These questions never receive an answer in Kierkegaard...

These questions never receive an answer in Kierkegaard, partly because he treats “the individual” as an ultimate category and partly because he understands the real existence of the individual as being what the individual is “before God.” For Kierkegaard the ethical is only a prologue to the religious, and the religious is necessarily offensive to human reason. One of Hegel’s key faults in Kierkegaard’s eyes was that he tried to present religion in rational terms.

But from an authentically Christian point of view Christianity must be seen as bringing the truth to a human reason which does not possess it, which prior to the Christian revelation is alien to the truth. So it is that from the standpoint of a self-sufficient human reason, Christianity necessarily appears as paradoxical and irrational.

Christian faith depends not on argument, but on choice, both for the more general reasons cited by Kierkegaard, which I have already mentioned, and for these special reasons. Skeptical objections to Christianity are not in reality grounded on intellectual doubt; they arise from “insubordination, unwillingness to obey, rebellion against all authority.” Hence the important decision is either to do or not to do what God commands in his self-revelation.

The example Kierkegaard invokes is that of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his son. This command is contrary, not merely to inclination but also to duty. What God commands is, from the standpoint of the ethical, simple murder. There is thus a break between the highest merely human consciousness and the divine intrusion of the apparently scandalous and absurd.

It is important to note that there is not a hint in Kierkegaard of the view taken by some Old Testament critics that the function of this story was to preach the abolition of human sacrifice and to educate the Hebrews into a belief that such a killing was in fact, not what God willed, but murder. The notion of revelation as progressive, as always suited to-but always slightly above the moral level of-those to whom it is addressed, is alien to Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard, then, stands at an extreme point, both in the development of Christianity and in the development of individualism. So far as Christianity is concerned, he poses one horn of a dilemma which had been arising for Christianity ever since the revival of Aristotle in the Middle Ages.