Journal of Moral Theology, Vol.

1, Special Issue 1 (2021): 20–39

On Pilgrimage with Abraham: How a

Patriarch Leads Us in Formation in Faith
Jana M. Bennett

I
THE CONTEMPORARY PLIGHT OF FAITH
N CHRISTIAN TRADITION, THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUE of faith de-
scribes an epistemology, a way of interpreting scripture, a
worldview of history and culture, an ethics, and more. St. Augus-
tine’s Confessions, for example, depicts Augustine’s journey to-
ward God as requiring intellectual as well as faith-based assent to a
scriptural worldview, and a bodily way of life that supports, and is
supported by, that worldview. The famous line “Lord, make me chaste
and continent, but not yet” (Conf. 8.7.17), is faith actively seeking God
in body and mind. For Christians, faith is a robust theological virtue
that requires our whole selves, in concert with God’s grace.
Twenty-first century accounts of faith fail to engage that Christian
tradition well, however. What people tend to mean by faith has be-
come attenuated largely to intellectual assent to certain beliefs. Faith’s
contemporary meanings tend not to bear the full weight of Catholic
teaching on faith. Moreover, these attenuated versions of faith do not
meet people’s deepest hungers for God, and therefore have the effect,
often, of turning people away from Christianity altogether.
For example, a common contemporary statement made about the
term “faith” is that it is merely another name for “organized religion.”
Organized religion, in turn, is often understood as a set of ideas that
one must believe to belong. In studies about people who have es-
chewed Christianity, people’s answers to questions about faith assume
both that faith is an organized religion named Christianity, and that
belonging to this mere organization means having belief in a set of
specific teachings about faith. Further, such statements have often
turned people away from the “Christian organization.” A recent Pew
Research Forum study observes that those who are unaffiliated are so
because: “I question a lot of religious teachings” (51 percent), “I don’t
like the positions churches take on social/political issues” (4 percent),
and “I don’t like religious organizations” (34 percent).1 Insofar as faith

1 Becka Alper, “Why America’s ‘Nones’ Don’t Identify with a Religion,” Pew Re-
search Forum, last updated August 8, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2018/08/08/why-americas-nones-dont-identify-with-a-religion/.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 21

is equated with religious institutions, Americans increasingly want no

part. The unaffiliated often name Catholicism and other religious tra-
ditions as irrelevant.2
The shift from a robust, holistic, theological virtue toward the at-
tenuated view just described stems from Enlightenment traditions of
thought that emphasized rational thought, especially as espoused in
scientific evidence and logical statements. Religious belief came to be
understood by some as irrational and personal to the holder of that
belief, rather than rational and (therefore) universal. What is interest-
ing is that around the same time, and in response to Enlightenment
traditions, Christians tended to package their beliefs into neat sets of
questions and answers, and catechisms. Nineteenth-century conserva-
tive and liberal Christians alike aimed to develop rational theories that
demonstrated proof that Christianity is true, such as archeological digs
to find the real Noah’s ark and attempts to find the “historical Jesus.”
Such activities continue today, perhaps most famously in the Hobby
Lobby Bible Museum, which has devoted itself to showing that arche-
ology and the historical record demonstrate the unchanging Word of
God in the Bible. The Jesus Seminar continues the search for the his-
torical Jesus. Despite, or maybe because of, such intense desire to
prove tenets of faith with historical and scientific proofs, contempo-
rary unaffiliated people are unconvinced, and have left.
Such deductive faith is not the only version of faith present in con-
temporary discourse. The same Pew Research Forum study also indi-
cates that the vast majority of the unaffiliated profess belief in a god—
though not quite the God of Christian teaching. Almost 80 percent of
the unaffiliated appear to have a belief in some kind of god.3 Faith of
this kind has an individualistic character: people desire to be free to
believe in God in ways that are not apparently ensnared in traditional
religious views. Journalist Caroline Kitchener studied the rise of the
unaffiliated:

