Abraham in Our Faiths: One Christian’s Perspective

        In January 2006 I was privileged to participate in a panel presentation entitled, "Abraham in Our Faiths," sponsored by our local chapter of the Jewish organization, Tikkun, and our local chapter of the Muslim American Society, meeting at the Friends Meeting House in Durham, NC. There were three of us presenting, a Jewish Rabbi, a Muslim leader, and myself, representing Christianity. This was not a debate, but rather, an opportunity for Jews, Muslims, and Christians to get to meet their neighbors and learn from each other. The presentation was followed by a period of discussion and an excellent pot-luck supper and good fellowship all around. About seventy people attended, about equally divided between the three faiths. My presentation was actually an abbreviated version of the one below, but the full written text was made available to the participants. 

Abraham in Our Faiths: One Christian’s Perspective

By Michael J. Watts, AB, MDiv, ThM

        My greetings to our Muslim friends tonight: As-salaamu ‘alaikum, wa rahmatullahi, wa barakaatuhu, Peace with you all, and the mercy of God, and God’s blessings; and, a belated ’Eid mubarrak! A blessed Festival to you all. My greetings to our Jewish friends tonight: Shalom ’aleichim! Peace upon you all. My greetings to our Christian friends tonight, in the words of the Apostle Paul: Charis humin, kai ’eirene, ’apo theou, patros hemon, Grace to you all, and peace, from God, the Father of us all. I am honored to share the podium tonight with these two distinguished co-panelists, and to present one Christian’s perspective on Abraham in this Interfaith Panel Discussion. 

        I have become convinced that the One God, in Whom I believe, loves equally all people who humbly seek God’s friendship, whether they be Muslim, Jew, Christian, or whatever. I am likewise convinced that the One God, Whom I worship, is Compassionate and Merciful, and indeed, that our One God is Love and Peace, and that this One God is so mighty that He/She[1] can reveal Himself/ Herself in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the Christian Scriptures, and in the Muslim Scriptures, despite any human imperfections a reader might encounter therein. And I am also convinced that no human being has a “lock” on the love of God, and that all of us who humbly seek God will eventually find God. And the really scary thought for me is that, sometimes, the one God, in Whom we live and move and have our being, also finds us! 

        From that kind of perspective, I now turn to Christian Holy Scripture to learn about Abraham, a man whom God found, and a man whom our one God has used to bless us all. The eloquent but unknown author of the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament says these things about Abraham in chapter 11:

       Hebrews 11:1 Now faith [trust] gives substance to our hopes and convinces us of realities that we do not see. 2 Indeed, it was for their faith that our ancestors received approval. . . . 8 In faith [trust] Abraham obeyed the call to leave his home for a land that he was to receive as a possession; he went away without knowing where he was to go. 9 By faith [trust] he settled as an alien in the land that had been promised him, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him to the same promise. . . . 

        11 By faith [trust] even Sarah herself was enabled to conceive, though she was past the age, because she judged that God, Who had promised, would keep faith [prove trustworthy]. 12 Therefore from one man, a man as good as dead, there sprang descendants “as numerous as the stars in the heavens or as the countless grains of sand on the seashore.” [Genesis 15:5; 22:17-18] . . .

        17 By faith [trust], Abraham, when put to the test, offered up his son Isaac [Genesis 22; the Holy Qur’an does not name the son, but Islamic tradition names him as Ismail = Ishmael]: he had received the promises, and yet he was ready to offer his only son, 18 of whom he had been told, “Through the line of Isaac your descendants shall be traced.” [Genesis 21:12] 19 For he [Abraham] reckoned that God had power even to raise the dead—and it was from the dead, in a sense, that he received him back. (Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19, Revised English Bible).

        Then Paul, the former Jewish Pharisee, also speaks of Abraham in two of his letters. First, to the congregations of Galatia (now in modern Turkey) he says:

        Galatians 3:6 Just as Abraham “believed [trusted] God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” [Genesis 15:6] 7 so, you see, those who believe [trust] are the descendants of Abraham. 8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the nations by faith [trust], declared the Gospel [Good News] beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the nations shall be blessed in you.” [Genesis 12:3; 18:18; 22:18] 9 For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed [trusted]. (Galatians 3:6-9, New Revised Standard Version). 

        And again he takes up the same theme in more detail in his letter to the congregations in Rome and its vicinity:

        Romans 4:1 What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed [trusted] God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” [Genesis 15:6] . . . 

        11 He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith [trust] while he was still un-circumcised. The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe [trust] without being circumcised, and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, 12 and likewise, the ancestor of the circumcised, who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith [trust] that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised. 

