William Arkle offers a lucid interpretation of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which I first encountered via Bruce Charlton’s Arkle-focused blog:
When Abraham "passed" his test over his son's killing, to my mind he only got 60% for obedience.
If he had said to God, "This is not like you, I won't do it", he would have got 100% for unobedience.
What arises from this conflict is unobedience, which is a condition beyond the relatively automatic stages of disobedience or obedience, and has become autonomous and calculated and chosen.
Dr. Charlton adds the following:
Arkle explains that un-obedience to God arises from the black and white of disobedience and obedience being in conflict.
In other words, what God most wanted was not that Abraham would obey, or disobey, a specific instruction that he regarded as coming from God; but that Abraham would instead recognize that the real and proper question was at an altogether larger and more general scale.
Neither disobedience nor obedience was required, but un-obedience.
For me, the above addresses the inherent limits of the free will doctrine and free will choosing, indicating that the exercise of true agency and freedom often extends beyond selecting from options to obey or disobey, particularly in circumstances when neither obedience nor disobedience are optimal.
Instead of agonizing over whether to sacrifice his son, Abraham should have realized that God’s apparent command was inconsistent with God’s Goodness.
Rather than obey or disobey the command, Abraham should have understood that a benevolent God would not burden him with such a monstrous and murderous request and should instead have unobeyed the command by questioning God’s motives and pressing for an explanation.
Disobeying God at every turn is unquestionably sinful and self-destructive; however, resolute, unquestioning obedience to God via external avenues of authority or insistence upon one's own "finite" limitations are also self-destructive in the sense that it diminishes the self to the level of an unthinking, impersonal, uncreative, automatic, and largely passive automaton.
Thus, obedience cannot be the highest ideal or virtue to which a Christian can or should aspire, particularly if such obedience stems from a fear of God’s power.
Christianity is (or should be) a religion of self-realization, not self-negation and self-destruction.
A big part of that self-realization involves knowing and loving God and working in harmony with his Creation through love.
It is only through that that we can build up or uncover the sort of self needed to affirm Jesus’s Second Creation and accept his gift of everlasting life in Heaven.
As Dr. Charlton concludes:
God's ultimate wish for us is that we should transcend obedience to become an un-obedient participant, and eventual collaborator, in God's creative work.
When Abraham "passed" his test over his son's killing, to my mind he only got 60% for obedience.
If he had said to God, "This is not like you, I won't do it", he would have got 100% for unobedience.
What arises from this conflict is unobedience, which is a condition beyond the relatively automatic stages of disobedience or obedience, and has become autonomous and calculated and chosen.
Dr. Charlton adds the following:
Arkle explains that un-obedience to God arises from the black and white of disobedience and obedience being in conflict.
In other words, what God most wanted was not that Abraham would obey, or disobey, a specific instruction that he regarded as coming from God; but that Abraham would instead recognize that the real and proper question was at an altogether larger and more general scale.
Neither disobedience nor obedience was required, but un-obedience.
For me, the above addresses the inherent limits of the free will doctrine and free will choosing, indicating that the exercise of true agency and freedom often extends beyond selecting from options to obey or disobey, particularly in circumstances when neither obedience nor disobedience are optimal.
Instead of agonizing over whether to sacrifice his son, Abraham should have realized that God’s apparent command was inconsistent with God’s Goodness.
Rather than obey or disobey the command, Abraham should have understood that a benevolent God would not burden him with such a monstrous and murderous request and should instead have unobeyed the command by questioning God’s motives and pressing for an explanation.
Disobeying God at every turn is unquestionably sinful and self-destructive; however, resolute, unquestioning obedience to God via external avenues of authority or insistence upon one's own "finite" limitations are also self-destructive in the sense that it diminishes the self to the level of an unthinking, impersonal, uncreative, automatic, and largely passive automaton.
Thus, obedience cannot be the highest ideal or virtue to which a Christian can or should aspire, particularly if such obedience stems from a fear of God’s power.
Christianity is (or should be) a religion of self-realization, not self-negation and self-destruction.
A big part of that self-realization involves knowing and loving God and working in harmony with his Creation through love.
It is only through that that we can build up or uncover the sort of self needed to affirm Jesus’s Second Creation and accept his gift of everlasting life in Heaven.
As Dr. Charlton concludes:
God's ultimate wish for us is that we should transcend obedience to become an un-obedient participant, and eventual collaborator, in God's creative work.
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