ABSTRACT
But this leaves unanswered our central question: does Johannes’ talk of a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ amount to the claim that the commands of ethics should be suspended in the light of the higher telos of the will of God? Though nothing we have said so far gives an unequivocal answer to this, Green’s first level seems to be leaning in the direction of an affirmative answer. His second level, which is concerned with ‘psychology of faith’, appears to answer this question in the negative. According to Green, such an inquiry ‘starts with the first level’s assumption that faith is a lived commitment but seeks to understand its precise mental content for the believer’.15 Crucial to this is the distinction between the movement of infinite resignation and the movement of faith. At the end of his brief discussion of this, Green appears to endorse Mooney’s view: that faith involves a ‘selfless care’ in which all ‘proprietary claims’ have been renounced. He concludes:
But this is clearly open to the objections we raised against Mooney earlier. On the first level, where the point was to shock the ‘bourgeois’ Copenhagen churchgoer out of his complacency, one can at least see that the Abraham-Isaac story was well chosen. What more striking way of showing the potential clash between ‘ethical’ and ‘religious’ commitment could there be? But on this second level, where the message is simply that religious existence involves selfless love, this particular story seems badly chosen. Why is the story of Abraham and Isaac, specifically, needed to make such a general and traditional point as this? Second, even if we ignored this objection, Mooney’s reading would still be open to the other interpretative difficulties we discussed earlier, such as whether it is
at all plausible to view Abraham as having renounced his ‘proprietary claim’ over Isaac.
