarchy, not to share information, their conversations have the curious ritual quality we see in the scriptures and the temple.
Good stuff Adam. In light of your idea that the Savior “obeys [the Father] precisely because, not needing to obey, his obedience shows love”, maybe Abraham’s sacrifice can be viewed as the ultimate ritualistic expression of love toward God–second only to the Savior’s atonement.
This is a story I’ve really struggled with personally (not because I myself have ever been subjected to anything remotely resembling an Abrahamic test). At least once here at Times and Seasons I stated some of my thinking on the subject of Abraham almost sacrificing Issac — and I probably didn’t come across as a very faithful believer in the traditional “moral of the story.”
I am also conscious of the fact that our prophets have endorsed this as a great event, as a great signal of Abraham’s obedience. So maybe I should recant what I had said earlier. I simply have a lot of trouble feeling enthusiastic about the way Abraham responded to the test and I need to work through it somehow I guess.
Danithew: Have you read Kierkegaard’s famous treatise on the subject? That really helped (energized, moved) my own thinking about the sacrifice of Isaac.
No I haven’t but I’ve been needing a pathway into philosophy of some sort and this might be the way to go (kill two birds with one stone). I will look this up and give it a read. Thanks for the suggestion.
Interestingly, the Abraham story has different implications for myself. I look to Isaac as the one truly challenged. He was over the age of majority, still willing to go and do what his father asked of him. Sort of a type and shadow within the type and shadow of Abraham. Isaac able to trust and yet still choose to particpate in his own sacrifice has huge implications. Not just that his father was willing to act on the word of God, but that he also would be willing to give his life if that’s what God had asked.
So did Isaac just trust and obey his Father or did he have the same devotion to God?
Before I can obey God in the same way that Abraham obeyed, I have to know with certainty that it is God speaking to me. Where do I find the voice of God speaking in a way that gives me this certainty? In the voice of a prophet who does not claim to be infallible and so could be mistaken? In my own spiritual impressions which have so often misled me in the past? An Abrahamic test of obedience is first a test of my faith, not in God, but in my own ability to discern God’s will, which I admit is rather weak. Only after I know that God is speaking does it become a test of whether I will obey God when he commands me. Given my uncertainty on this issue, is it not much better for me to be obedient to principles of justice, mercy and charity than to my own perception of what God wants me to do in those cases where my perceptions are inconsistent with my understanding of those principles?
Very interesting angle indeed, Gary Lee.
As to your last point, how do you know that your perception of the principles of justice, mercy, and charity is any better than your perception of what God wants of you?
Adam: I was afraid you might ask that question. I am not sure–I will have to think about it some more.
Gary Lee: Great question. I know LDS (including myself) who, anticipating that God would ask them to give up “Isaac” (i.e. his equivalent in their own lives), started abandoning certain cherished hobbies etc. This kind of thinking leads a sort of very confused asceticism where you are “sacrificing Isaac” all over the place, & eventually get to the point where God’s voice & the voice of your inner ascetic become hard to separate. I hope this makes sense–I’m afraid you have to have suffered it to understand it!
Adam,
Great post. As anybody can tell from looking at my responses to various posts here at T&S, Abraham’s sacrifice carries deep meaning for me, as I harp on it a lot, and your thoughts here about what his experience tells us about reason and logic versus obedience dovetails nicely with many of my own thoughts, though you are more articulate than I am :).
Now, I’m not sure what to make of your feelings about the “love of madness”, though. I agree that there does seem to be an element of human psychology that is attracted to the “thrill” of total sacricfice in the face of reason. However, normally I can’t say I have ever seen this in anything but a negative light. The most common expression of this seems to be in women, not men, where I’ve seen, over and over and over again, an otherwise decent woman sacrifice everything for husband or boyfriend, despite all logic, and despite the man’s being an unredeemable cad (adulterous, violent, deceitful, etc.). I can’t tell you how much I am sickened and repelled by such madness, which is what it truly is, but it happens more and more often as men get worse in our telestial world, and as more of them figure out that their woman’s need for love is everything to her, and can be exploited. No, no, I don’t think God is encouraging that, or trying to “re-direct it”, at all.
I am one of those who don’t believe Abraham “cheerfully” walked to Moriah, or that Adam “cheerfully” sacrificed animals, etc. My reading of the Scriptures, plus my experience in the presence of truly humble, righteous people, is that the latter tend to be very sensitive not only to others’ needs, but feel emotion in a general sense much more strongly than others. They may not express that, in fact they may take great pains to hide how they really feel (especially if they are angry or are suffering), but they FEEL very strongly nevertheless. (The Savior is the perfect example of this.) In addition, such people tend to actually be more introspective, soul-searching, and rational than most. By rational I mean that, since they tend to be so sensitive to other’s needs, they make every effort to think through their own actions and words before acting or speaking (lest they offend God or Man needlessly).
