Abraham in the Abrahamic Faiths

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Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –

Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –

Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –

Oh rocka my soul –

According to the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abraham has a bosom big enough to rock a world of souls.

It is a testament to the Christian vision of Abraham that this song was sung by black slaves in the American south.  The song is a reference to a passage in the gospel of Luke chapter 16 about a poor man named Lazarus who suffered and starved and then ended up in heaven in the bosom of Abraham, while a rich man, from whose table Lazarus had begged for crumbs, died and went to Hades and then begged Abraham to save him.  Abraham was waiting in heaven to receive his children, including his black children, the slaves who suffered in this life and hoped for satisfaction in the next.

The early Christians looked to Abraham as their progenitor – even if they weren’t Jewish Christians.  They remembered the words attributed to John the Baptist:  “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. “  (Matt 3: 9) and of Jesus, probably inserted into his mouth long after his death -  “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." (Matthew 8:11-12)  In this passage, Jesus was referring to the faithfulness, what could be translated as "trust", of a Gentile, a Roman centurion.  "Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith,”  said Jesus, presaging (or perhaps post-saging) the opening of the church to Gentiles after his death.  We find some of the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism in these passages – hints of horrors that would follow when Christians repeatedly tried to kick Abraham’s Jewish offspring out of their father’s tent.

There is enough ambiguity in the story of Abraham to make his tent big enough for three religions, and plenty more.   He and Sarah were elderly people, childless, before Abraham fathered Ishmael by Sarah's servant girl, Hagar.  The Genesis story was used later to explain that Ishmael, after being sent away into the wilderness with his mother, became the father of the Arab people.  It took divine intervention for Sarah to become pregnant with Isaac, who then takes the role of the heir of Abraham.  In Islam, the story reads very differently.  Hagar is Abraham's second wife and Ishmael is the firstborn child.  The difference in the stories in the Bible and the Koran is a perfect illustration of the confusion and tension in the Bible story itself, making a lot of room for fertile imaginations to offer creative interpretations.  Why didn't God intervene earlier to make Sarah fertile, and avoid all the trouble among her, Hagar, and Abraham?  The Bible story presents us with a fractious family, a convoluted genealogy.  It presents us with the figure of Abraham as a hapless fellow, short on words but long on patience (faithfulness?).  It presents us with a story into which much could be, and has been, read.

Paul did just that.  Perhaps we should call him the first Christian, as he was the one who turned the followers of Jesus into members of an organized religion.  A critical step toward that end was his declaration that non-Jews could be fully integrated into the new Christian community.  He said that “if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.”  (Gal. 3:29)  Through an elaborate allegorical stretch in his letter to the Romans, Paul made Abraham the father of all who had faith in Christ, whether they were Jews or Gentiles.  He read this idea into God’s covenant with Abraham in the book of Genesis (ch 17) to make him the father of a multitude of nations.   Paul made Abraham the faithful father of the faithful, because it was through his faith that he was blessed by God.  It was through their faith that black slaves in the American south could claim Abraham as their father.

Søren Kierkegaard made Abraham the hero of his existential rumination on faith, “Fear and Trembling.” For Kierkegaard, it was Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar that defined his faithfulness, and defined faith itself.  “He who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.  Upon this pinnacle stands Abraham.”  On his way up to the altar with his only son as the sacrifice, Abraham was in a state of “infinite resignation”:  “Abraham is therefore at no instant a tragic hero but something quite different, either a murderer or a believer.”  Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, exemplified by Abraham, was without a visible basis; it could not be accounted for by assent to a particular doctrine or by envisioning a particular outcome.  In the Christian imagination, Abraham was defined by his faithfulness.  Islam carried this understanding forward.  As the Koran (67) says, “Abraham was not a Jew nor yet a Christian; but he was true in faith….”

It would appear that in the gospels, Abraham was “grandfathered in” to Christian heaven.  He never knew Jesus nor is he attributed to have announced faith in him, in the sense of faith that is an assertion of belief in a particular doctrinal formula.  Somehow Abraham was given a pass around that heavenly gatekeeping question of American evangelical Christians: “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?”  No, he didn’t, but he’s the one they believe will gather those who do into his bosom beyond the Pearly Gates.  How did he get over there?  “Faith” is the answer, but to the question “what is faith?” we have no clear answer.  And that lack of a clear answer is integral to faith itself.  Abraham transcends the ongoing tension between Christians like myself, who see faith primarily as an existential condition, and Christians who see faith as belief in doctrine.

God showed up to the tent of Sarah and Abraham one day, in the form of three men.  Can we take a leap and say they represented the divine presence as known by the three great tribes comprising all of humanity - the descendants of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth? Can we take a further leap and say that they represented the three Abrahamic faiths?  Who knows why the One God showed up as three that day?  It was a doctrinal question that did not trouble Sarah and Abraham.  They did not ask who the men were.  They did not ask for an explanation of their appearance.  They simply acted faithfully, and offered them generous hospitality immediately.  There is room in the tent of Sarah and Abraham for everybody.  I would like to believe that there is room in Abraham’s bosom for all kinds of Christians, room in his bosom for Jews, room in his bosom for Muslims, and room in his bosom for everybody else.  For as God told Abraham in Genesis 17, he would be the father of many nations: the number of his descendants would be like the grains of sand on the beach.  A number we can never count, a number of rocking souls we can hardly imagine....