1) The Story of Abraham and Faith:
God informed Abraham, after he had waited for his promised son for 25 years, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” (Genesis 22:2, NIV) Abraham proceeded to go the 50 miles as instructed, with Isaac, two slaves, and a donkey. Abraham told his slaves to wait with the donkey until they got to God’s appointed place while he and Isaac walked up the mountain.
We shall worship and then we will return to you, he assured the men (Genesis 22:5, NIV). Abraham said that the Lord will provide the lamb when Isaac asked him where the animal for the sacrifice was. Abraham, who was distraught and perplexed, tied Isaac up with cords and set him on the stone altar. Abraham was about to kill his son when the Lord’s angel pleaded with him to stop and not hurt the child. Because Abraham had not kept his only son hidden, the angel claimed to know that Abraham feared the Lord. Abraham looked up and saw a ram with its horns trapped in a thicket. In place of his kid, he sacrificed the animal provided by God.
2) General interpretation of Abraham’s story:
God had already promised Abraham that via Isaac, he would make Abraham into a powerful nation. Abraham was compelled by this information to choose between trusting God with his most important concerns or mistrusting him. Abraham opted to have faith. Isaac had to put his faith in God and his father in order to voluntarily make the sacrifice. The small boy had been observing and studying his father Abraham, one of the most trustworthy characters in scriptures.
Abraham was being taught by God that complete devotion and submission to the Lord are necessary for covenant rewards. God’s promises to Abraham were kept because of his willingness to give up his cherished, promised son. This occurrence foreshadows the world’s sins being paid for by the death of God’s only son, Jesus Christ, on the cross at Calvary. The Lord provided a substitute for Isaac when He directed Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, just as He did when He offered Christ as our substitute via his sacrificial death. God demanded of himself what he did not demand of Abraham out of his immense love for us.
3) Kierkegaardian interpretation of Abraham’s story:
Kierkegaard was fully aware that the church had looked to Abraham as the founder of faith starting with Paul. The church has typically focused on God’s eventual decision to spare Isaac in response to Abraham’s steadfastness while discussing Gen 22:1-14, the tale of God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. However, Kierkegaard reinterpreted the story to highlight Abraham’s initial uncertainty, ambivalence, and suffering. Without the ambiguity that Abraham felt while attempting to grasp God’s intentions, Kierkegaard feared that faith would turn into spiritual haughtiness.
The account of Isaac’s almost-sacrifice in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling serves to challenge the idolatrous association of God with a culture’s ideals, even its most noble ones. In order to express his passionate concern for genuine faith, Kierkegaard invented the pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio (Latin for “from silence”). Johannes de Silentio is wary of breaking the profundity of silence before God with flimsy pious words, suspicious of popular culture, and utterly enthralled by the troubling plight of Abraham.
In four different ways, Kierkegaard relates the account of Abraham’s choice to sacrifice Isaac; each one emphasises Abraham’s struggle with hopelessness and challenges the reader to picture Abraham’s severe confusion. The author makes the reader confront the unsettling notion that being obedient to God can necessitate disobeying our most ingrained social values. A parent’s duty to protect his own child’s life is one of society’s most fundamental values, but Abraham’s love to God supersedes it.
Abraham’s anguish is transformed in Kierkegaard’s recounting into a deeply painful illustration of how even the most beloved moral principles can be rendered meaningless in the face of God’s requirements. Our relationships with God are more important than any of our commitments to socially useful ideals, such as being responsible citizens, diligent employees, conscientious businesses, and responsible parents. God is greater than the moral code of the typical good person living in a country that claims to be Christian.
Kierkegaard highlights the distinction between a life focused on God and a life dedicated to some culturally constructed idea of societal well-being through these musings on Abraham. The book Fear and Trembling raises more queries than it does solutions. Kierkegaard’s alias De Silentio never entirely succeeds at comprehending Abraham’s spiritual journey. However, his confusion about Abraham prompts the reader to reflect on how readily religion is equated with loyalty to the norms of any human group.
