Using the biblical narrative of the sacrifice of
Isaac for purposes other than elucidating biblical truth is not a new
phenomenon. Wilfred Owen, like Leonard Cohen, made up his own version of
it, too, in a poem, which Benjamin Britten subsequently used in his famous ”War
Requiem”, composed to celebrate the re-inauguration of the cathedral of
Coventry, which had been destroyed by the Germans during World War II. Owen had
died in World War I. In Owen’s poem Abraham is used figuratively, representing
the fathers, which put their sons at stake by sending them into war. Owen
depicts a crotchety old man, who deliberately, arbitrarily and stubbornly
resists the angelic interference, which would have spared Isaac’s life, just as
it did in the original story. This smacks very much of the
“anti-father-revolution” which Bonhoeffer described in his analysis of the
anti-Christian currents which were to become a vital element in Hitler’s
ascendancy to power. Anyway here is Owen’s version of the story:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son,
When lo! and angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son, -
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
(taken from Naxos’ CD publication of Britten’s War
Requiem, Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd., 1961)
A Biblical perspective concerning the Sacrifice of Isaac
Leonard Cohen’s use of the biblical account demands a clarification of the real content and purpose of the biblical narrative of the Sacrifice of Isaac. Its theological significance is obviously ignored, by Cohen, by Owen as well as by those wanting to use it in order to discredit Judaism and Christianity. With the prevailing biblical illiteracy that is quite a simple task. Anybody not knowing the biblical context will feel that this story “stinks”. With many national education systems cultivating subtle or open hostility towards parents as well as towards biblical standards and Christian truth, it is no wonder that many teachers become prone to despise this story and will therefore not bother to try to understand it from a theological perspective, on the hermeneutical terms of the Bible itself. Consequently they loose out on the factual meaning of the passage.
A theological investigation of the narrative,
taking into consideration the context of the passage, reveals the following:
Concerning Isaac: He wasn’t just any kind of son
of any kind of father. Abraham had been told by God before that his offspring
would be as numerous as the stars in the sky – yet many years went by with
Abraham’s wife Sarah reaching an age where childbirth was normally impossible.
Eventually, however, God fulfilled his promise and Sarah gave birth to Isaac.
He wasn’t just ”fucked up”, to use Philip Larkin’s terminology, from his
”poem” ”This be the Verse”. Isaac was not mere matter created my earlier
matter at random, according to an evolutionary, materialistic worldview. Just
as God had a special plan for the world with Adam and Even, he wanted to start
something peculiar for and within humanity with Abraham and Isaac.
Abraham was first of all called out of his native
country Ur. A risky emmigration followed without any kind of politically based
security for Abraham. He had to live as an immigrant in a strange country. Then
the humiliating years of waiting for God’s promise to come true. Doubts, fears,
anxiety. Kierkegaard described this well. And now finally this completely
contradictory and alienating command, to sacrifice Isaac. Drawing a parallel
between modern parents abusing their children at home and Abraham setting out
to sacrifice his son is therefore completely absurd. Abraham did not have some
arbitrary, sadistic, egotistical motive. As a matter of fact, Abraham’s deed
should rather be seen as a fatal blow to child sacrifice, as noted by Marcus
Dods in ”The Expositor’s Bible”, Vol. 1 (edited by W. Robertson Nicoll), Marcus
Dods writes on page 54:
”[Abraham] may have seen Canaanite fathers
offering their children to gods, [which] he knew to be utterly unworthy of any
sacrifice; and this may have rankled in his mind until he felt shut up to offer
his all to God in the person of his son, his only son, Isaac. ... it became his
conviction that God desired him to offer his son; this was a sacrifice which
was in no respect forbidden by his own conscience. But although not wrong in
Abraham’s judgment, this sacrifice was wrong in the eye of God; how then can we
justify God’s Command, that he should make it? We justify it precisely on that
ground which lies patent on the face of the narrative – God meant Abraham to
make the sacrifice in spirit, not in the outward act. He meant to write deeply
on the Jewish mind the fundamental lesson regarding sacrifice, that it is in
the spirit and will all true sacrifice is made. God intended what actually
happened, that Abraham’s sacrifice should be complete and that human
sacrifice should receive a fatal blow. So far from introducing into
Abraham’s mind erroneous ideas about sacrifice, this incident finally dispelled
from his mind such ideas and permanently fixed in his mind the conviction that
the sacrifice God seeks is the devotion of the living soul, not the consumption
of a dead body. God met him on the platform of knowledge and of morality to
which he had attained, and by requiring him to sacrifice his son taught him and
all his descendants in what sense alone such sacrifice can be acceptable. God
meant Abraham to sacrifice his son, but not in the coarse material sense. God
meant him to yield the lad truly to Him; to arrive at the consciousness that
Isaac more truly belonged to God than to him, his father. It was needful that
Abraham and Isaac should be in perfect harmony with the Divine will. Only by
being really and absolutely in God’s hand could they, or can any one, reach the
whole and full good designed for them by God”
What is more, in Christian theology in particular
the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted allegorically. Abraham becomes a ”type”,
a shadow, symbol or spiritual prototype, of God Father Himself, in His giving
up His own son, Jesus Christ, for humanity. In this view Abraham does not lie,
when he tells Isaac that God will choose a lamb of sacrifice of His own, but he
is in fact prophesying concerning the substitutional death of Christ. Isaac
then becomes a type or symbol for Christ’s resurrection (preshadowed by the
fact that he survives his submission to God) and even stronger than that, of
the true Christian’s submission to God, of the Christians being dead and yet
living in Christ and thereby receiving the promise of the resurrection just as
Isaac receives a renewed covenantal promise of the old Abrahamic covenant (all
nations becoming blessed through him).