Americans are leaving organized religion in droves: they disagree

with their churches on political issues; they feel restricted by dogma;
they’re deserting formal organizations of all kinds. Instead of atheism,
however, they’re moving toward an identity captured by the term
“spirituality.” Approximately sixty-four million Americans—one in
five—identify as “spiritual but not religious,” or SBNR. They, like
Beare, reject organized religion but maintain a belief in something

2 Nicolette Manglos-Weber and Christian Smith, Understanding Former Young Cath-

olics: Findings from a National Study of Emerging Young Adults (University of Notre
Dame, 2013).
3 Alper, “Why America’s Nones Don’t Identify with a Religion.”
22 Jana M. Bennett

larger than themselves. That “something” can range from Jesus to art,
music, and poetry. There is often yoga involved.4

The apparent individual development of spiritual practices is not

the whole picture. There also seems to be rather a collective sense of
religious belief. Over a decade ago, sociologists Christian Smith and
Melinda Lundquist Denton observed American teenagers and discov-
ered that many held several common conceptions of faith, irrespective
of the particular faith tradition they belonged to, or even whether they
saw themselves as seekers or nothing. They termed this collection of
ideas “moralistic therapeutic deism.” They summed up these beliefs
as:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over
human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as
taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about
oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except
when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.5

Smith and Denton also suggest regardless of faith status or back-

ground, moralistic therapeutic deism is not limited to a specific gener-
ation; adults, too, share several of these conceptions of God.6
In a later study, sociologists Nicolette Manglos-Weber and Chris-
tian Smith dug into more details and suggested that both Christians
and unaffiliated have more in common on their views of faith than we
might otherwise presume. Smith and Manglos-Weber studied young
adults who left the church, as well as Catholics who had not left. The
ways unaffiliated people describe what faith looks like to them has
much in common with the ways professing Catholics describe faith.
For example, both groups are likely to name God as merely an object
in the universe, like other objects. They are also about equally likely
to see scientific and religious questions at odds with each other: “Sci-
ence and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and
religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific

4
Caroline Kitchener, “What it Means to be Spiritual but not Religious: One in Five
Americans Reject Organized Religion but Maintain Some Kind of Faith,” The Atlan-
tic, 11 January 2018, http://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/01/what-
it-means-to-be-spiritual-but-not-religious/550337/.
5 Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and

Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York/London: Oxford University Press,

2005), 162–163.
6 Smith and Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching, 169–170.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 23

knowledge.”7 Because religion thus operates on irrational subjective

ideas, many also see religion as a main source of conflict between peo-
ple.8 Both Catholics and unaffiliated express the views that God acts
for me (as an individual), and on my behalf, largely in ways that I
perceive to be positive and self-beneficial.9 God is seen as benevolent
and all-loving, but in ways that are individually-directed. Such indi-
vidualism stands in direct contrast to Catholic thinking about the com-
mon good, or the Catholic view that all people are made in the image
and likeness of God and therefore have inherent dignity and worth.
Indeed, my worry is that, in a secular culture that prefers to eschew
both the common good and the inherent worth of all people, belief in
a personal, individualistic god further enables secular culture to work,
including on professing Catholics.
The commonalities between professing Catholic young adults and
young adults who name themselves as unaffiliated should be highly
concerning. For many church observers, a key issue for Catholicism
is about numbers: number of baptisms, number of mass attendees,
number of people who get married and raise their children in church,
and more. Unaffiliated people now surpass Catholics in terms of num-
bers.10 Scholars have suggested that if the problem is the increase in
the numbers of unaffiliated, the solution needs to be finding ways to
bring more people into the church.
Yet what if the church to which we are bringing unaffiliated people
back is merely displaying some of the same basic, and very troubling,
visions of faith, regardless of stated affiliation? If that is the case, I
contend that faith is getting watered down into concepts that are not,
in fact, compatible with traditional Christian beliefs about God. Yet it
is precisely those kinds of beliefs that both groups hold—that seeming
incompatibility between science and religion, that view of God as a
mere object—that only serve to reinforce unaffiliated people’s dissat-
isfaction with propositional beliefs, and that place the beliefs of pro-
fessing Catholics on increasingly shaky ground, especially as they en-
counter secular cultures that raise questions for which a deductive faith
has no answers.

