ABSTRACT
The first of Green’s ‘levels’ is simply a ‘call to Christian commitment’.13 On this level, Johannes is using the story of Abraham and Isaac as a kind of ‘theological shock treatment’.14 Kierkegaard saw his age as complacently conflating being a Christian with being born in ‘Christendom’ – being born in a ‘Christian country’ like Denmark, to Christian parents, and being baptised into the Danish State Church. Such a ‘bourgeois’ view of what religious commitment amounts to contrasts starkly with the courage of Abraham’s raw, ‘primitive’ faith which involves acting and living in a certain way, even – perhaps especially – in the most trying of circumstances. A more sophisticated version of the confusion of the age, Kierkegaard thought, came with the threat of Hegelianism. As we have seen, Fear and Trembling contains several jibes at the idea of ‘going further’ than faith: a reference to the Hegelian idea that faith was a relatively elementary stage of intellectual development that the Hegelian philosophy could surpass. Such a view subordinates the first-person dimension of faith – stressed by Kierkegaard as so vital – to an understanding of the unfolding of Geist [Mind or Spirit] through world history.