Now, how do these observations apply to Abraham’s sacrifice? Well, for starters, when Abraham received the command (and I’ll get to Gary Lee’s concern about making sure it is God speaking to us in a minute), I see him agonizing over it. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. However, what *kind* of agony are we talking about here? It wouldn’t have been, “Is it God speaking, or am I deceived?”. Abraham spoke with God, walked with God, was the “friend of God”, and I think he would have known by this time how to distinguish God from Satan, and God from his own emotions. Rather, I think it would have been agony of the “Why are you doing this? What about the promises you made to me, and to Sarah? What about the promises made to my fathers, which must come through Isaac–a *live* Isaac, not a dead one? It was all I could do to forgive my own father for this, why must Isaac suffer what I did then? Why? Why?”
Now, the Scriptures don’t tell us of such a conversation (of course they don’t tell us a lot of things, but when has that stopped us here at T&S?), but they do give us intimations. Abraham rose very early the next day–that would have been easy, as I doubt that he slept any. Likewise, I strongly suspect he felt a need to be gone before Sarah arose (though she suspected sonething—see how she looked for their return a far off). Also, look at the disingenuous way he responded to Isaac’s question, “Father, where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”, with “My son, God Himself will provide a sacrifice.” We do have a clue as to what went through Abraham’s mind, from Paul’s writings, when he says that Abraham reasoned and had faith that God could raise Isaac from the dead.
That brings me to my point. Abraham DID NOT obey “blindly”, if we mean that he obeyed without somehow rationalizing his obedience. No one ever obeyed a truly difficult commandment (notice how I phrased that) without trying to rationalize what the sense of the commandment was. Sure, there are plenty of saints who obey routine commandments, with some discomfort, with the idea, “That’s what the prophet said to do,” but NO ONE who ever lived, followed a truly hard, demanding, and difficult commandment of God, without at least trying to reason as the utility or “silver-lining” of it. (“God will make this up to me in the resurrection,” or “This bishop will eventually be released, then it’ll get better,” etc.) So, when it was all said and done, and Abraham was marching with Isaac to Moriah, he evidently was thinking, among other things, “God knows about those promises. He has the power to raise Isaac from the dead. Surely that’s what he will do…As for the reason for all this…I wish I knew. But I am nothing without my Heavenly Father, the only real “father” I have ever had. He must have a reason for this, He must…”
My admiration of Abraham, then, is not because he obeyed without questioning. Rather, because he obeyed at all. How many of us, faced with far lesser trials, and with just as much ability to “see a silver lining” as Abraham, DON’T OBEY. Brigham Young obeyed the commandment to have plural wives, despite wanting to trade places with a man in a casket rather than do so. William Law had the same commandment, and apostatized. Reed Smoot received the commandment to *not* have plual wives, and obeyed. Richard Lyman received the same commandment, but disobeyed and was excommunicated. All of these men rationalized what they did—but not all obeyed.
In the end, it isn’t that God expects us to *abandon* our reason and logic, but to *sacrifice* it. God never condemned anyone for trying to make since out of a commandment that seemed illogical or wrong. We are human, and we can’t help but reason. However, in the end, we must obey. That’s why I love Abraham…not because he was “superhuman”, but because I perceive that he was “all too human”—that he was truly human, and obeyed. God is NOT saying, “Follow me and lose your mind! Embrace madness!” (That would be Satan; just picture those scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, where Rudolf Hess yells out, to obvious crowd approval, “Hitler has made us free from Freedom!”) Rather, God is saying, “I know you like to think you understand everything, my child, but you have so far to go, and I have to teach you. Rationalize all you want–but in the end you must trust me.” Obedience to God, ultimately, always boils down to TRUST. Abraham trusted God, and is with Him now.
Just a few more bullet observations;
-Doesn’t the passage of time make this story more acceptable? I mean, does there appear to be any moral difference, on the surface, bewteen God’s telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (that is, to cut his throat, disembowel him, fillet him, cook him on the altar, and eat him), and Joseph Smith telling men to give their wives to him to be sealed? Well, is there any difference, other than the passage of time? We’re all so ready to judge poor Joseph—can we direct that judgementalism a little towards God, especially if we find out in the eternities that, just like Abraham being told to lie about Sarah being his sister, or to sacrifice his son, we find out that God *told* Joseph to do what he did, to test *him*, as well as the others involved? God could have “taken” Joseph—he didn’t. (When Joseph says, “You never knew me. You don’t who I am…”, I can guess at least one thing that he was: a suffering servant, tortured with knowledge he could not share, knowledge that might very well justify him a little better in our eyes.)
–Was Isaac’s test in all of this any different than that of the men who were asked to give Joseph their wives, other than the passage of time?