7 Manglos-Weber and Smith, Understanding Former Young Catholics, 14.

8 Manglos-Weber and Smith, Understanding Former Young Catholics, 10–11. See
also Christian Smith, Kyle Longest, Jonathan Hill, and Kari Christoffersen, Young
Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
9 Mangos-Weber and Smith, Understanding Former Young Catholics, 9.
10 Jack Jenkins, “Nones Now as Big as Evangelicals, Catholics,” Religion News Ser-

vice, March 22, 2019, http://www.ncronline.org/news/people/nones-now-big-evan-

gelicals-catholics-us.
24 Jana M. Bennett

Abraham, the Father of the Faith

In this article, I aim for a return to that more robust account of faith
of Christian tradition. My account of faith draws from one of the fa-
thers of faith in scripture, Abraham. By pondering Abraham’s journey
of faith in Genesis, I argue for four points about faith that need to be
articulated in our contemporary world. First, faith must be seen as a
journey, a pilgrimage, that one undertakes as a response to God, rather
than a set of simplistic propositions. Secondly, faith, perhaps espe-
cially in the initial journey stages, encounters God who is largely hid-
den, especially in modern context, yet as faith grows, we find our-
selves gradually seeing God face-to-face. Third, faith requires a com-
munity that shows us that God is a God of life, but that also nurtures
our faithful pilgrimage toward God. Thus finally, faith shall lead us
inexorably toward God’s own life. Taken together, the journey, God’s
hiddenness but emerging presentness, the ways faith must become
communal, and the fact that faith draws us toward God’s own life,
become great. Indeed, we shall see that faith really is like the mustard
seed that grows into a tree so large birds can make nests in it.
Stories about Abraham provide potential windows to other views
of faith because Abraham is so clearly not a modern person. Contem-
porary readers of Abraham must do some work to think through Abra-
ham—migrant, desert wanderer, important man of his time, husband
to Sarah, lover of Hagar, father of Ishmael and Isaac, near-sacrificer
of his own son.
Of course, we contemporary readers can and do bring our Enlight-
enment and contemporary interpretations to Abraham’s stories. Many
modern thinkers have myopically focused on Abraham’s near-sacri-
fice of Isaac, precisely because that is the moment when Abraham’s
story turns irrational, the moment when Abraham’s God appears as so
violent and vicious that no clear-thinking, compassionate, rational per-
son ought to believe. Thus, the early-modern philosopher Immanuel
Kant “could not reconcile a command to kill one’s son with a universal
moral duty within us.”11 In Kant’s account, Abraham’s obedience to
God’s voice contradicts obedience to the universal moral law of not
killing a human being. Kant calls into question the goodness of even
having faith; rather, Kant argues that an individual must separate reli-
gious beliefs from universal moral principles, thereby disconnecting
morality from faith. The later philosopher Soren Kierkegaard empha-
sizes the same sacrificial story as Kant and sees in it some of the horror
that Kant sees. For Kierkegaard, the story becomes a potential moment
for more profound faith: “Let us then either consign Abraham to obliv-
ion, or let us learn to be dismayed by the tremendous paradox which

11Carey Ellen Walsh, “Christian Theological Interpretations of God’s Grace in the

