What if God asked you to kill your son?

[Peter_Plato]

There’s a problem with this interpretation, however. Here are the relevant verses in Genesis:

Notwithstanding that it was Sarai who pressured Abram to impregnate Hagar in the first place, and also she who pressured him to send Hagar and Ishmael away after Isaac was born, God himself went out of his way to endorse Sarah’s idea and reassure Abraham.

Look at the sequence of events:
Gen 15:1 God’s promise to Abram that his own son would be his heir.
Gen 16:1-4 Sarai complains to Abram that she has not yet borne a son; Abram listens “to the voice of Sarai (hearkens back to Adam listening to Eve before the fall). After ten years Sarai takes Hagar and “gives” her to Abram. Note this is not by approval of God.
Gen 16:6 Sarai deals harshly will Hagar and is supported by Abram (”.…do to her as you please.")
Gen 16:7 The angel of the Lord finds Hagar and returns her with the promise that she would also have a multitude of descendants. Hagar claims to have seen God and lived.
Gen 16:15 Ishmael is born to Hagar.
Gen 17:15 God reiterates his promise for the third time, this time specifying that Sarai would be the mother. Abraham laughs because Sarai is too old.
Gen 18:13 Sarah laughs, doubting that God could possibly fulfill his promise that she would bear a son. God intervenes with, "Is anything too hard for the Lord? Sarah is afraid and denies that she laughed.
Gen 21 Isaac is born
Gen 21:10 Sarah tells Abraham to “…cast out this slave woman and her son…”
Gen 21:12 God only appears to support Sarah’s demand to cast out Hagar. “…whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you…”

Note this appears that God endorsing Sarah’s request, but it could also be read as, “Look Abraham, you keep listening to what Sarah says because you don’t trust my promise to you, so go ahead and do what she says but I’ll still bring about my plan, you’ll see. Go do what Sarah says, then!” It’s the tone of God’s words that needs to be understood within the entire narrative of the story.

Even if I grant that Abraham’s laughing at God’s promise to send him a child at his advanced age was evidence of a lack of faith, is there any textual evidence to support the idea that this lack of faith continued even beyond this point?

The evidence is that Abraham still sent Hagar and Ishmael to their deaths despite the fact that God reminded Abraham that he should be trusting God’s promise and not Sarah even when God emphatically reminded Abraham that his plans would prevail for Isaac and Ismael (v 12-13). It was Sarah’s distrust in God that motivated her to tell Abraham to cast Hagar out. She was worried that “the son of this slave woman” would be heir with Isaac. God was directly contradicting Sarah by insisting that both Isaac and Ishmael would become two distinct nations, even if Abraham did this (implicitly wrong thing) by doing Sarah’s bidding.

God ultimately did fulfill his original promise to Abraham and Sarah with a child of their own - you’d think even a true skeptic would stop doubting at some point.

This is exactly why God called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It was an all or nothing ultimatum and Abraham came through by taking the outcome out of his own hands and putting it absolutely into God’s hands - absolute trust was finally Abraham’s choice.

Moving ahead to Genesis 22 - God does refer to Isaac as Abraham’s “only begotten son.” Regardless of what Abraham knew or didn’t know about the fate of Ishmael at that particular moment, this was, in a sense, true. Ishmael’s not there anymore - and he’s not coming back. If Abraham kills Isaac, he has nobody left in his immediate life (notwithstanding the promise that Ishamel’s descendents would be a nation as well). Further, I don’t care how many kids you have running around the house - for someone of average moral equipment, the thought of sacrificing one can’t make you feel too warm and sunny inside.

It certainly didn’t appeal to Abraham. Note God calls Isaac “your only-begotten son Isaac, whom you love…” Obviously Isaac wasn’t Abraham’s only begotten son, because Ishmael was his first son. God was rubbing a sore spot. Second, God knew the depth of Abraham’s love: “whom you love.”

If the sacrifice means Abraham has “nobody left” that is precisely the point of the test of faith. Is Abraham going to put the outcome of God’s promise entirely in God’s hands or will he succumb again to the temptation of trying to take it back into his own? That is why it was an ultimate test of faith in God and not in himself.

So what was the point of the command, exactly? To test Abraham’s faith and obedience? Okay, fair enough. The question is, on what basis did Abraham’s faith and obedience need to be tested?

Precisely because Abraham kept listening to Sarah or his own doubts in trying to contrive ways to control the outcome.

