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HERMENEUTICAL BORDERLINE SITUATIONS—KIERKEGAARD AND THE COMPELLING SIGN
which in the experience has proven insufficient before, becomes more and
more dominant. Here is the key to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham.
The challenge for Abraham from this viewpoint is whether or not he can hold
on to the original God-experience every second of the three-and-a-half-day
period. Hence, the challenge is not what kind of decision he makes about
the origin of the voice, as we could see was the case with Sartre. It is rather
whether he can stand by his decision made in favour of the original God¬
experience — and here is the focus of the challenge: against his own reason.
The message of the voice, in the light of the reason, is nothing but scandal.
It contradicts not only ethical norms but also God’s purpose. God makes
himself the subject of a possibility of offense in this message by presenting
himself to human reason in a curious ambiguity. This ambiguity hides
a huge risk in itself, namely the possibility of offense. It does so not in
the original directness of the God-speaking, where, as we have already seen,
human reason is compelled to be silent, but during the journey following
the original directness. The stake in this definitely hermeneutical situation is
whether Abraham reinterprets the original experience later, in order to avoid
the tremendous offense to human reason, or not. The challenge, therefore,
is really a hermeneutical one, as can be seen in the case of Sartre. However,
while the latter thinks that the essence of the situation lies in Abraham’s
interpretation of the origin of the voice, in Kierkegaard the issue seems
to be whether Abraham, in his interpretation, stands by his experience of
the original hearing of the voice or reinterprets it. The direct situation of
the experience is now followed by an indirect hermeneutical situation.
Standing by the original God-experience against the offense to reason is in this
context faith, which is mute, after all, exactly for this reason. Faith is beyond
the boundaries of the hermeneutical. As Kierkegaard writes: “Faith begins
precisely there where thinking leaves off.”" It lies not in irrationality, but in
the field of the paradox. Kierkegaard says, surprisingly, “Here again it appears
that one may have an understanding of Abraham, but can understand him
only in the same way as one understands the paradox.”” So the paradox could
have a hermeneutics, but it would not be hermeneutics in the ordinary sense.
It has to be a new one.
the confrontation with the possibility of offense. Without this condition, what is born
is not faith in its original meaning, as only in the experience of the possibility of offense
realises Jesus Christ’s presence. In this context, the contemporaneousness with Christ
opens the possibility of offense and, thus, the potential for faith itself. It could be fruitful to
attempt to specify the difference between the place of the possibility of offense in Fear and
Trembling — as | try to interpret it — and that of offense in Training in Christianity. While
in the latter the contemporaneousness with Christ and the possibility of offense go hand
in hand, in the former, the situation of the possibility of offense appears precisely through
the passing of the contemporaneousness.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 106.
2 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 214.
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