Knowing God’s voice: The problematic case of Abraham

I am experiencing what I knew would be the hard part about having a blog, which is actually keeping it up! It is even harder at the beginning I think, because I have so many thoughts running around in my head that it’s hard to find a good place to begin in attempting to make them coherent. But I think I will start by looking at the various ways of knowing mentioned in the Bible: knowing about God, knowing God’s will, knowing God, etc.

The story of apprehending God’s will that absolutely blows my mind and, quite frankly, bothers me is the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac at God’s command (as recounted in Genesis 22). When I have heard this story taught/preached, the focus is usually on Abraham’s faith. Indeed, the writer of Hebrews (in Hebrews 11) praises Abraham for his faith that he demonstrated in not withholding Isaac, his miracle child, from God when He asked for him back. Kierkegaard (in Fear and Trembling) also marvels at Abraham’s faith, suggesting that in faith he may have believed ‘on the strength of the absurd’ that he would somehow get Isaac back again.

However, what I don’t think I have ever heard discussed is how Abraham determined that it was God who was telling him to sacrifice his son. Judging by the Biblical record, Abraham was very close to God, and their relationship had a long history. He had arguably heard God’s voice enough times previously in his life that he could recognize it again. Presumably, he also knew something of God’s character. He didn’t have a written record of God’s dealings with people through history (such as the Bible), and God hadn’t given the ten commandments yet. But it seems fair to say that he had to have at least a basic grasp of God’s character and moral law.

The problem this raises is that when God tells him to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham doesn’t even question whether or not this is God (or if he does, the Biblical record gives no indication). This is in spite of the fact that the command God gives is more in keeping with the practices of paganism and the gruesome offerings sacrificed to pagan deities than anything remotely resembling God’s moral law. I might also add that it also sounds similar to his nephew Lot’s actions in offering up his virgin daughters to be gang raped in an attempt to protect the guests in his home (Genesis 19).

It seems there are a couple possible options for explaining Abraham’s approach. Either he did not know God’s moral law and prohibition of murder, and therefore saw nothing inconsistent in the command he received; or he placed a higher value on his sense-experience perception of what God was telling him than he did on his previously acquired knowledge of God. It seems to me that the first option is not likely. For someone to walk as closely with God as Abraham did and not know enough of His character to at least be aware that He would (generally) not be pleased by the sacrifice of his offspring seems improbable. That leaves the second option. So to be clear: Abraham acted drastically on the input he received through his sense experience rather than rational application of previous knowledge.

The implications of this are huge. The best example I can think of to illustrate this in the present era is that, if we are to follow Abraham’s example, we would be obligated to fly a plane into a building if we believed we heard God’s voice telling us to do so.

People who say they hear God’s voice today are usually looked at with suspicion. We may ask if they hear these voices often, if they have been to a psychiatrist lately, and if they are taking their medication. If they seem otherwise sane, we would probably ask what they were hearing, and compare that with what we think we know of God from the Biblical record. This rational application of previously acquired knowledge certainly trumps any supposed divine revelation most of the time; anything that does not line up is judged to be, at best, not from God. And I would guess that if a Christian told his pastor that God told him to fly a plane into a building, the pastor would probably call in the elders for an exorcism.

Another recommended way to judge whether something is from God is to ask for the counsel of Godly people – usually those senior to oneself. Yet Abraham does not do this either. The Bible indicates in Genesis 14 that, at least earlier in his life, Abram (as he was called at the time) had interactions with Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who the Bible says was “the priest of the most high God.” I don’t know if Melchizedek was still around by the time this incident occurred, but the fact that there was, somewhere, a “priest of the most high God” suggests that there were other followers of God that Abraham might have consulted. Not least of which would be his wife, the mother of the son he was prepared to sacrifice. Yet the author of Genesis seems to indicate that Abraham told no one else of God’s command, and did not ask for anyone’s help in determining if it was actually from God.

So where does this leave us? Do we say that Abraham is an anomaly – that his (childish?) obedience is a nice example of faith, but that this is a type of faith we should never practice? Or should we act like children of Abraham, and listen to God’s voice and follow wherever it leads?

I’ve realized that this also points more generally to the seemingly antithetical approaches of reason and faith. I would like to think that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive; rather, I would like to think that in fact it is impossible to have a mature faith without reason or a reason that makes any sense without faith. Yet the case of Abraham seems to falsify this position.

I don’t quite know how to even wrap this one up, except to say that I am sure I will revisit these issues of reason and faith in future writings. I do believe that God still speaks, and I hope that I will get better at listening. But, for better or worse, I know I don’t have the faith of Abraham.

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~ by HW on August 10, 2008.