GOD If there is to be a God who is more than a personification of duty, then there must be a sphere higher than the ethical If Abraham is a hero, as the Bible portrays him, it can only be from the standpoint of faith ‘For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal.’ Even if we accept that the demands of the unique relationship between God and an individual may override commitments arising from general laws, a crucial question remains If an individual feels called to violate an ethical law, how is he to tell whether this is a genuine divine command or a mere temptation? Kierkegaard insists that no one else can tell him; that is why Abraham kept his plan secret from Sarah, Isaac, and his friends The knight of faith (as Kierkegaard calls Abraham) has the terrible responsibility of solitude But how can he even know or prove to himself what is a genuine divine command? Kierkegaard merely emphasizes that the leap of faith is taken in blindness His failure to offer a criterion for distinguishing genuine from delusive vocation is something that cries out to us in an age when more and more people feel they have a personal divine command to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill as many innocent victims as possible Kierkegaard’s silence at this point is not inadvertent In his Philosophical Fragments and his Concluding Unscientific Postscript he offers a number of arguments to the effect that faith is not the outcome of any objective reasoning The form of religious faith that he has in mind is the Christian belief that Jesus saved the human race by his death on the cross This belief contains definite historical elements, and Kierkegaard asks, ‘Is it possible to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge?’, and he gives three arguments for a negative answer First, it is impossible, by objective research, to obtain certainty about any historical event; there is always some possibility of doubt, however small, and we never achieve more than an approximation But faith leaves no room for doubt; it is a resolution to reject the possibility of error No mere judgement of probability is sufficient for this faith which is to be the basis of eternal happiness Hence, faith cannot be based on objective history Second, historical research is never definitively concluded: it is always being refined and revised, difficulties are always arising and being overcome ‘Each generation inherits from its predecessors the illusion that the method is quite impeccable, but the learned scholars have not yet achieved success.’ If we are to take a historical document as the basis of our religious commitment, that commitment must be perpetually postponed 296