The narrative of Abraham setting out to sacrifice
Isaac is also a type of the scandal of the cross. The cross of Christ has now
become a ritualistic symbol, which does not convey the horrific, humiliating,
frightening and scandalous meaning it had in the first century after Christ. In
the ancient world the mere notion of a God letting Himself become executed was
beyond any decent person’s natural capacity of comprehension and nobody would
naturally sympathize with it. Yet the story of Abraham is theologically seen
the same thing, in many respects. And since it has not been ritualized and
merchandized (you cannot wear a mount Morija round your neck) it has pertained
the original effect of it being conceived of as ridiculous and dangerous.
Everybody reading this story and not understanding it from the perspective of
the message of the cross of the New Testament, will automatically feel
compelled to promote, endorse and agree with state legislations leading to
immediate seizure of children growing up in homes where this story is read with
reverence and awe, just as any decent Roman citizen in the first century AD
found it the most logical, civilized, pedagogically responsible and lawful
action to persecute Christians holding to this scandalous doctrine of an
exclusive and particular God, that would not share His place with other gods or
goddesses (including the emperor), and who exhibited that revulsive epitome of
lack of taste by actually becoming executed on behalf of his followers!
Ebbe Kløvedal Reich wrote in his book about
Grundtvig’s life that according to Grundtvig the Jewish way of thinking
promoted fatherliness. A Jewish rabbi first had to become a family father in
order to be able to teach authoritatively. The Hellenistic mindset, however,
contains elements of an anti-father revolution. Here we have the
Oedipus-principle that reigns. Oedipus kills his father in order to get his
father’s wife, who happens to be Oedipus’ mother. Christianity became more
Hellenistic, unfortunately, and the Romish Church demanded celibacy of its
priests. Fatherhood was to be replaced by brotherhood. In the story of Abraham
and Isaac we see son and father united in their devotion and submission to God.
”They went together”. Isaac is not submitting primarily to Abraham, he
is first of all submitting to God, because he knows that Abraham is submitted
to God. Mutual submission to God heals all family problems and tensions that
might have existed between a father and his child. This theme occurs several
times in the Bible, see for example in Malachi 4:6 (Modern
King James Version): ”And he shall turn the heart of
the fathers to the sons, and the heart of the sons to their fathers, that I not
come and strike the earth with utter destruction”. This is the kind of
father-son relationship, which most people hate, because they cannot grasp the
essence of it.
The real message which lies under the surface of this text, which at first
glance sounds terribly rugged, old-fashioned, sectarian, obnoxiously religious
and perverted could be summarized as follows: Whoever trusts God fully, will
give up the best that he or she has even if it does not make sense on the
outside. Such submission, if shared, will lead to true unity in Spirit, not a
fake-unity based upon some compulsive and manipulative consensus. God will
reward such an attitude with a genuine blessing, not some bloated and inflated
phoney self-esteem. The person who submits to God in this way, will receive
everything he or she has given up back ”a hundredfold” as Jesus says. The real
Christian is one who is ”in Christ” because he or she is dead in
Christ and therefore overcomes that other kind of death, which, according
to the New Testament, every human being has, namely the death which comes
through sin. Because of this, that Christian is also seated together with
Christ in heaven, all the while he or she is still walking on earth. Whoever
earnestly believes this doctrine will surely become crucified in one way or
another as well, just as Christ had been! God himself died on the altar instead
of Isaac or any other human being having to die there. But in order to partake
of the blessings which come from this fact one has to be ready to take Isaac’s
place, just as the apostle Paul actually states in Romans 12, 1: ”...
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, which is your
reasonable service.” (Modern King James Version). This is really the
essence of the story.
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