The blinding horror of Abraham’s faith

A thought experiment: if they had asked me to edit the Bible (whoever “they” might be—perhaps the Holy Spirit, or the heavenly Council on Divinely Inspired Works) . . . if they had made me the original editor of the Bible, I would have made some substantial changes. The very first change would have been to get rid of the 22nd chapter of Genesis, the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. “It’s way too off-putting,” I would have argued. “Just listen to this: And God said, Take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac, and take him to some as yet unspecified place, and offer him there as a burnt offering. This is exactly the kind of story that gives the Old Testament a bad name,” I would have said. “It gives God a bad name. If you put this story just 22 chapters into the Bible, who is going to read the rest? Even if the story is true, who would want to believe in a God like this?”

Mine is a commonsense argument, which must have occurred to countless sensible people through the ages. Certainly the literary and theological geniuses who put together the book of Genesis must have considered this argument and dismissed it. Raising my sights, I imagine making my argument to the heavenly Council on Divinely Inspired Works, and after they have listened politely, they would tell me that I have completely missed the point. The point of this story is not to make people want to believe in Abraham’s God—who is, of course, also Jesus’ God and father. Rather, this harrowing story exists to help people who already believe make sense of their most difficult experience, when God seems to take back everything they have ever received at God’s hand. In other words, the Holy Spirit and the heavenly council would tell me, the point is not to draw people in but rather to help people who are already in stay in—stay in relationship with the one true God, even when their world turns upside down.

This story appears front and center in Genesis, where no reader of the Bible can miss it, because the hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful more often than we like to admit. I remember the words of my young friend, a devout Roman Catholic, just a few hours after his first child had died in birth, strangled by her umbilical cord. “I could say, Why me? But why not me? I knew this happens to people, and it never made me doubt God before. So why should I doubt God now? But still, I do not understand.”