        13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the Torah [i. e., the “Law,” “Instruction,” “Revelation,” which, of course, had not yet been promulgated or set down in writing in Abraham’s time] but through the righteousness of faith [trust]. . . . 16 it depends on faith [trust], in order that the promise may rest on grace [God’s unmerited favor] and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the Torah but also to those who share the faith [trust] of Abraham (for he is the ancestor of all of us, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the ancestor of many nations”) [Genesis 17:4-5] – in the Presence of the God in Whom he believed [trusted], Who gives life to the dead and [Who] calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against hope, he believed [trusted] that he would become “the ancestor of many nations,” [Genesis 17:4] according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” [Genesis 15:5] 19 He did not weaken in faith [trust] when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith [trust] as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised. 22 Therefore his faith [trust] “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” [Genesis 15:6] 23 Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” [Genesis 15:6] were written, not for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe [i. e., who place our trust] in Him, Who raised Jesus, our Lord, from the dead, . . . (Romans 4:1-25, New Revised Standard Version, adapted).

        Lastly, the writer of the New Testament Book of James adds this word:

        James 2:21 Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? (Genesis 22) 22 You see that faith [trust] was active along with his works, and faith [trust] was brought to completion by the works. 23 Thus the Scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed [trusted] God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," (Genesis 15:6) and he was called “the friend of God.” (Isaiah 41:8; 2 Chronicles 20:9; cf. also the Holy Qur’an, Surah 4:125, in which Abraham is referred to as Khalîl ’Allah, “the friend of God.”). (James 2:21-23, New Revised Standard Version). 

        In the Book of Genesis we are told that this man ’Abram, later called ’Abraham, was called by God to leave his roots and to go in faith [trust] to a land that God would give him. God makes promises to Abram. Abram trusts the promises of God and leaves his family and his homeland for Canaan. His trust in God—his faith—is what we Christians throughout the centuries have remembered as the most important feature of his life, and that trust/faith is what we Christians have continued to understand should be our own response to God.

        In many of the patriarchal stories, I find that I cannot always be certain whether a person who is named in a story is a single individual, or a whole family, or a tribal group, because it seems to have been a frequent custom in Hebrew writing to let the name of the ancestor of a tribe or a group stand for the whole group. Thus, the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis 12-50 may or may not have some historical basis. Yet I rather think that they do.

        But beyond the core of historical facts that might be imbedded in the traditions, I am convinced that we are given here a picture of how Israel came to think about itself. The important thing about these stories for us, it seems to me, is not how much of them is true in a strictly historical sense. The important thing is that these stories reveal how the people of Israel understood themselves, and, consequently, how today’s Jews and Christians and Muslims can understand themselves as inheritors, through our faith, of the promises to Abraham, in light of those same stories.

        That point of view about the patriarchal narratives should not be considered too unusual. We find it in our own American national history as well. The legendary story about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree and then being unable to lie about it, for example, is certainly nothing more than a fiction. Parson Mason Weems first popularized that tale in his late 19th century biography of Washington. That story became important for us Americans, not because it was historically true. Rather, it became important because it speaks of the honesty and of the honest reputation of our first President, and of our own ideals for ourselves, and for our nation’s leaders: namely, that we think honesty in public officials, and honesty in our everyday life, is important for our society. Would that more of our public officials today would take that story seriously!

        In Genesis 12:1-3 Abram receives God’s call: Lech lechah! Go-you-forth! He is called to leave his country (his general location, in Haran, in northern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq), and to leave his kindred (his clan or tribe), who probably were among the mass of people called Aramaeans, or Amorites, who had moved into Mesopotamia from the Arabian Desert), and furthermore, he is called to leave his father’s house.

        Genesis 11:31 seems to me to imply that Abram’s father, Terah (the Holy Qur’an gives his name as ’Azar), may have been the first to receive God’s call to leave Ur and to go to the land of Canaan. But for reasons unstated in the Biblical text, Terah stopped in Haran and settled there instead. Now Terah is said to have been 70 years old when Abraham was born (Genesis 11:26), and he is said to have died in Haran at the age of 205 (Genesis 11:32). Thus, in the story as it has been handed down to us, when Abram left Haran at the age of 75 (Genesis 12:4), his father would still have been living at the age of 145, with 60 more years of life ahead of him!

        Now I think the telling of this tradition is significant. To leave the house of one’s father before the death of the father, as Abram did, was very much against ancient tradition. Not until the father would give his death-bed blessing and then die—leaving a kind of will or legacy—was the son supposed to be free to leave home. But Abram, in accepting the call of the LORD, was making a sharp break with the past, and he was leaving without the blessing from his father. The only blessing Abram was to receive was the one that the LORD had promised to give him!