4) Leap of Faith:
We must first clarify what Soren Kierkegaard meant by the general concept of “leap” and where it fits into his existential philosophy in order to comprehend the significance of his well-known phrase, “leap of faith.” To replace the Hegelian idea of mediation between two conflicting parts, Kierkegaard proposed the term “leap.” The idea of a leap in Kierkegaard refers to a situation where a person is forced to make a decision because it cannot be rationally justified. The leap of faith, which results from a paradoxical conflict between the ethical and the religious, is a leap into faith that is permitted by it.
Abraham’s Leap of Faith is the most famous and significant example of such a leap in Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the argument that morality and religion are incompatible, and that killing one’s own child cannot be reconciled with following God. Because of this, Abraham had to take a leap of faith to obey God while still having faith that Isaac would survive.
Since it is a leap towards faith, moving from the aesthetic sphere of existence to the religious one, Kierkegaard names and defines it in this way. It is also a leap of faith because it can only be accomplished by faith and not by reason. Only the jump made Abraham the father of faith, or as Kierkegaard puts it: the knight of faith; he was unable to rationally justify his acts.
In his idea of leap of faith, Kierkegaard opposes a significant portion of rationalist philosophy, including that of René Descartes and Hegel, who held that faith can be supported by reasoned argument and that God can be rationally shown. Faith is a leap since, in Kierkegaard’s opinion, there is no basis for it. The idea of a leap of faith is intimately related to Kierkegaard’s ideas about the self and paradox or absurdity.
5) Its Relevance Today:
We operate in an objectified universe in the realities of our daily existence. Human externalisations, which are the culmination of numerous individuals’ subjectivities, are what make up society. It is acceptable to claim that, with regards to the creation of subjective truths, one must hold their passions in control and consider the ramifications of their beliefs because society’s construction depends on the externalisation of humans’ subjective beliefs and facts.
But how is this even conceivable? When the thing in which one places their faith is illogical in and of itself, or, at the very least, something the existence of which cannot be proven, is it feasible to evaluate one’s own views rationally? These people who have chosen to believe in spiritual truth in the face of absurdity have only their passions to support their beliefs; are these feelings sufficient to justify such a “leap”?
In order to fulfil our obligation to humanity, we must rigorously examine our ideas and never take them at face value. Otherwise, we risk becoming credulous as a society and embellishing our everyday reality with “trinkets” that we didn’t really deserve in order to avoid the absurd. These trinkets just serve to make up for what the cosmos lacks by providing a false sense of security. One could argue that this delusion of security leads us to view life only as a means to an end. There are people, for sure, who view life as nothing more than a stepping stone to a more holy existence. Living in the moment allows us to be open to a wide range of potentialities and opportunities that we might otherwise miss if we were to go through life with a sort of tunnel vision.
Choosing to live despite the absurdity of the world must also be a passionate decision if choosing to take a leap of faith qualifies. Both of these choices entail committing oneself to a specific way of life; acceptance of absurdity and rejection of absurdity both suggest a real choice.
Here, Kierkegaard makes a case for the significance of such a journey. Kierkegaard makes the wise inference that the “truth” we so fervently seek is outside of our prefabricated ideas of how the world works. As long as a person is alive, there are always evolving subjective truths that are ongoing. These truths are the building blocks of our reality.
The “truth” is something we encounter first-hand via regular, real human experience. The “truth,” which might exist outside the absurdity of our reality, is beyond our ability to understand. The only sources of experience through which any truth could be understood are one’s lens and daily narration, which are moulded and directed by internalised subjectivities. These lenses are arbitrary, vulnerable to human reasoning, and given simplistic explanations for why something exists.
So, is there any truth that exists outside of this crazy reality that is worthwhile pursuing? It seems absurd to establish a “truth” or “inherent meaning” based on a collection of disconnected pieces of reality that we organise and give meaning to. The divine truths we strive to produce are extensions of our commonplace, hopeless human experiences. Instead of accepting what we experience, the “truth” only provides an explanation for it.
The absurdity of the search is shown when it elevates us into an idealised interpretation of our seemingly useless existence, which assuages our worries and suffering. Kierkegaard writes, “You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you,” in Alexander Dru’s 2003 collection of his letters (no. 1395). We take a leap of faith as we live our everyday lives believing that one day the true reason for our existence might be revealed.