–Finally, to address Gary Lee’s quite sincere question, “How can you be sure that it is God giving you the commandment?” Well, maybe that explains why everybody’s “test” is different. Abraham spoke with God directly; all the men Joseph went to for their wives had seen Joseph perform miracles, and had received revelations at various times for themselves. My point is that God seems to tailor such tests to the time and place in which we live, as well as our individual circumstances. Today, who knows how such tests may come. (For me, it might be President Hinckley telling us to all register as Democrats…:> ) Also, notice the test always seems to involve what we love the best, or what has already involved the most emotion for us. (Notice how the Lord, in commanding Abraham, says, “Take thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest…”)
Whew! That’s enough for now, but thanks again Adam for a grest post.
“Was Isaac’s test in all of this…” What??
YES. Isaac knew he was being tied to an alter. Isaac knew there was no other provided to sacrifice to the Lord. It wasn’t like he wasn’t vested in this at all. Remember Abraham had the dagger in his hand, and had lifted to take Isaac’s life. And he willingly laid there and accepted the Lord’s will. Again, I will state the ultimate type and shadow of the Savior and God.
Gary: I don’t think the central issue of Abraham’s sacrifice is trust. Trust implies a belief that all will be well or improved though we may not know how or why. No doubt Abraham trusted God, but what does he learn about trust by offering up Isaac? Nothing happens. God stops him from going through with it and sends him home. Now if He(God) hadn’t prevented it–it would be interesting to see how God would fullfill Abraham’s trust. But even so, Paul tells us that Abraham already had faith that God could raise Isaac from the dead.
Well, I still find myself wondering and speculating…
What would have happened if Abraham put his foot down and refused (in a respectul manner)? Could God have punished Abraham for refusing to do something that was wrong? I suppose by definition, if God tells you to do something, it is not wrong. But the fact that the angel restrained Abraham from sacricing Isaac shows otherwise.
I can’t help but feel that Abraham betrayed his own lifelong experiences and fatherly responsibilities by not at least arguing a little bit with God. If he had done so, perhaps he would have saved himself a three-day trip to Moriah and perhaps he would have saved his son the trauma of being tied down to an altar and almost being killed.
I can’t picture Abraham resisting even a little bit and then God continuing to insist that Abraham sacrifice his son.
I can only wonder at how God issued the command to Abraham. Maybe it was issued in such a way and in such a tone that Abraham didn’t feel comfortable arguing or resisting. Perhaps Abraham felt cowed and didn’t have the ability to resist God’s demand due to the nature of the command itself.
I remember once hearing thunder so close to the room in which I was sleeping that I was not only awakened on the spot but was immediately filled with an overwhelming fear. I had heard thunder many times before but the sound was so loud and so powerful that I was left almost dazed. It really made me feel a sudden and unusual awe for the power of nature. I know that the presence of Heavenly Personages and voices can have the same kind of power as thunder… so maybe that would explain this situation.
But if this was the case, how much free agency did Abraham have? And if it was not the case, then why was Abraham so complicit?
I recanted earlier… and I don’t mean to be expressing doubts and lack of faith in a story that has been lauded by our prophets. But these are honest questions that I have.
Maybe I had better go read Kierkegard (not sure I’m spelling his name correctly).
Danithew,
I wondered about this, too. I suspect God may very well have spoken to Abraham in the “still small voice”—and I don’t think we can assume that Abraham didn’t ask questions. How about this scenario:
God: “Abraham.” (still small voice)
Abraham: (with a smile—God has something to tell him!) “Here am I, Father.”
God: “Take thy son, thine only son, Isaac, and take him to Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering.”
Abraham: (with absolute horror) “Lord? You wish me to kill him and offer him, as I would a sacrificial animal?”
God: (no response)
Abraham: “Father! Why? What of the promises? What about…” (and this goes on all night, Abraham begging for an explanation, and the Lord not giving one).
Now if it happened this way, what choice would Abraham have, to be obedient, but to leave in the morning with Isaac and obey, without an explanation? I doubt that Abraham’s relationship to God at this point involved the same fear and trembling you describe. It might have earlier in his life, but he was used to divine communication surely by now. I don’t see him responding in fear (“I’ve got to do this, or I’ll be zapped!”), at least not that type of fear. Rather, I see his response like Peter and the apostles after Jesus’ “eat my flesh” discourse. Jesus could see their faces, how troubled they were at his strange words, and asked, “Will ye also be offended and leave?” Peter responds the same way Abraham must have: “Lord, to whom shall we go? For Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe, and are sure, that Thou art the Christ.” Abraham went to Moriah–not in cringing fear, but in great anguish of mind and spirit, pouring out his soul to God in prayer, but getting no explanation, obeyed anyway. For Who else could He turn to for Eternal Life, but God? And how could he claim God’s blessings, save through obedience? Like Job, his attitude could have been: “The Lord giveth, and taketh away—naked came I from the womb, and naked will I return.” This is how I see this, any way. I see Abraham as the classic spirtual man, having overcome the “natural man” and being born again, he, like a little child, “suffereth all things which the Father seeth fit to inflict upon him.”