Binding of Isaac,” Perichoresis 10, no. 1 (2012): 43.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 25

constitutes the significance of Abraham’s life, that we may understand

that our age, like every age, can be joyful if it has faith.”12
A different way to approach the questions about rationality in
scripture has been via historical-critical method. Historical-critical
methods of Scripture interpretation developed in the nineteenth cen-
tury; there are multiple methods that have in common emphasizing
scripture as a historical book. Some methods have taken up old ques-
tions about discrepancies that exist between similar Scriptures (the dif-
ferent accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, for example),
but now doing so in new ways. Other methods have relied on the de-
velopment of archaeology as affirming or denying both scientific and
historical facts that may be present in Scripture. This turn in scriptural
study encompasses both liberal and conservative voices. One scholar
describes how “certain famous archaeologists began to dig up sites in
Palestine to find proof that the Bible was true in a modern historical
sense. What had been known as a textual story to that date was now
reconstructed as real history.”13 Yet other scholars will find in arche-
ological record little or no evidence, or open questions, regarding
Scripture.
Historical-critical methods have a large impact on how we read
Abraham and have held very real cultural and political consequences
to the present day. For example, a historical-critical reading from a
more evangelical Protestant, and often conservative, sensibility, ar-
gues that Abraham’s call from God and the gift of a promised land
show a political impact on Zionism, the drive for a modern state of
Israel, and the current evangelical Protestant push to identify contem-
porary Israel with evangelical claims about the end of times. Abraham
becomes political, under the guise of faith.14
Historical-critical methods can be helpful, and of course historical
context provides important details about scripture. Yet for the contem-
porary plight of faith, especially the relative thinness of faith as I de-
scribed above, the focus on using facts and archeology to prove or
disprove scriptural veracity does not illumine how Christians might
approach faith theologically.
My method is to do direct readings of some texts from Abraham.
Direct reading of the Scriptures, for me, will mean making use of both
plain sense of scripture as well as, at times, the multiple kinds of ty-
pological readings that patristic scholarship understood. Truly typo-
logical readings of scripture, on my view, encompass all the four
senses of reading scripture that patristic and medieval fathers extolled:

12 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1994), 43.
13 Ulrike Bechmann, “Genesis 12 and the Abraham Paradigm Concerning the Prom-

ised Land,” The Ecumenical Review (2016): 63.

14 See Bechmann, “Genesis 12.”
26 Jana M. Bennett

the plain sense, the allegorical sense, the moral sense, and the escha-
tological senses.15 I will also draw on some of the patristic interpreta-
tions of Genesis, to show how some of earliest Christian typological
readings shaped Christian life. Each of these readings from Genesis
draw us into salvation history and call us to see our own lives—past,
present, and future—imprinted with God’s word. Typological read-
ings have been criticized in recent decades for supporting superses-
sionist claims about Judaism, or similarly, for perpetuating troubling
and serious anti-Semitic attitudes that the Church has denounced.16
Yet I think that typological readings, done carefully, can also call
Christians to greater love and appreciation of Jewish traditions of read-
ing scriptures, as well as acknowledging Jews as the chosen people of
God. Typological readings seek an awareness of time, place, and cul-
ture, in order to know what the author might have meant in the initial
telling of the story. Typological readings can also draw us into a range
of interpretations, including rabbinic interpretations. From that kind
of reading, we can then search spiritually for how that story connects
to us today, and then even further, to think through how it might read
for the future of the Kingdom of God and our place in God’s Kingdom.

READING ABRAHAM’S FAITH

In the following four subsections, I focus sequentially on four pas-
sages in Abraham’s story that demonstrate the four points about faith
named above: faith as journey, God as hidden, the way the faithful
community reveals a God of life, and what it means to be drawn into
God’s own life. These stories are: Abraham’s beginning journey from
Hebron to Canaan, his successive covenants with God especially as
shown in the story of Lot, his practice of the virtues of hospitality to
the three visitors, and his near sacrifice of Isaac.

