Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the faith of our fathers

Abstract

The faith of our fathers is supposed to have survived what Rudolph Bultmann has called "the crisis in belief."1 Yet what we are to understand by that faith and that crisis has escaped too easily the attention it requires. Bultmann has learned much from Kierkegaard, if not also from Nietzsche, though he reveals the limits of his own understanding in the signal importance he assigns to the project of demythologizing. While the self-will of man is said to be the everpresent crisis in belief, the particular crisis of modern times is the displacement of mythological by scientific thinking. For Bultmann this calls for a new way of thinking about the task of theology and thus about the content of belief itself. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however, have provided what is at once a less programmatic and more penetrating way of thinking about this belief and the fate it has suffered in the history of the West. Moreover, at the core of their contribution is a deeper insight into the selfwill of man, an insight which reveals a yet more profound transformation within the history of postbiblical times. Their uncommon ground and intentions notwithstanding, they have opened up an uncommon perspective into what it means for man's moral will and reason to possess the power to determine the true and the good. Before and beneath this power is the faith of Abraham, the paradigm of faith in the biblical world, a disturbing problem for our own world. The good which Abraham possessed in Isaac, his son, even his special son of promise and greatness, was, without complaint, subordinated to a yet higher good. But Abraham or his narrator did not determine for himself what this higher good must be. For Abraham is a creature of "dust and ashes" (Gen. 18:27). He is characterized by his unconditional obedience and faith in the salvific power of a God who reserves for himself the freedom to determine the true and the good. Abraham's highest good was thus the God of his faith and worship. But this God cannot be identified (sans appropriate stipulations) with the highest good of an enlightened moral will and reason. For this highest good must be worthy of worship, a God who would command the sacrifice of a human being only if it were justifiable on (rationally accessible) moral grounds. In the absence of such grounds, the enlightened believer can admire only the God who stayed Abraham's hand, not some demonic deity for