Hey Gary… That’s a pretty touching way to deal with the question and it doesn’t come across as untrue to the narrative. I appreciate what you’re saying.
Clearly there are gaps in the text that we need to fill in somehow. It had occurred to me that a brief argument or questioning period could have happened and wasn’t recorded. But since it’s absent I felt the question needs to be asked.
I am not sure that the outcome Abraham underwent is the only right way this could have gone. Had Abraham dissented, I think it would have been hard for God to condemn Abraham considering the nature of the test and what Abraham was being asked to do. But that’s not the story that we have in front of us, so we can only speculate in that direction. We can’t really know how God would have responded to this act of “disobedience” that never happened.
Abrahamic tests seem to consist of tests where a person is asked to do something that they should not do or that at least normally they shouldn’t do. The other component of the Abrahamic test seems to be that at the last moment, when the person has demonstrated their willingness to obey even the unlawful command, the actual command is rescinded.
I am wondering if we have a story of an Abrahamic test that was “failed” or where the participant refused to obey the Abrahamic test command. Perhaps such an occurrence would not be presented in that light, and would not be recognized as such.
Danithew: Such a story is found in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, where Gail Wynand (read: Abraham) ultimately fails to sacrifice his gigantic publishing firm (read: Isaac) to Howard Roark (read: God). Just kidding. (Although, it is pretty clear that Ms. Rand regarded Wynand’s failure as Abrahamically, i.e. cosmically, significant.)
Gary Cooper: Just so.
In the end, it isn’t that God expects us to *abandon* our reason and logic, but to *sacrifice* it
Gary Lee: Respecting the question you wished I didn’t ask–notice that I’m asking it, not answering it.
Adam: I have been thinking about the question you asked. I am afraid that what follows is the best I can do.
I said: “Given my uncertainty on this issue, is it not much better for me to be obedient to principles of justice, mercy and charity than to my own perception of what God wants me to do in those cases where my perceptions are inconsistent with my understanding of those principles? And you asked how I can be sure that my perception of those principles is any better than my perception of what God wants me to do.
The truth is, I can be never be certain. It seems that there are two basic approaches. The first approach is try to act in accordance with correct principles. The second is to try to figure out what God wants, and then do that. I think that I am more likely to be correct if I try to act in accordance with those principles than if I try to discern God’s will without regard to those principles. I believe that God is just, merciful and loving and that he expects me to act in accordance with those principles. Therefore, there should not be any conflict. There should be an irrebuttable presumption that God wants me to act in accordance with correct principles to learn how to apply those principles. The only question is whether I have correctly understood how to apply those principle in any particular case. Notwithstanding my best efforts, It is often difficult to know what course of conduct is the best. Is it charitable to give to the beggar, or I am ennabling a drug addict to continue or worsen his addiction? When my child misbehaves, is this a time for mercy or justice? We face these questions every day, and they are hardly Abrahamic tests. It not always clear what course of action is best. However, at least I have some basis for my decisions. I am trying to implement a principle of justice, or mercy or charity. I have some experience to guide me. And when I err, I learn from my mistakes because usually I find out why I was mistaken. Accordingly, I believe that if I am at least trying to live based on these principles, I am likely to make the right decision most of the time. On the other hand, I find that God does not usually speak very clearly to me. I have had very occasions in my life when I thought he was really making his will known to me. I know people who believe that he speaks to them much more often and much more clearly than he speaks to me. Those people often make horrendous decisions. if the exercise becomes one of trying to discern God’s will rather than trying to be obedient to correct principles, one’s decision making begins to resemble divination more than Christlike behaviour.
If I heard the voice of God telling me to sacrifice my son on altar, there would be at least two possible interpretations. First, perhaps I am mentally ill, or have hallucinated. God did not really ask to me to do this—I conjured it up in my own mind. I have a cousin who is schizophrenic who is quite capable of hearing just such a voice. The other possibility is that he really did want me to do it. The first possiblity is far more likely than the second, I hope that I would be true to correct principles and not proceed to kill my son, or that my son would say “Dad, sorry but this just isn’t going to happen.” I cannot believe that God would be critical of either of us if we did not go through with it in those circumstances. If he really wants me to do something that violates my conscience, he will either have to relieve me of my free agency or make his will known with such power that there is no room for doubt. I simply could not kill my son as an act of faith. (Another option would be to do like Satan does, and make that course of action seem so very tempting!) If there is no room for doubt, I don’t see how my complying with his will would be an act of faith. It would be an act of self preservation, knowing that the omnipotent God of the universe had commanded me to take that action at peril of my eternal soul.