 

[Peter_Plato]

…from previous

We recall that God did not seem even slightly perturbed that Abram and Sarai had gone into business on their own to have a child with Hagar. And again, when the time came to send Hagar and Ishmael away, God co-signed on this as well. Ultimately, we have no compelling reason to believe (based on the text) that Abraham even needed to have his faith and obedience tested. God seemed to do it only because he could.

What appears to you to be an unperturbed God, is intended to show a God of infinite patience. From the very beginning, when Abram was first called, Abram demonstrates a series of compromised acts of faith. For example, when he leaves Haran to go to Canaan, he is told “leave your kindred,” yet he takes Lot with him. Why? He didn’t trust that God would look after him so he took Lot for support. What happened? A famine in Canaan so he had to leave for Egypt. His lack of trust in God to look after things leads him to lie about Sarah to Pharaoh and causes near disaster. There are more.

Additionally, God’s test of Abraham is hardly the only Biblical example of God ordering the deaths of others through his human surrogates. Nor does it include all the times that God does the killing himself.

Yes, but we are not dealing with those other circumstances here. I did so in Post #30

 

[Peter_Plato]

Yes, very well put Still, I don’t believe that Catholics normally explain the problem of suffering in terms of “God can do whatever He wants or sees fit.” Rather, the problem of suffering - and of death – is normally explained in terms of human free will, including the free will of Adam, based on which we’ve inherited original sin. From what I understand, it is original sin that is posited as the origin of death in the world.

Thus, the question “why do we become sick and die?” becomes analogous to the question, “why do some go to hell?” The apologist is essentially saying, “God is not responsible for suffering and death; we are responsible for suffering and death”; just as they say, “God didn’t choose hell for you; you chose hell for you.”

John Calvin, ironically, would have been more inclined to say, "God is God and can do as He sees fit, including sending you to hell – not as your choice, but as His choice.

There is no need to concede free will to a Calvinist determinism. That would be to portray God as limited in terms of how free will is endowed, and as such imposes a limitation on the omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence of God. It relies on a compromised notion of free will.

Frankly, I am surprised that you are trying to steer things in that direction.

 

[Portofino]

There is no need to concede free will to a Calvinist determinism. That would be to portray God as limited in terms of how free will is endowed, and as such imposes a limitation on the omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence of God. It relies on a compromised notion of free will.

Frankly, I am surprised that you are trying to steer things in that direction.

To clarify, I was responding to an earlier post of yours on this thread:

[E]very human being dies. We are all mortal. Apparently, if God is the Creator and determiner of all existence, then humans do die because God has determined that to be the case. We are all under a death sentence. The divine command is that all of us, not just the son at the hands of his father, but each one of us have been sentenced to die by the fact of our mortality.

Atheists may not like this state of things and may rail against the very idea of a God who has made us mortal, but the fact that we are mortal means, that if God does exist then we die because of a determination of his. What right does the omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent Creator of all have to take life? Perhaps because all life belongs to him, he is the source of all life, Life itself, it is his to take or to give. If the omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent Creator of all has determined that some being is unfit to merit life, who is there to argue the case?".

There did not seem to be an emphasis on free will in that passage (the free will of Adam in having chosen sin, and thus having incurred suffering and death).

Most Catholic apologeteics I read on this question of suffering tend to emphasize human free will, whether the suffering in question is physical pain and suffering, or an eternity in hell.

Naysayers often argue that the human being exercising his free will chooses the transgression, but has not chosen that the dire consequences of that transgression, are as dire as they are. In my experience, many Catholics resist that reasoning, insisting that God does not send anyone to hell; individuals, wholly and completely, send themselves to hell. God does not take ultimate responsibility for hell’s existence.

You seem to take a harder line – or a more frank line – in saying, “yes, ultimately, God does sentence us to death” (and, presumably, to hell, if He decides that we merit it). This does sound more Calvinist to me in tone, if not in theology.

Similarly, William Lane Craig (an Evangelical, I believe), defended the massacre of the Canaanites by saying, “God can give and take life as he sees fit.”

Perhaps I am mistaken that this is a more Calvinist-sounding justification; perhaps, in reality, the tone of this defense is actually more Augustinian (with Calvin having imbibed it, however imperfectly, from Saint Augustine).

