beyond resignation, that is, on impossible grounds—on grounds beyond the totality of the ethical itself: “for it is great to grasp hold of the eternal but greater to stick to the temporal after having given it up.”16 Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac is a decision of faith precisely to the extent that it is not a decision to give up either Isaac or the ethical. Johannes invites the reader to share his wonder at the fact that Abraham never ceases to hold to Isaac and to the ethical, by holding to God’s promise and possibility concerning him, even as he raises the knife.
The extent to which the faith of Abraham entails a distinctive embrace of the ethical within the very decision to sacrifice Isaac is further illustrated in the accompanying sketch of the “happy burgher,” a sketch of how a contemporary knight of faith—presumably, a modern-day Abraham—might appear in nineteenth century Copenhagen. On the surface, this knight of faith bears very little resemblance to Abraham. The figure he does resemble, however, with “remarkable similarity,” is “the bourgeois philistine” (a middle class, decidedly non-intellectual and non-spiritual, businessman).17 Needless to say, there are no abhorrent breaches of ethical responsibility such as child sacrifice and the like visible here. Indeed, the “extremity” of Abraham’s ordeal is nowhere to be seen.
He looks like a tax gatherer. . . . He is solid through and through. His stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to finitude, no smartly turned-out townsman taking a stroll out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground with surer foot; he belongs altogether to the world, no petit bourgeois belongs to it more. . . . No heavenly glance or any other sign of the incommensurable betrays him; if one didn’t know him it would be impossible to set him apart from the rest of the crowd.18
One can only marvel at this startling identification of two such starkly contradictory scenes: Abraham ascending Moriah and a contented petit bourgeois walking through the park. If one recalls the opening of Fear and Trembling, Johannes gives a series of differing versions of the trip to Moriah, his own versions that attempt to present an Abraham he could understand—versions that included a glimpse of a grimace of anger, a wince of pain, a clenched fist, the fallen countenance of resignation or despair. But none of these, in Johannes’s reading, are given in the biblical story, not a hint of understandable human response to such a horrible task. It is as if Abraham on his way to Moriah is indeed indistinguishable—to the neutral observer—from a well-fed merchant on the way to market. And this incognito is no doubt a clue to the nature of Abrahamic faith about which Johannes can only wonder (and tremble). But clue or not, one is apt to take offense here at the seeming trivialization of the horror of Abraham’s act, and especially what it meant for Isaac. Yet there is more to the modern day Abraham than meets the eye.
The happy burgher is indistinguishable from the crowd, and yet, Johannes continues, “he purchases every moment he lives . . . at the dearest price; not the least thing does he do except on the strength of the absurd.”19 Johannes insists that he is essentially akin to Abraham after all. His open-armed, full-blooded relation to the ethical whole of the creaturely realm, his being at home in the world, is at every moment the invisible double movement of faith.
He drains in infinite resignation the deep sorrow of existence . . . he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, whatever is most precious in the world [Isaac!], and yet to him finitude tastes just as good as to one who has never known anything higher . . . the earthly form he presents is a new creation on the strength of the absurd.20
In light of Johannes’s description of the happy burgher as a knight of faith, the meaning of the sacrifice of Isaac as an illustration of the nature of faith demands radical reconsideration. Stephen Crites’s observations are enlightening in this regard.
But faith, after negating the finite . . . negates as well the infinitude that stands opposed to it, and so embraces again the things of this world. On different terms, however: For now earthly things are no longer . . . self-explanatory . . . simply given in the nature of things . . . the earthly things faith now embraces it receives as miraculous gifts fresh from the hand of God. . . . Faith realizes existentially what it means to live, not in a self-contained cosmos, but in creation.21
When the story of Abraham and the happy burgher of Copenhagen are read together, the sacrifice of faith takes on the nature of a radicalized relation to the finite world, and the persons and things within it, that gives up the status and authority of the ethical as such and in its own right, and whole-heartedly embraces it rather as a gift from God, which is understood to be its proper basis. Faith is not a sacrifice (giving up) of the neighbor, but a receiving and embracing of the neighbor on their proper basis, as a gift from God.
Again, then, the key point with regard to faith? On Abraham’s terms: Abraham’s decision of faith is not a breach or rejection of the ethical, but rather an affirming yet displacing embrace of the ethical on the grounds of faith—understood as the distinctive and particular relation to God. In the faith of Abraham, “the ethical is reduced to the relative.” And Johannes is quick to add, “it doesn’t follow . . . that the ethical is to be done away with. Only that it gets quite a different expression.”22 Abraham’s decision of faith only appears as a breach of the ethical if one assumes that, in the Hegelian (and as we shall see, modern in a more general sense) understanding of faith, the ethical is the highest in relation to faith. But if Abraham is taken as determinative of the nature of faith then it is faith that is the highest, and the ethical is not rejected, but is wholly embraced, albeit as relative to faith.
One of Kierkegaard’s tricks in his reading of Hegel, then, is to overturn the Hegelian supersessionist movement of “going further” than Abrahamic faith by which the particularity of faith is embraced, superseded and given its true content and meaning from the higher, universal standpoint of the ethical. And in the reading of Barth that follows we will find that this overturned supersessionist structure of affirmation and displacement, by which the ethical is embraced on grounds other than its own, that is, on the impossible grounds of faith, is remarkably similar to the riskily supersessionist structure of an evangelical Christian faith’s embrace of Abraham and the Jewish neighbor. As the argument goes on to show, there seems to be enough supersessionism here for everyone. And consequently, the remedy does not easily—or ever—escape the poison (at least as far as what is humanly possible).
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If one looks closely, then, at the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel as it is staged in Fear and Trembling, it is clear that what is at issue is not an either/or decision between faith and the ethical. Rather, the issue is an either/or decision between two understandings of faith, in its relation to the ethical. One understanding sees the God-relation of faith as “the highest,” and as such, the proper ground of the ethical. I am calling this an understanding of faith that takes Abraham as a model. Such an understanding of faith has several distinctive elements. The first two are structural.
1. The God to whom one is in relation in faith is absolutely distinguishable from creation and humanity and, as such, is “over all.” Consequently, the relation of faith to God is absolutely distinguishable from all relations to creation and humanity.
2. The relation of faith to God is held to be absolutely prior and binding, determining the nature and status of all relations to creation and humanity.
3. The third element is substantive, dealing with singular content: the God to whom one is in relation in faith is the God of Abraham, a God who embarks upon a determinate, particular history with this determinate, particular people, through which God works to bless all people and all of
