Choosing Our Contradictions

The story of Abraham (almost) sacrificing Isaac is one of those Bible stories I’ve heard so many times I almost don’t hear how weird it is anymore.

Abraham waited his entire life for kids and then God commanded him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham went to the preordained mountain and got as far as reaching for the knife before an angel intervened: “Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your son, your only one, from Me.” (Genesis 22: 10-12). Abraham then re-received the promise given to him in earlier chapters: he would be the father of many nations. After, Abraham and Isaac went back down the mountain to a quasi-happy ending.

ABRAHAM AND ISAAC: illumination from a Spanish Haggadah, c. 1300.

None of this tells us what went through Abraham’s mind as he trudged up the mountain or when Isaac caught on to what was happening. It doesn’t tell us if Abraham had decided what he was going to tell his wife, Sarah, and if he’d allowed himself to think about what their marriage and lives would be like without Isaac. It also doesn’t tell us how this episode affected Isaac and Abraham’s relationship or what either of them did tell Sarah about the trip when they got home.

When we tell this story, we usually echo the angel. We say that it’s about fearing God, about being willing to sacrifice everything, about obedience, and it absolutely might be (because those things are important), but my New Testament professor told me that stories lose their power when we only let them mean one thing, so let me suggest a different telling, one that is about coming to know God and making choices in the face of contradictions.

Early this year, just before the world started ending, I had a meltdown about polygamy. During Day Two of this meltdown, I went to cry in Dr. Holland’s office (again), and as a part of our conversation he suggested that there are three points of interaction with God: scriptural, prophetic, and personal. The work of religion is bringing all three of these into conversation and coming to know ourselves and God better through it. That is, these things do not always immediately line up, and all three of these methods for knowing God come through the hands of humanity in ways that we have to be wary of. Because all ways of knowing God are filtered through mortality, we have to seek alignment between our multiple ways of knowing. When contradictions emerge, we acknowledge them and seek to reconcile them. (I hope I’m getting this right—I can’t find the article he wrote about this idea.)

I’ve thought about this a lot since concluded, and I’ve concluded that for me the work of religion is finding that alignment or, when that does not seem possible, acknowledging the contradiction and making choices with all the integrity I can muster.

J. Kirk Richard’s Before I Formed Thee

The patron saint of contradictions in LDS Christianity is Eve. In our telling, God gave Adam and Eve contradictory commandments: 1. to not partake of the fruit (which would make them mortals—meaning that they had bodies that could suffer and bear children but also that they could progress and learn) and 2. to have children. Eve was the one who caught the contradiction. She saw that she was being asked to do two different things. The things she understood God to be saying contradicted, so she took everything she knew about God and made a choice.

Through this choice, she came to know God and herself better. She came to see herself as both flawed and capable of growth (but especially capable of growth) and God as both bound by eternal laws and merciful (bust especially merciful, Aslan-at-the-stone-table-merciful). She received new promises of salvation—the world would receive a savior and that through him all the ill effects of mortality would be redeemed.

This was necessary, of course, because there were ill effects of mortality. Eve’s choice meant that her life, and the lives of all her children, included pain. Later, it meant that story was weaponized against her daughters for thousands of years. There was a cost to her choice, as there are to all choices.

Here’s my theory: if both Eve and Abraham were being tested, then Eve aced her’s and Abraham got a C. Like, he passed for sure—God doesn’t punish us for obedience—but he didn’t level up. While Eve received a new promise of Atonement, Abraham received only the same promises he’d had before. It’s a beautiful promise, but he didn’t level up. Perhaps because God already knew Abraham could be obedient and was working on developing a different skill.

Abraham showed obedience, but he didn’t see and choose contradictions in the commandments. He exhibited faith, and this pleased his God—but he doesn’t acknowledge the contradictions. Abraham receives God’s command to kill Isaac and, in the story, does not point out the Lord generally frowns on killing people, especially sacrificing children (something Abraham knew from very personal experience).

Abraham negotiates and co-creates with God in other stories. When God came to destroy Sodom, Abraham pled for mercy and convinced the Lord to spare the city even if there were only ten good people in it (Genesis 18). In this moment, he came to know God better. In this moment, he followed the example of Mother Eve.

There are dangerous implications to reading the story this way. The danger is that when we disagree with something—when we don’t want to sacrifice or be obedient, when we find faith too taxing—we will use this idea of contradictions as an excuse. The God we find will look too much like us. When I taught writing, I found that the worst papers always came from students who had made up their mind before doing their research. They only found the evidence of what they already believed, and they weren’t changed by the process. To see and pursue contradictions with integrity is not to make God over in our image but to truly seek Him, acknowledging that we might be wrong.

This version of the story also doesn’t answer the question it poses: why does God give his children contradictory commandments sometimes? I think, though, while it doesn’t answer the question, it proffers a possibility. If God wants His children to be like Him, then they need not just to obey but also to problem solve. They need to choose when there are no right choices. They must see the contradictions and seek truth. Above all, they must be able to learn about themselves and Him. To be like Him, they have to know Him.