Still, it intrigues me to wonder whether the cultural dominance of Evangelical Protestantism has at all influenced American Catholic thought. Again, my personal experience is that Catholics tend to explain suffering, death, or eternal damnation in terms of human choice. They minimize God’s ultimate responsibility for these things. Protestants such as William Lane Craig, it seems, tend to turn it around and say, “even if it were God’s ultimate decision, who are you to question God?”

This is a harder line to take, and – it seems to me – many Catholics shrink from asserting it. I think Giants was agreeing that many Catholics are uncomfortable with saying, “yes, maybe God is ultimately responsible for all these things. So what?” Which is why he found your assertion so refreshing…

 

[Peter_Plato]

You seem to take a harder line – or a more frank line – in saying, “yes, ultimately, God does sentence us to death” (and, presumably, to hell, if He decides that we merit it). This does sound more Calvinist to me in tone, if not in theology.

Presuming a necessary connection between death and hell is unwarranted. Death is, I believe according the traditional Catholic teaching, the result of original sin. Paul definitely holds this (Romans 5:12). That would entail something like God’s judgement and sentence of death on the inherited “nature” of human beings that became distorted by Adam and Eve’s sin. However, Christ’s redemptive action in creation provides human beings with a “new” or renewed nature, retroactively, to all human beings, so that hell need not be a consequence, except for those who “reject” the new nature by affiliating themselves completely with the old one that will, in fact, die.

As for free will, this post

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=10046216&postcount=21

provides a summary of current thoughts.

 

[thinkandmull]

God did not want Isaac to die, but He DID want Abraham to make up his mind to kill his son. He did NOT go up on that mountain thinking “God will end this”; he didn’t know. But he made up his mind to kill an innocent person, and it did NOT violate his conscience. God vindicated his conscience, the decision he made to take that knife. This really shows that ideas of “objective right” and “killing and murder are the same” are not true. Today we have consciences, guided by Christ’s grace, to respect life in a way the polygamist Old Testament wise men did not. God knows the heart of people and commands on that bases. 1 Samuel 15 clearly relates God’s command to his prophet. Liberal modernist attempts to ignore these and the other scriptures I’ve cited on here are not worthy of true Catholics

 

[thinkandmull]

The only time the Bible specifically tells us that God told someone to kill an “innocent man” was with Abraham. The commands to wipe out “everything that breathes” among evil communities did not definitely include children under the age of reason; God instead left it to the consciences of the warlike Jews. Samuel MAY have interpreted God’s words to him to universally-inclusively. But God allowed those things to happen for a reason. The children killed were spared the temptations to mortal sin and damnation that adults have to face. Some of you are thinking to much about this “objectively wrong” idea: Psalm’s 137:8-9 is very clear. The consciences on those killing the children may be blessed, just as Abraham’s were. But as I showed earlier from the words of Solomon (who by the way, commanded, in an acts of wisdom, soldiers to commit their conscience to cutting a baby in half) and from Leo XIII, these days and times are forever over!

 

[thinkandmull]

finally, isaas was above the age of reason, so he was no innocent

 

[Philthy]

I am not clear where this “God” of yours lives, but is he “Lord of life?”

He is Lord of life; lord of Heaven and earth, of time and eternity.

If he is, then you still need to explain why human beings have their lives taken from them, often in untimely fashion and for inexplicable reasons. Your “God” still needs to explain why he acts so capriciously.

Really? Why would He need to explain that, and to whom exactly? Your perception of God’s actions as being “capricious” is, in fact, simply a confession of your own ignorance. How could you possibly judge whether the taking of a life was capricious? What standard do you use?
Furthermore one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that our mortal life is not the end all of existence. We believe in the “resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. This creates an irreconcilable difference between us: you cannot allow for the fact that the greatest eternal good has been accomplished in an untimely death while a Christian can.

 

[x1980x]

…

You can certainly do that. Of course, there are pieces of the puzzle you’re leaving out. For starters, God’s command was obviously a coercive act. Ask yourself what would’ve happened if Abraham had refused to what God wanted of him. Additionally, the OT is rife with examples of God killing people, or ordering that they be killed. So it’s not much of a point in God’s favor that he called Abraham off at the last moment. Had that not happened, and Abraham sacrificed his son, it occurs to me that the moral lesson of the story would be precisely the same.

One rule of thumb that I was taught by Baptists as it related to inklings that God might be telling you specifically to do something was that God would never tell you to do something that is against his Word. For example, if you got up one day and felt that God was telling you to worship an idol or commit adultery, you would know that that message is not from God because the associated act is against his Word.

