my emphasis. This demonstrates an implication of my argument, that modern assumptions—especially what I call the modern ethical desire—determine much of today’s theology (even that claiming itself to be postmodern; and even my own, of course) in ways neither theologian nor reader appear to be explicitly aware.
25. I borrow this phrase from the title of Gary Dorrien’s book, Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology Without Weapons.
26. I am indebted to Dhawn Martin for this phrasing, as well as for the insight that the argument of the book can indeed be positioned in this way vis-à-vis Anselm and the task of Christian apologetics.
27. There is a strong consensus here, from Jewish theologians like Emil Fackenheim to Christian theologians who are relatively generous readers of Barth, like Kendall Soulen and Katherine Sonderegger.
28. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique.
chapter 2
Kierkegaard and Hegel on Abraham: The Openness and Complexity of the Modern Context
In the previous chapter I suggested that there were three key, inter-related dimensions constitutive of contemporary theological remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor that are importantly related to the wider context of contemporary analysis of the problem of Christian faith more generally: the nature of imperialistic discourse, the relation of particularity to universality, and the relation of concrete religious faith to the ethical. In this chapter I give a reading of the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel, as staged in Fear and Trembling, to demonstrate the extent to which these inter-related dimensions emerge and function within the deeper context of modernity’s foundational struggle with the particularity of Abraham and the nature of religious faith. The imperialistic logic of what I am calling the sectarian-particular is fleshed out, as is its essential connection to Abraham in the theological, ethical, and philosophical imagination of the modern West. The goal of the chapter is to lay the ground by which the reader will more readily recognize the extent to which contemporary analyses of the problem of Christian faith for the Jewish neighbor—mine included—are pursued within the territory staked out in the contest between Kierkegaard and Hegel and follow its distinctive geography. It should also begin to emerge how this modern context determines contemporary analyses of the particular problem of Christian faith and the Jewish neighbor precisely to the extent to which the context itself emerges as a consequence of—and so as determined by—this very problem in its irreducible particularity.
I first attempt to bring out the complexity beneath the deceptive and powerful simplicity of Kierkegaard’s language of Abrahamic faith as “breach” of the ethical. The either/or between seemingly mutually exclusive alternatives this simple language sets before the reader is not between faith, on the one hand, and ethical obligation, on the other, but between two understandings of faith in its relation to the ethical: the Abrahamic (Kierkegaard could also say, “New Testament Christianity,” here) and the Hegelian. I then show how this “breach of the ethical” is fundamentally structured as an imperialistic violence to the neighbor when seen through the lens of Hegelian assumptions. Finally, I briefly show that a certain understanding of the relation of particularity to universality is fundamental to these assumptions by which the faith of Abraham is polemically condemned and superseded.
In closing, I note that, as compelling as Hegel’s critique of Abraham strikes our contemporary ears and hearts, Kierkegaard’s reading keeps open the unexpected possibility that Hegel might actually have it wrong. Hegel may be engaged in a certain kind of imperialistic discourse himself, and one that casts its own specific shadow over the children of Abraham. The chapter ends, then, with an ironic rub for contemporary remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor funded by modern assumptions expressed by Hegel—assumptions with regard to faith and the ethical, the universal and the particular, and the status of Abraham as the father of imperialistic religious “genius.” As a result, the Kierkegaardian either/or between two understandings of faith in relation to the ethical can be seen as pertaining between two forms—or, as I will argue, three forms—of interpretive imperialism with their own variously problematic shadows in relation to the children of Abraham. The ultimate goal of the chapter in relation to the argument that follows is to suggest that this either/or—the existence of live alternatives—is still in play, to the extent that modernity is not a settled context in which the problem of Abraham has been overcome and interpretive imperialism dispensed with. It is a context that is open and contested, postmodern and post-colonial discourse notwithstanding.
The Either/Or: Two Understandings of Faith (and the Ethical)
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard has Johannes de Silentio describe the faith of Abraham, as it is expressed in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God’s command, variously as a breach of the ethical, as outside the ethical, as a contradiction of the ethical, and most famously, as a teleological suspension of the ethical—mutually exclusive alternatives, all. However, to appreciate what Kierkegaard is up to, one must not simply take this oppositional language at face value. To probe more deeply into what Kierkegaard’s either/or actually involves, then, we will first look at Hegel’s assumptions with regard to the ethical. There are two consistent, interrelated refrains in Fear and Trembling regarding the Hegelian conception of the ethical: the ethical is the highest and the ethical is the universal. We will consider the consequences of the first assertion, here, and come back to the latter toward the end of the chapter.
First, the ethical is the highest. The characterization of the ethical as the highest signifies the extent to which there is neither something higher than, nor outside of, the ethical itself, of the totality of relations constituting the concrete whole of one’s social (or, national—today we might say, global) world. In the words of Johannes, the ethical “rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos but is itself the telos for everything outside, and when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go.”1 The ethical, having its telos within itself, is self-sustaining and self-justifying. “The whole of human existence is . . . entirely self-enclosed, as a sphere, and the ethical is at once the limit and completion . . . fill[ing] all existence.”2 In the words of Levinas’s critique of Hegel’s conception of history, the ethical conceived as the highest constitutes “a universal order which maintains itself and justifies itself all by itself.”3
Now what does this concept of the ethical mean for an understanding of religious faith? In as much as the Hegelian ethical is the highest (and the universal), Johannes says it “fills all existence” as the totality of relations. There is nothing outside of this relation that cannot be reduced to or remain in opposition to it, “except in the sense of what is evil.”4 He goes so far as to insist that, for Hegel, “the ethical is the divine.”5 The ethical constitutes the very end (telos) and content of the individual’s relationship to God. There is no relation to God outside of—or higher than—the ethical, for the ethical itself is the highest. Consequently, the individual is properly related to God when properly and rationally related to the ethical whole, the totality of ethical relations. As Hannay points out, there is simply “no duty to God that could not be found among those obligations.”6
The key point with regard to religious faith, then? On Hegel’s terms: the conception of the ethical as the highest does not exclude or oppose faith, but constitutes an expression of what Hegel believes to be essential Christian truth. It entails a specific understanding of the nature of faith as properly ordered