A Journey of Small Steps (Genesis 11–12)

The beginning of Abraham’s story demonstrates that faith is better
seen as a journey or pilgrimage than a set of reductive criteria. Like
Abraham, we who thirst for God are invited to follow God. The jour-
ney motif, however, will help us see that faith might best be under-
stood in terms of small, even halting steps that we take toward the
voice of God as we currently apprehend it. Our faithful response to

15 In my view, Thomas’s discussions of the senses of reading scripture intersect with

each other, and all use “types.” The types may signify how the New Testament relates
to the Old Testament (allegory), or they may signify Christ, which gives us what we
ought to do (moral sense), or they may signify eternal things, thereby offering a type
of our blessed end in God. See Aquinas, ST I q. 1, a. 10.
16 Christopher Leighton offers an overview in “Christian Theology after the Shoah,”

Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. Tivka Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs,
David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000):
36–48.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 27

God may deepen and change over time; our vision of God that is our
guide and goal on the journey may likewise deepen and change.
Thus, Abraham’s story runs contrary to the way we contemporaries
approach faith. Like Kant, or like the more contemporary theologian
Paul Tillich, moderns are tempted to see faith as an ultimate decision,
in which one must make a choice to assent to or dissent from God (in
whatever form one chooses to believe in God). Tillich writes: “Faith
as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It . . . is the most
centered act of the human mind. … It participates in the dynamics of
personal life.”17 By contrast, Abraham’s faith does not show as a cen-
tered act of the human mind as much as one simple step on a journey
that began, in fact, long before Abraham even existed.
Abraham’s (Abram’s) beginnings are in Genesis, Chapter 11,
where we find that he and his father Terah have been on the move
from Ur in Chaldea (v. 31). In Chapter 11, it seems that Terah had
intended to travel all the way to Canaan, but for some reason he stops
and remains in Haran. The knowledge that this journey has been un-
dertaken before sets us up for Chapter 12, then, where God first says
to Abraham:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the
land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will
bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I
will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will
curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (12:1)

Notice that Abraham’s journey is both one of leaving behind his fam-
ily, friends, and country but is also one of continuing the journey that
his father had begun so many years before.
Abraham’s response and action here is that he simply takes up a
journey that has already begun. He takes the steps of a life that he has
already been living, follows the voice of a God he has been following
and yet does not entirely know. Abraham’s is not a brand-new journey
that he, personally, has undertaken. This is a fact that surely wreaks
havoc with us moderns who believe our spiritual seeking after God to
be entirely ours, entirely an individualistic choice that we made in fa-
vor of (or against) belief in a certain, kind of god. Abraham’s step of
faith already suggests to modern readers a more distinctive vision of
faith than is seen in the moralistic therapeutic deist view that God
“does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life” and that a
“central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”18

17Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 4.
18Christian Smith, “On ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ as Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit,
De Facto Religious Faith,” Catholic Education Resource Center, www.catholicedu-
cation.org/en/controversy/common-misconceptions/on-moralistic-therapeutic-de-
ism-as-u-s-teenagers-actual-tacit-de-facto-religious-faith.html.
28 Jana M. Bennett

Rather, God engages directly in Abraham’s life. In contrast to his fa-

ther Terah’s journey, God directly calls Abraham. We do not know if
God had similarly called Terah, but we do know definitively that God
has called Abraham to follow the path of his father, but with a new
purpose. The journey God calls Abraham to undertake is simply to be
a continuation of the person that Abraham already has been: he is a
semi-nomad, a pilgrim, and he grew up in that way.
It is significant that in this passage, Abraham does not see God, he
only hears God’s voice, yet he recognizes the voice as God’s. Some
accounts of Abraham suggest that he did not really know God until
God first calls him in Chapter 12; but some accounts, like the Jewish
Midrash, suggest that Abraham searched for God from the time he was
young, and that “ultimately he apprehended the way of truth and un-
derstood the path of righteousness through his accurate comprehen-
sion. He realized that there was one God who controlled the sphere,
that He had created everything, and that there is no other God among
all the other entities.”19 I suggest that the reason Abraham is willing to
leave his family, his friends, and the land of his father behind and jour-
ney to Canaan on God’s command is because he has already been lis-
tening to God’s voice for many years, at least in a nascent sense; yet
now he will undertake the journey that—as we shall see—steadily en-
courages him to know God more and more. He shall steadily journey
more and more toward becoming God’s friend.
One key element is to note the nature of the call, the way that God
speaks to Abraham and the way he responds. We live in a culture
where it is difficult to hear God’s voice. We live in a post-Kantian
culture that is prone to believing that the voice of God may simply be
our own intuition, or willful mind, or internal thoughts—only Chris-
tians are so stupid (culture suggests) as to put a name like “God” to
those thoughts. Such a view of God makes sense in a post-Enlighten-
ment world that has imbibed ideas like “man makes religion.”20
For modern sensibilities, I suggest that we need recollection of the
fact that hearing God’s voice is not always a clarion call, and in fact,
that we can be entirely wrong in our perception of God’s voice. Just
as we are prone to seeing faith as a clear and final decision, so listening
for God’s voice can seem like it must be clear and loud. Such an as-
sertion about God’s speaking to us is precisely one of the aspects of
faith that causes Nones to assume they must not have faith. Yet Abra-
ham witnesses to the possibility of hearing God’s voice in a time when
hearing God’s voice is not valued. Abraham’s position as father of the
faith also enables us to read his story alongside all the scriptures that

