Fear and Trembling

oh boy. this was A Lot. at times, i thought i read the same sentence twice, but nope, that's just how he writes!! though short, this text essentially acts as an in-depth study of abraham's sacrifice of isaac and the ultimate calling and irrationality of faith. kierkegaard wrote in direct opposition to the danish church, which cultivated a lukewarm Christianity, so this makes sense contextually. the story of isaac's sacrifice is definitely not unfamiliar to me; i've personally held onto it to comprehend certain events in my own life. kierkegaard's take on "surrender", however, looks a little different from what i've inherited from modern reformed teaching. instead, he fixates on the actual morality of abraham's actions and the outward insanity of the sacrifice itself. kierkegaard argues that abraham transcends the universal/ethical motivations that hegel and other philosophical scholars touted as the premiere calling. he even manages to surpass "infinite resignation" by rising to the highest calling of all: an absolute love for God. i don't really agree with all of kierkegaard's suppositions about faith; i think of it more like a gift out of God's sovereignty than an individual passion. i also think the "resignation" part is intrinsically linked to faith itself; i think that's what taking up your cross implies. still, i can appreciate his honest wrestling with the paradoxes of faith. like, same. ultimately, i was reminded of 1 corinthians 1:18: "for the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

Very challenging.

Used the creepy story of Abraham and Issac to talk about faith. Abraham who waited 70 years to have a child, and then takes him for a walk with a knife hidden in his robe and lies to his only, cherished son and tells him the they'll find a lamb somewhere to offer as a sacrifice - but his plans are to sacrifice his son. Because he thinks God has told him to do it. I think I might have missed the point.

This is an incredible book, but one I hardly understood- partially because I'm not trained in philosophy, and partially, I think, because Kierkegaard was dealing with a topic that comes near being inexpressible. Fear and Trembling is a philosophical consideration of the story of Abraham and Isaac. The central question is: how could it have been moral for Abraham to consent to sacrifice his own son to God? Kierkegaard is determined that we not take this question lightly. Jews and Christians frequently dismiss this problem by stating that Abraham was a man of faith- but that will not do for Kierkegaard. Yes, it was faith, but what does that mean? Is faith the willingness to suspend any notion of morality at the bidding of The Absolute? Can God command that a person ignore morality to obey him? Very likely, no one in their right mind would do what Abraham did. More likely they would sacrifice themselves to God in their child's place. Self-sacrifice would be noble, Kierkegaard admits. Noble, yes, but it wouldn't be faith. It would be tragic and heroic, but faithless. What, then, is faith? This is the central question to Kierkegaard's book. I don't think the answer can be pared down to a single sentence (which is why he wrote a whole book about it) but if I had to stab at it I would say, borrowing Kierkegaard's terminology, that faith is this: sacrificing everything to the Absolute, as an individual who, by relating to the Absolute, transcends ethics, and then believing on the strength of the absurd that everything will be regained by your sacrifice. If nothing else, that's at least a description of what Abraham did. The power and significance of this is not simply religious, it's philosophically practical. If faith- an existential sacrifice that rests on the absurd- is a possibility (and it must be, if we accept the story of Abraham and Isaac) then that means there is a mode of living that transcends reason and which reason cannot comprehend. We don't like to relax our grip on our reason, and philosophers from Plato to Hegel lashed themselves to it like sailors to a wheel. But, to quote Kierkegaard, "faith begins where reason leaves off." And the fact that reason does leave off eventually is a significant one. I could go on. But in the end, it's just a bunch of existentialism, which isn't surprising. I think it's significant, however, that the father of existentialism was tapping into the veins of Christianity when he established his philosophy. The title for the book is taken (I think) from Philippians 2 in which Paul entreats his congregation to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling." This is the existential, the Christian, and the Abrahamic project. The movement of faith that Kierkegaard describes should only be attempted with fear and trembling, but it can be attempted with an eye toward salvation - though it comes on the strength of the absurd.

This was probably the most difficult philosopher I've had to read so far this year. While, I was not well versed in philosophy enough to understand the book entirely, the class discussions that followed did help clarify points Kierkegaard made. I did enjoy his analogies and references back to Abraham, as those did help clarify his philosophy.