An obvious problem with this is that God’s Word tells us not to murder. A more in-depth look indicates that the Bible as we know it today did not exist as such in Abraham’s time.

1. Was there any sort of revealed, inspired scripture or organized, authoritative magisterium available in Abraham’s time that existed apart from the day-to-day revelations of God that Abraham could have consulted to check for a ‘Thou shalt not commit murder’ commandment? The book of Enoch might be one possibility.
2. What would have happened if Abraham had said, “No, that is murder and against God’s law! Is this Satan speaking to me?”

 

[Peter_Plato]

He is Lord of life; lord of Heaven and earth, of time and eternity.

Really? Why would He need to explain that, and to whom exactly? Your perception of God’s actions as being “capricious” is, in fact, simply a confession of your own ignorance. How could you possibly judge whether the taking of a life was capricious? What standard do you use?
Furthermore one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that our mortal life is not the end all of existence. We believe in the “resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. This creates an irreconcilable difference between us: you cannot allow for the fact that the greatest eternal good has been accomplished in an untimely death while a Christian can.

Look, if you are not going to follow the flow of a thread, please don’t reply. You have pulled this completely out of context because you didn’t follow it through to find out the idea being targeted. I won’t say anything more. You can figure it out.

 

[thinkandmull]

Least I be guilty of Catholic Biblical modernistic revisionism, I carefully reread some passages in the Bible, and now fully realize that 1 Samuel 15 cannot be interpreted in any other way than as proof that God ordered the destruction of all the Amalekites “children and infants”. This, however, is not ritualistic child sacrifice, but part of a purging campaign, the destruction of an evil culture. Two principles must be keep in mind:

First, we are related to Adam and Eve differently than we are to our parents. Although it is difficult, and would take time to explain, let me just say that we were all in Adam and Eve when they sinned. This may seem absurdly mystical, unless it is challanged I won’t attempt a defense of that fact right now. What is certain, I believe, is that everyone, even children in the womb, are guilty before God. God can order the death penalty for anyone He wishes; in fact, during the Passover, did not an angel kill all the first-born? If God desires to test a person’s loyalty to Him, He has the right to pick an executionar.

As for why God ordered the death of the Amalekites children, let’s see Titus 1:12 -* Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons”*

Every people, as with every family, has their unique tendencies to certain sins. Call this genetic or whatever you want: what is important is that God forsaw what evils would result from letting those children live with the Jews. Therefore His commands were merciful. If we believe in the after-life, this should not be so difficult for us to see…

But when the Bible says God or someone said and/or did something, we Catholics accept that as the WOrd of God. Otherwise, EVERYTHING in the Bible is compromised. The literal accuracy of any passage could be ignored in favor of all kinds of other theories about how “God wants us to read so and so…”, instead of saying it is actually the Words of the Lord. Even *This Rock *magazine has attempted to explain away those commands of the Lord, saying (paraphrase) “at times the Bible says God said something when He really didn’t, so that’s all I can make of those homicial passages”. (execution passages is more accurate) That position is sadly a heretical attempt to ignore the truth of the Bible. Benedict XV in *Spiritus Paraclitus *(15/09/1920) defended the Catholic truth that the history of the Bible cannot be reduced to stories God wants us to read! Famous example: when the Bible says “God hardened his heart”, that means that God did an action on his heart (withdrew grace), resulting in sin

 

[Philthy]

Look, if you are not going to follow the flow of a thread, please don’t reply. You have pulled this completely out of context because you didn’t follow it through to find out the idea being targeted. I won’t say anything more. You can figure it out.

MMea culpa. Now up to speed. I enjoyed post 30.

 

[Peter_Plato]

MMea culpa. Now up to speed. I enjoyed post 30.

Wow! Thanks for “owning” your response and accepting my blunt critique.

For what it’s worth, you have my deep respect. :bowdown2:

Peace!

 

[Philthy]

…they say that if I answer Yes, then I am crazy

I think the burden of proof in claiming that an answer of yes means you are crazy lies with them. Please note that they did not say, What if you “thought” God was asking you or anything that leaves open the possibility of subjective confusion. I say that if you knew God was asking you to do something you’d be crazy not to do it. That much being said, once this point is made I’d likely be quick to follow it up with the claim that God would not ask this of you.