        God announces the promise in the very first scene of the story (Genesis 12:2-3). The sense of the promise in this passage is very broad: First, there is the promise of land. Second, there is the promise that Abram and his wife Sarai (Sarah) will have a child, whose descendants will become a great nation, implying great numbers and large territory. Third, there is the promise that other peoples will be blessed, or will bless themselves. Thus the fortunes of other peoples will be subject to the fortunes of Abram’s people.

        But note that, at the beginning, the blessing is not clearly spelled out. The LORD promises blessing, certainly, but it is the blessing of a land unknown, and of children from a barren wife! Clearly the readers/hearers are meant to understand that such a blessing is not a human possibility. Furthermore, unlike the human ingenuity and the social cooperation on which the Tower Builders in Genesis 11 had relied, the promises to Abram (and to his descendants through him) are based solely on the possibility of Divine “grace,” the unearned and unmerited favor of God. Abram is here called to respond on the basis of nothing other than his absolute trust in the Divine faithfulness.

        The narrator of these stories tantalizes the readers/hearers of these stories with the suspense of waiting. Because Abram believes/trusts the promise, he is able to endure the long wait for a child. He is already 75 years old (Genesis 12:4) when his story opens, and we are later told (Genesis 17:17) that his wife is only ten years younger. Furthermore in the prelude to the story (Genesis 11:30) we are informed significantly that Sarai is barren.

        Within the land of Canaan the LORD watches over Abram. And when, during a side trip to Egypt the promise is jeopardized, asAbram tries to pass off his wife as his sister, and as the Pharaoh lusts after the aging, 65-year-old, but apparently still very beautiful, Sarai, the LORD intervenes. Again, when Abram risks the land of promise by agreeing to let his nephew Lot have first choice, the LORD protects—and Lot chooses the area of the cities of the plain, near the Dead Sea, instead.

        Ten years pass. Abram is now 85, and his wife is 75. Their biological clocks keep on ticking like a Timex. They both are tempted to doubt the promises. Sarai asks Abram to have children by her maid Hagar—for according the Amorite and Hurrian culture from which they had come, a child born of a woman’s personal maid could be credited to the woman herself (Genesis 16:1-3). Hagar does conceive, but because of her haughty attitude, Sarai drives her away. Hagar eventually returns to Abram’s household to bear a son in Abram’s 86th year (Genesis 16:4-16). Her son will be Ishmael, traditional ancestor of the Bedouin Arab peoples, and, thus, according to Muslim tradition, ancestor of Muhammad.

        In Genesis 17 we have recorded another version of God’s renewal of the promise in Abram’s 99th year. He has now waited 24 years (!) with no result. But Abram still believes! God changes the name of ’Abram (meaning “great father”—surely an ironic misnomer up to this point!) to ’Abraham (which means, “father of many nations”). And the name of Sarai is changed to Sarah (both names mean, “princess”).

        Abraham now expresses some amusement at the impossibility of the promise, and tells God that he will settle for Ishmael as the promised son (Genesis 17:15-18). God refuses the easy way out. Sarah, God reiterates, will be the mother of the promised child, and the child’s name, “Yitzhak” (“Isaac,” meaning “laughter”), will be a witness for generations to come that God can, in fact, accomplish the impossible (Genesis 17:19-23)!

        In Chapter 20 we encounter another version of the tradition that was related in Chapter 12 about the patriarch passing off his wife as his sister. Here the protagonist is Abimelech, ruler of Gerar, rather than a Pharaoh. Here also, the deception is somewhat mitigated when Abraham explains that Sarah is his “half-sister.” Apparently Sarah is not yet pregnant. And before the 89-year-old, but still apparently very beautiful Sarah can be taken into Abimelech’s harem to satisfy that ruler’s lust for her, God again intervenes, and does not allow this apparent failure of faith by Abraham to interfere with the Divine promise.

        Eventually, in Chapter 21, we find Sarah pregnant, craving pizza when it hasn’t even been invented yet! After 25 years (!) of waiting, Sarah conceives, and the son Yitzhak/Isaac is born to 100-year-old Abraham and 90-year-old Sarah, and “laughter” comes into their home.

        But one more event puts the promise in jeopardy. In chapter 22 the tradition, in its finest moment, records Abraham’s great test—the “’akedah,” the offering and near-sacrifice of his beloved son. Again God calls to Abraham: Lech lechah! Go-you-forth! And again, Abraham responds in faithfulness and trust. Now for Jews and for Muslims it has become important whether the son offered for sacrifice was Isaac or Ishmael. I note that the Holy Qur’an itself does not specify the name of the son at that point. And, of course, you would expect me, as a Christian, raised on the Hebrew Bible and on the New Testament, to go on the assumption he was Isaac. But also for me as a Christian, as one of those who share “the faith of Abraham,” the millata-’Ibraahiim, the question of just which son was offered is not really important. So I will focus my attention here on the man Abraham himself.

