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representative of many critical remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor (“leaving room” for the children of Abraham by “going further” than Abraham), constitutes a contemporary example of this understanding of faith.

      I am clearly up to a bit of mischief myself here in this choice of language. As I noted in the previous chapter, the Christian tradition of supersessionism—the supersession of Abraham and Israel by the Church in God’s economy of salvation—is considered a prime expression of that logic (interpretive imperialism) inherent in traditional Christian faith and theology that contemporary Christian theologians understand to be ethically problematic in relation to the Jewish neighbor. It is a rather obvious trick, then, for me to employ the language for the traditional problem in my characterization of the contemporary theological remedies of that very problem. However, I am not simply trying to be clever or mischievous. While perhaps an obvious rhetorical ploy on my part, I believe it is just as obvious to an attentive assessment of both the modern assumptions regarding faith and the ethical represented here by Hegel, and certain contemporary remedies of Christian faith for the sake of the Jewish neighbor, that what we are in fact dealing with is precisely a supersession of Abraham; the remedy of traditional supersessionism is accomplished by means of another kind of supersessionism. My employment of the language of supersession here is not, then, merely pithy, but finds its mark; it reveals a certain self-contradiction that does indeed complicate the prognosis of the administered remedy. This case remains to be made in later chapters. It is, however, given some provisional footing in the following consideration of the nature of the ethical breach enacted by the faith of Abraham (a breach, that is, according to Johannes’s rendering of the Hegelian view of the ethical as the highest in relation to faith).

      Abraham’s “Breach of the Ethical” as Imperialistic Violence

      While we find ourselves confronted with an either/or between two understandings of faith in the pages of Fear and Trembling, it is important to note that these two understandings do not stand side by side in an arbitrary and benign relationship. It is not the case that one is left to choose between them as if they were equally viable possibilities, choosing according to the tastes of personal religious preference or conviction, with no serious consequences attendant upon which option is chosen (this is, of course, what modernity longs to be the case: religious faith as benign choice of personal taste irrelevant to the public sphere). In both cases, the one understanding does not allow for a generally generous and respectful assessment of the alternative, and therefore of the decision for the alternative. Rather, each compels a decision in its favor to the necessary exclusion of the other as untenable. It is customary to identify the Abrahamic understanding of faith with this exclusionary logic of the either/or. However, this logic is characteristic of the Hegelian option as well, at least in relation to Abraham, or perhaps more accurately and more to the point, only—singularly—in relation to Abraham.

      This exclusionary logic of the Hegelian either/or is already before us. The Hegelian understanding of faith essentially entails both a polemical judgment upon the faith that takes Abraham as a model, and a remedy that, in “going further” than Abraham, brings faith into its own proper truth. What is the problem with a Christian faith that takes Abraham as a model that Hegel should find it necessary to supersede it, or more accurately, to supersede Abraham, for the sake of remedying Christian faith? For Hegel, a faith that takes Abraham as a model inevitably puts Isaac—the son, the brother, the neighbor, the ethical itself—under the knife. And therefore, in bringing faith into its own proper truth—by superseding Abraham—Hegel renders faith safe for the neighbor; he redeems faith from Abraham’s abusive patrilineage. He delivers faith from the dysfunctional and abusive house of Abraham.

Again, in Johannes’s reading of Hegel, there can be no God, as the telos of faith, which stands outside of and irreducibly distinct from the ethical. Within Hegel’s conception of the “self-enclosed” whole of human existence, “God becomes an invisible, vanishing point, an impotent thought.”25 Kierkegaard has Johannes wryly conclude that the love of God demonstrated by Abraham’s faith, the love of a God who stands outside and beyond the ethical, cannot but be “suspect, like the love referred to by Rousseau when he talks of a person’s loving the Kaffirs instead of his neighbor.”26 The implication of this reference to Rousseau (other than Rousseau’s implied racism) is that the faith of Abraham constitutes a betrayal on every level of the interlocking complex of the ethical. Fidelity to a relation with something other than the neighbor and the totality of neighbor-relations—that is, fidelity to God—appears to constitute a fundamental betrayal of the neighbor. And even more, since Abraham’s suspension of the ethical obligation of father to son cannot be seen to serve a higher sphere of the whole, the Hegelian ethical can only conclude, if it is consistent, that Abraham is a murderer.27 The echo of Rubenstein’s question about the logic of Christian faith that requires the murder of Jews should ring discomfortingly in our ears at this point. And the prescient reader will demand to know what I am up to? In anticipating how the argument will unfold, the reader has good reason to ask if this is a perverse joke—holding Abraham ultimately responsible for the killing of the children of Abraham at the hands of the Church. It may be perverse, but it is no joke. And it is not of my own making. It is a perversity entailed in the modern understanding of religious faith and the ethical. The horror of Abraham for such an understanding is precisely that he is a killer of his own child. Again, the disturbing pertinence of the title of Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide comes into view here.

      Kierkegaard makes explicit here a fundamental aspect of Enlightenment modernity’s objection to traditional religious faith that is often overlooked. He dramatizes in a powerful way the extent to which the offense of traditional faith for the modern age was never simply faith’s opposition to, or difference from, Reason. In the wake of the Enlightenment, traditional religious faith was not only denigrated as absurd and rationally abhorrent, it was castigated as dangerous and ethically abhorrent. And the Hegelian understanding of faith presented by Johannes stands firmly in this tradition. It entails an uncompromising ethical condemnation, indeed, a criminalization of the faith of Abraham.

The particular criminal logic of Abrahamic faith that Hegel finds objectionable—that puts Isaac under the knife, that is inherently dangerous for the neighbor—is, in contemporary parlance, the logic of imperialistic violation of the other as described by Edward Said (and as we shall see, Levinas and Derrida). Said’s characterization of Orientalism as an imperialistic discourse of cultural and material domination serves as a key for translating Hegel’s “modern ethical desire” into contemporary categories, enabling a certain shock of recognition with regard to our own so-called postmodern and post-colonial ethical instincts. For example, the phenomenon of a “nexus of knowledge and power” in which the other is, “in a sense, obliterat[ed] . . . as a human being” can certainly be taken as an apt description of what is going on in Abraham’s relationship to Isaac.28 Consider: in the biblical story of Mount Moriah (and Johannes’s reading of it), Isaac appears to be a silent, represented object serving the interests of Abraham’s own relationship with God. When the assumptions of Abraham’s faith are imposed upon Isaac as the truth of Isaac’s own life, the reality of that life is reduced to that of an object to be sacrificed for the sake of the reality and fidelity of Abraham’s God-relation. To be so reduced seems awfully close to being, “in a sense, obliterat[ed] . . . as a human being.” Indeed, not even “in a sense.” For Isaac, it means the very material violation of being put under the knife.

And this appears to be just how the young Hegel understood those events on Mount Moriah. In his early theological writings, Hegel identifies Abraham as the origin of Jewish history, and his “spirit” as “the unity, the soul, regulating the entire fate” of that history. He then notes that “the first act which made Abraham the progenitor of a nation is a disseverance which snaps the bonds of communal life and love. The entirety of the relationships in which he had hitherto lived with men and nature, these beautiful relationships of his youth, he spurned.”29

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