The Real Sacrifice of Isaac

Michie · Feb 29, 2024

The modern understanding (Catholic and Protestant!) of Abraham's sacrifice is deeply disturbing.

I confess to having spent a lot of time with Genesis 22 over the past several years. For a time, it was in Old Testament survey classes; before that, it was the very different setting of middle school religion classes encountering the Bible for the first time. I’ve also encountered it here and there in parish settings, not to mention the many years of Sunday School and Bible School growing up.

I mention this simply because the most common way today of reading this story—among both Catholics and Protestants—still strikes me as deeply disturbing. It goes like this: God tells Abraham to kill his kid; he takes said kid up the mountain with the kind of characteristic silence of a stoic father; in the end, it all works out, though we might wonder about the psychological damage to both father and son.

When asked about the meaning of this story, most people seem to respond with a kind of rote familiarity: obviously, God is testing Abraham. As if that somehow makes it better. This is often among Catholics who are deeply committed to various pro-life issues. In what world would we think that God would ask us to do something intrinsically evil just to mess with us? That doesn’t really sound like the eternal, impassive, transcendently good God whom Christians claim to worship.

It turns out that this modern reading is an aberration, a novelty. In fact, there is a long tradition of reading the sacrifice of Isaac that assumes a crucial difference: that Isaac is not a child, but a young man; that he knows what is going on; that he is not the victim of some cruel child abuse, but rather the willing participant in his family’s self-offering to the one true God. This makes all the difference in the world. Because it is one thing to offer to God everything that is yours; it is another to offer to God something that belongs to another.

I used to think of the moment at the end of the story, when the angel of the Lord stops Abraham from killing his son, as the end of this great ordeal, this existential crisis in which God and Abraham come to their senses. But if we read this with the tradition of the Church, and of Israel before it, it becomes rather the dramatic endorsement of Isaac’s sacrifice, and a clear indication that the whole exercise was always, from the beginning, ordered as a type of something else to come.

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