Abraham. He could only fulfil God’s command by acting, not merely against his natural inclinations as a loving father, but in defiance of the deeply grounded moral principle that forbids the killing of an innocent person; furthermore, the moral enormity of the action was compounded by the fact that the person in question was his own son. Thus what he was required to do must have appeared to him, as it does to us, abhorrent on both human and ethical grounds. Yet – as Johannes de silentio points out – he is continually praised, from the pulpit and elsewhere, for his grandeur in setting out to
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