        It is almost impossible to make too much of this story. It seems to me to express the very heart of the Hebrew understanding of the nature of faith. Faith for Abraham here is not just the abstract concept of a person’s intellectual assent to some doctrinal proposition about the nature of God or about God’s ways of dealing with human beings. Rather, faith here is a concrete action based on a history with God, and this faith has always been his way of life, even when he is faced with the ever-present temptation to doubt the promises. His faith is a concrete action exhibiting absolute personal trust in the character and in the faithful activity of this God Who makes and keeps His promises.

        The crucial thing to remember in reading this remarkable story is that we readers/hearers are meant to understand that, even as he raises the knife, Abraham believes (trusts) that God is somehow going to fulfill the promise that through Isaac the blessing will come (Genesis 21:12)! He was not giving up his belief in that promise. It is beside the point that the reader/hearer “knows” that God will not, in the end, allow Abraham to go through with the sacrifice. The reader/hearer must also assume that Abraham himself did not know this, and yet he was still willing to give up the promise in radical obedience to God.

        Abraham was here being asked apparently to give up the very substance of God’s promise to him—the very son through whom the blessing was to come. So “faith” [trust] here was being asked to give up the very benefits of that faith. Later in the Hebrew Bible this becomes a major theme in the Book of Job—the question of whether a person will continue to devote himself or herself to God if the benefits of such devotion are withdrawn (cf. Job 1-2). Here, Abraham answers that question affirmatively without belaboring it. Abraham remains faithful.

        Notice further that “faith in God” in the circumstances presented here cannot mean just the confidence that God will fulfill the promises in spite of the surrender being demanded. Here God is apparently demanding the surrender of the promise itself! Now that to me is an example of genuine “Islam” — “submission”[2] to God! But this is not a blind submission. Abraham’s trust is in the One Who, throughout Abraham’s lifetime, has always proved faithful [trustworthy] to him. And Abraham continues to trust that God is not merely the Almighty One, the Most High God, the Lord of the Worlds, but that God is also, continually and forever, the All-Compassionate One, and the All-Merciful One, Abraham’s “friend.”

        Indeed, if I knew nothing more from the Holy Qur’an than the words of its opening verses (Surah 1:1)—that God is the All-Compassionate and the All-Merciful — that would be enough for me. If I knew nothing more from the Hebrew Bible than the repeated words of the Psalmist (Psalm 107:1; 136:1 and elsewhere) that “the LORD . . . is good, God’s chesed, God’s steadfast love, God’s mercy, endures forever” — that would be enough for me (dayenu! as our Jewish friends say). And if I knew no more from the New Testament than the words of the writer of the First Letter of John, that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16) — that too would be enough for me! And that document goes further by saying, “We love God because God first loved us.” (1 John 4:19). So it was with Abraham. He had come to trust God’s mercy, God’s compassion, God’s faithfulness, God’s love. And therefore Abraham was enabled to respond faithfully.

        So in the experience of Abraham as we have it in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the New Testament, faith is not just calm confidence that everything will work out all right. It is also willingness, not only to obey God, but to trust God’s faithfulness, and thus, to walk out to the edge of all the light that this compassionate, merciful, faithful, trustworthy, and loving God has provided, and then, . . . to take . . . one . . . more . . . step . . .

—Reverend Michael J. Watts, January 15, 2006

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[1] Actually, I am convinced that God has no genitalia, and thus, no gender. This is not a matter of “political correctness” for me. “He” or “She,” “Himself” or “Herself,” will do equally well for me. The main thing is that for me, God is a Person, with Whom a human being can have a “relationship.” I think that is at least part of what it means to say that humanity was created “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26).

[2] The traditional rendering of Surah 2, verse 121 in the Holy Qur’an is, “Recall, when his Lord said unto him: ‘Aslim! Submit! [i. e., be a Muslim!’] he said: ‘aslamtu, I submit, [i. e., I will be a Muslim], before the Lord of the Worlds!’” I find myself wondering if the Arabic words might bear the meaning: “Place your trust in Me!” . . . “I place my trust in You, O Lord of the Worlds!” I must remind myself to check this possibility out with an Arabic scholar. Several Muslim friends who speak Arabic have suggested to me that this would be a reasonable translation/interpretation.