Reading the story of God testing Abraham to sacrifice his son reared its head again in our nightly devotions with our children. Somehow, reading these stories (made more palatable already in the Action Bible) have a shocking reality to them. And I'm left at a loss how to REALLY explain them to my children. So as I was jolted by this story again, I remembered there was one individual who expended a lot of energy on plumbing the depths of this mysterious command. He was my good friend Soren Kierkegaard.
The interesting bit about Kierkegaard was that he has this complex entanglement of his pseudonyms, his relationship to the woman he was engaged to, Regine Olsen, and then his own mission before God. As I look back on what I've read previously and determined to once again take up and read this overly read little book, it hit me that the Biblical story is merely the occasion for these complex streams to intersect. So how did he approach this story with these other complex streams that coalesce? Hopefully, if I see this through a bit, we will see. I hope to give a organically biblical answer to the original troubling story from the text itself. But lets wrestle a bit with it. And as Kierkegaard used the biblical story for an occasion for his own personal and missional expression, make we can use his book as a occasion for understanding this unusual command in the redemptive scheme of God.
