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Pinkfish_411 t1_iw5c2ux wrote

Reply to comment by B33Man88 in A cross between an Existentialist and an Old Testament prophet, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard urged his "single individual" reader to follow the "highest passion" of faith rather than becoming one of the stereotyped pseudo-individuals of "The Crowd" by thelivingphilosophy

In its canonical form, the testing of Abraham is just that, a testing of Abraham. The narrative tension is built on Isaac being the child of the promise who is now being demanded to be offered back to God. To say that it's simply to make the point that child sacrifice is no longer necessary is a very shallow reading that might make sense divorced from canonical context but makes no sense when read canonically as Scripture.

Kierkegaard does read the story incorrectly, but his error is in treating the narrative tension as an ethical one--Abraham being asked to do that which violates the ethical, the killing of Isaac--rather than one that calls into question the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham. Abraham wasn't wrestling with the ethics of sacrificing his son, but he would have wrestled with the fact that the same God who had miraculously given him this child through whom he was to become the father of nations was now asking for that child back.

That said, focusing on whether Kierkegaard gets the biblical narrative correct is to completely miss the whole point of what he's doing, and his philosophical reflection on the story demands analysis on its own merits. the purpose isn't biblical exegesis.

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B33Man88 t1_iw5ixt3 wrote

He uses his modern context to draw his conclusions. It’s misplaced. I can’t get past it to find a greater meaningful understanding of ethics. Shame on me.

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Pinkfish_411 t1_iw5mjnw wrote

Well, yeah, he's definitely using his modern context; it's a work of modern philosophy, in response to other modern philosophy (like Hegel). Again, it's not a work of biblical exegesis. It's certainly worth turning to some secondary literature to understand what he's doing there rather than getting hung up by treating it like a bad piece of Old Testament scholarship. You can pretty much bracket any scholarship on the sacrifice of Isaac because it's just beside the point.

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