Ellen Davis – The Binding of Isaac
Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (2001)
This book commends a style of spiritually reading that is, I think, largely unfamiliar to Christians. I offer it as an alternative to two more common ways of approaching the Old Testament. The first, common among conservative Christians, is to read it chiefly as prophesying the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Those who take this approach also find moral teachings useful to Christians in some parts of the Old Testament (the Ten Commandments, Proverbs and a few psalms) and an account of history in other parts (Genesis, Exodus.) The rest is largely ignored. A second option, more common among liberal Christians, as to assume that wherever the Old Testament is not repugnantly boring, if represents a distinctly inferior moral sensibility. It is assumed that everything necessary for salvation appears in the New Testament, in a conveniently abbreviated form. My approach differs from both. I am looking for what the Old Testament tells us about intimate life with God.
The New Testament writers always presuppose the Old Testament and not only in the places where they specifically cite it for support. They assume that their audience is already familiar with and benefiting from its instruction. In other words, the Old Testament is their theological base, referred to and deferred to.
To really get the most out of the Old Testament, we must learn to “turn the pages slowly.” Our usual reading style reflects our culture’s admiration for speed, but the Bible’s riches are perceptible only to those who move slowly; like mushroom hunters we must peer closely where there appears to be nothing at all. Almost always it is useful to linger over a word or phrase that seems strangely chosen, to ask, “Why does the Bible say it this way, instead of the way we might have expected?” It is by means of words that the Bible performs its revelatory function. An unexpected word can jar us into contemplating new possibilities of how things really are.
The Bible is relentlessly realistic about the world and our situation in it. It does not pretend that things are better than they are, nor entice us to imagine that we can transcend difficulties through some kind of spiritual superiority, innate or acquired. Nevertheless, a radical change happens as we read deeply. John Calvin compared the Bible to a pair of spectacles: it enables us to see things as they are. As an example, let us look at the story of The Binding of Isaac, Genesis 22.
Our natural, instinctive response to this story is to reject it. Surely, a foreign element has snuck into our Biblical tradition. It is not just pre-Christian but sub-Christian, antithetical to everything we know to be true about God the Father of Jesus Christ. So, we throw it out. Another way of nullifying it is to apply historical criticism: this story marks a key juncture in the religious and ethical development of Israel – the point at which Israel rejected the archaic (and archeologically well attested) pagan practice of burning babies to placate the deity. After all, Isaac was not slaughtered; he was released at the divine command. This approach would clearly demonstrate why this story is in the Bible at all: Israel celebrates the breakthrough to “ethical religion.”
Yet, the historical approach, like the instinctual one, involves a contradiction of a fundamental kind: it contradicts the story itself. While it is true that Isaac is not sacrificed, it is also true that neither Abraham nor God ever repudiates that practice as a grisly abomination. The text refuses the historian’s kind offer to make God and Abraham look good. Abraham doesn’t want to do it, but he never says, “God must be mistaken.” God stops Abraham but he never accuses him of having misread the divine mind. So, as involved readers of the Bible, our back is against the wall – and that is exactly the position in which the Bible intends to put us, especially here at the very beginning of our reading into the long and difficult account of Israel’s life with God.
It's important we find a way to deal with this because we need to know what kind of God we are committing to. It gives us crucial information about God the Father. Without the kind of information we can gain here, Jesus’ death on the cross is more than shocking or tragic. It is nonsensical. The essential theological problem – “Why does God ask this?” – whatever ‘this’ is, is one of the abiding questions in Israel’s life. The Passion narratives pose it in the sharpest and most poignant way. For us, who cannot avoid the text, who are backed up against the wall, the only way out is to read, but more carefully and slowly than usual, because this is a story in which not a word is wasted, nor casually chosen.
To start with, the text begins “After these things…” We are forced to ask, “What things are we talking about here?” This story does not stand alone. Getting it into proper perspective depends on remembering the things that came before. This boy, Isaac, was the miraculous fruit of barrenness and old age, coming late after God uprooted Abram and Sarah from all that was familiar and sent them (“Get you going!”) across the known world with only the promise of a blessing. Twenty-five years later, Isaac is born, and now Abraham is being asked to sacrifice his “only” son.
