On Abraham and other patriarchs – James Butler in LRB:

“Then, when the child was older, God told the man to kill the boy as a sacrifice. God permitted no ambiguity about what he wanted. The man did not argue, as he had on another occasion when God proposed to destroy an entire city. A silence descended on him. He rose and walked three days to the place of sacrifice, his son carrying wood for an immolation but no sacrificial lamb.”

(…)

“Kant thought this story obscene: any theophany which commands so fundamental an ethical transgression as child murder cannot be considered divine; still less can obedience to it be celebrated as exemplary piety. This was his pretext for arguing that moral reason must never submit to authority, even when that authority seems to speak with the voice of God. It wasn’t just a theological matter. Isaac’s binding by his obscene and irrational father, Abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage Kant wanted society to escape. Prudently, the Prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again.”

(…)

“ The greatest modern response – an antithesis to Kant – was Kierkegaard’s, for whom the ethically impossible demand became the terrible, paradoxical predicate of faith. In Fear and Trembling he wondered how many had truly understood the story. ‘How many did it make sleepless?’ The pseudonym Kierkegaard used seems in sympathy with the story’s starkness: Johannes de Silentio.”

(…)

“ ‘Few and evil have been the days of my life,’ Jacob declares as his wanderings come to an end.
Marilynne Robinson is interested in readers of Scripture (she always capitalises the word). It furnishes the mental world of her characters and structures their stories. Her Gilead novels are a refraction of Genesis’s interest in wayward sons, familial deceit, guilt and hope, through the double prism of American religion and politics. James Wood once praised Robinson’s style for its ‘spiritual force’, derived from spare, unspotted Protestant exemplars. In the novels, plainness is a vehicle adequate to domestic grief and spiritual epiphany alike. Robinson’s precise style is tuned to pugnacity in her essays, in which bad readers of scripture abound: right-wing fundamentalists, cringing liberals, those who traffic in cliché and caricature about God, Christ, Calvin.”

(…)

“Recent interviews suggest her friendship with Obama has cooled during his Netflix-funded retirement. Another dictum: ‘It is my belief that a civilisation can trivialise itself to death.’”

(…)

“Robinson quotes Isaiah in support of her claim that God desires justice rather than sacrifice: the entire transactional logic, not just its dark hyperbole, is wrong. She insists on unmerited grace, which is a kind of short-circuit of that logic. The rare intrusion of a later text masks an awkwardness, however. God may not be interested in sacrifice, but Genesis is. Every interaction between God and man is marked by the pouring out of blood.”

(…)

“The writers of Genesis are literary revolutionaries, revising the familiar materials of their culture for a new purpose.”

(…)
“Everything really springs from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which has no known ancient parallel. It’s as if they were saying: this is what actually matters. Perhaps it took a marginalised, semi-nomadic, ragtag underclass, for whom a parade of divine kings meant little, to see that. ‘A wandering Aramaean was my father,’ they state in Deuteronomy.” (…)

“Like most revisionists, Robinson has never presented herself as such. Her rescue of Calvin from the theocratic terror and psychic dread of his reputation depends on her emphasis on his humanism, something he may not himself have recognised. Her determination to find universalism in Genesis also requires reading against the grain. She avoids the antisemitism often lurking in Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, and simply omits most questions of land and possession. Pagans are discovered to be virtuous, quite against the expectations of the patriarchs, who underestimate them. The human family is one, and the slavers who took Noah’s curse as a pretext were guilty of a misapprehension. The covenant with Abraham promises to bless ‘all the nations of the earth’ through him. The partial is a pretext for the universal.”

(…)

“Genesis was written among a historically marginal people, and it may be that marginality was the condition which produced its power. It is a sad but abundant historical irony that past oppression can be invoked as a guarantor of moral righteousness, a permanent exculpation, once power is finally attained. Any plea for the grandeur of scripture unmoored from the history of its use is at best incomplete. Interpretive closure turns it into a cudgel. As a member of a group historically tortured and murdered under the rubric of Sodom, this does not seem to me a marginal consideration.
Robinson tells us that ‘a given of the text is that God is interested in human beings’ and that its primary ethical lesson is that ‘to refrain, to put away power’ is Godlike. But which human beings? Merit is a recurrent anxiety for the Hebrew writers. Abraham, who received divine favour without obviously deserving it, finds his counter in Job, whose merit occasions only suffering. Viewed cynically, the covenant with Abraham looks like a protection racket, as hard-headed as the ancient suzerainty treaties from which it borrows its vocabulary. You don’t want to find yourself on the other side of providential history.” (…)

“To be memorialised as victims by your killers might be thought poor recompense for annihilation. Who can find majesty in this divine silence? I who am but dust and ashes dare to ask.”

Read the article here.

It’s Christianity that invented universalism, and according to some this universalism was already the death warrant of that religion. Judaism has no universal aspirations, although there are laws that are valid for gentiles, the seven laws of Noah.
Fear and Trembling is a great but difficult book, to believe is to trust and to trust is to leap into the abyss of the unknown, indeed an abyss where individual human life might be reduced to the life of an ant. If “reduced” is the word.

The death of “our” culture has become a life-affirming cliché, the culture is trivializing to death, so that contemporary prophets or other public intellectuals can warn us for dangers.

In other words: trivializing ourselves to death keeps us alive, because it enables prophets to rise up to the occasion.

It’s always dangerous when the marginalized become the center of power, but that’s history: the periphery becomes the center, before it turns into periphery once again.

And what would remain of religion without the transactional logic?