abe and isaac
Having never even stepped on church grounds, besides for a wedding, this is the first time I have heard of the story of Abraham and Isaac, let alone having read it. After reading the passage I must confess that I was quite surprised and confused. My initial reaction was that of many questions. Why does Abraham obey God? What kind of sick test is this? Why should anyone be this scared of God that they would be driven to kill their only son? What would the consequence have been had Abraham said no? With these questions bearing on my mind I moved on to Adams' "Abraham's Dilemma." Adams' chapter on this situation provided insight on some of my questions while also enlightening me with some very interesting arguments. Here I will summarize the story of Abraham and Isaac, which appears in Genesis 22. God decides to test Abraham so He commands him to take his only son to a mountain that He tells him about and proceed to burn him as a sacrifice. Abraham without question gathers wood and brings his son to the place God tells him about. Making his son carry the wood of which he would be burnt on they set off to the mountain where the sacrifice was to be held. During the
(1) If God commands me to do something, it is not morally wrong for me to do it. To try and understand why Abraham obeyed God we must first try to understand what Abraham's thoughts were. Adams I feel does a great job at finding three main points in which Abraham believes: Now the challenge is to figure out which belief we must reject. It is obvious that you cannot keep all three because of the inconsistency it raises. But it is not obvious to which belief we want to reject. I believe ideally, if it were possible, we can reject the first two. But if we are to go along with Adams' chapter then we will reject each one, doing so one by one. Adams starts out by stating that the easiest way and most popular way of rejecting the first belief is that "what is morally wrong is eternally and necessarily wrong, and would therefore still be wrong, and certainly not obligatory, even if God commanded it (and never forbade it)" (Adams, p.27). I personally find this statement absolutely correct. Whether I truly practice this is another case altogether. This type of attitude leads to the "do as I say and not as I do" type of reasoning. It is not to say that I would do some
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Approximate Word count = 795
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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