That word only, calls attention to one of those “things” we must keep in mind. Abraham has another son, Ishmael who, at Sarah’s insistence, has been driven out of the camp, along with his mother, so that he would not receive any part of the blessings due Isaac. As far as Abraham knows, he may have only one son left; the other might have died. Now, there is no mistaking that fact that it is upon Isaac that the hope for the future rests. Genesis is primarily a book about God, and only secondarily about human beings encountering God. So, what does this story tell us about God? Here, in the Bible, all we have to guide us are the words.
When the sacrifice is aborted, there is a sense of relief, but the relief is not Abraham’s but God’s. Abraham has passed the loyalty test. And it is a real test. This ghastly ordeal, one time only in the history of the world, was designed to give God certain and critical information about this man Abraham. The test will show whether he cares about God above everything and everyone else, even above Isaac, his one hope of seeing God’s promise fulfilled.
And God said, “For now I know that you are a God-fearer.”
God knows something now that God did not know before. Genesis offers little support for a doctrine of divine omniscience, if by that we mean that God knows everything we are going to do before we do it. God can only know things that have already happened. And the free response of the human will is not a thing that can be known, with any certainty, in advance.
But why should Abraham be singled out thus, to be tested in a way no one else in the Bible is tested, before or since? Let us go back to the first words, “After these things, God tested Abraham.” God may not know what might happen, but he knows what did happen. There have been a lot of difficult experiences for Abraham in the past few years, but also a lot of difficult experiences for God. Look at the history of mankind up to this point as seen from God’s perspective: the betrayal in the garden in the first generation, the murder of a brother in the second, the rapid escalation of violence so that the whole world becomes filled with it. With the flood, God resolves to make a clean sweep, but nothing really changes. The first eleven chapters of Genesis, from Eden to the Tower of Babel, is predominately a story of steady alienation from God, human rejection of God.
And so, in chapter twelve, God tries a new strategy. At this point, God gives up on trying to work a blessing upon all humankind. From now on, God will work through one man, one family, one people. The old strategy did not work, but the new one is hardly surefire. We should not be surprised if adopting it makes God anxious, for now everything depends on this one man, Abraham. And Abraham does not have a good track record when it comes to faithfulness. Twice it is recorded that Abraham has Sarah pass herself off as his sister. He lets his beautiful wife go into a king’s harem rather than trusting her to God’s protection on their sojourn. It is a disappointing showing for God’s best man.
God, having been badly burned by human sin throughout the first chapters of Genesis, yet still passionately desirous of working blessing in the world, now chooses to become vulnerable on the point of this one man’s faithfulness. We are more comfortable using the “omni” words – omnipotent, omniscient – to describe God. Yet, if we properly understand the dynamics of covenant relationships, a relationship between two partners who make binding promises to each other and work together to reach a common goal, then we find that God, too, can be vulnerable. God needs Abraham to work with him towards a goal, the blessing of the entire world. If Abraham were to be unfaithful, God had rather know it now than later.
As both testaments maintain, the covenant with God is an unbreakable bond of love, and experience shows us that love and vulnerability are inextricably linked. We are most vulnerable to emotional pain when the well-being and faithfulness of those we love are at stake. There are important parallels between this story and the final resurrection appearance of Jesus in the gospel of John when Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me more than these?” What might be our crucified Lord’s interest in pressing that question so hard? Peter is the Rock on which the Church will be built. Just as with Abraham, God has a lot riding on Peter’s faithfulness. The question is another expression of divine vulnerability. Will Peter be faithful to his calling?
And, of course, the parallel of God’s selfless willingness to sacrifice his own son for the good of humanity. In Jesus Christ we see a son of Abraham sparing nothing, totally faithful in covenant relationship with God. At the same time, we see God expressing his faithfulness as excruciating vulnerability, even to death on a cross.
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Ellen Davis is Associate Professor of the Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School. She has taught at Union Seminary, Yale Divinity School and the Virginia Theological Seminary.
Coming Next: Robert John Russell: History of Christian Belief in Divine Action - Quantum Mechanics and the Laws of Nature (1991)