19 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey: Reflections on the Life of the Founding

Patriarch (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 2008), 40.
20 Karl Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1970), 127.

 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 29

witness to those times when God’s voice is precisely not heard (for
example, the prophets in Kings and Chronicles who merely speak the
words the kings want to hear). Such recognition of both God’s call to
Abraham and the fact that we humans do not always (or even often?)
hear God’s voice well, is to remember that following God’s voice is a
matter of discernment.
One final point I observe about Abraham’s call in chapter 12 is that
God calls Abraham out from the ordinariness of his life at Ur. The
journey takes place as part of Abraham’s ordinary life, which again
emphasizes that faith is so often the small steps we make in the midst
of the life we are given. God does not usually ask us to make gigantic
leaps but rather asks us to go this way rather than that way. Faith might
best be seen as a journey of exploration, waiting to see what one small
step may lead to by the end of a person’s life. This shall become more
significant as we continue through Abraham’s story. While we know
the end of this story—we know that God’s call to Abraham will con-
tinuously expand even to the point of near-sacrifice of his only son, in
chapter 12—here, he is simply a son following in his father’s foot-
steps.

Responding to the Hidden God (Genesis 13:1–18)

The second scripture passage to examine is Genesis 13:1–18. In
this passage, Abraham responds in faith to a God who is, at least at the
moment, hidden from him. Abraham’s response to God includes re-
sponses of virtuous action toward others, even when that action ap-
pears to leave Abraham in a worse position than before his action.
The thirteenth chapter tells the story of when Abraham—still re-
ferred to as Abram in the text—and his nephew, Lot, separate. Up to
this point, Lot has come right alongside Abraham, with all his family
and flocks. In these verses we see that Abraham has amassed some
wealth (“Now Abram was very rich in livestock, silver, and gold”
[13:2]), and so has Lot (“Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks
and herds and tents, so that the land could not support them if they
stayed together” [13:5–6a]). Perhaps it is inevitable that arguments
would arise: “There were quarrels between the herders of Abraham’s
livestock and the herders of Lot’s livestock” (13:7). In a semi-nomadic
community, such arguments over land would be quite ordinary.
Abraham chooses to settle the dispute by deciding that he and Lot
should part ways. So Abraham proclaims to Lot: “Is not the whole
land available? Please separate from me. If you prefer the left, I will
go to the right; if you prefer the right, I will go to the left” (13:9). Lot,
being quite human, chooses what looks like the best of the land. “Lot
looked about and saw how abundantly watered the whole Jordan Plain
was as far as Zoar, like the Lord’s own garden, or like Egypt.” Lot sets
out on the most fertile of land; Abraham’s portion looks more like…
desert.
30 Jana M. Bennett

In the next verses, in fact, God plays on the fact that Abraham’s
land is desert land. “After Lot had parted from him, the Lord said to
Abraham: Look about you, and from where you are, gaze to the north
and south, east and west; all the land that you see I will give to you
and your descendants forever. I will make your descendants like the
dust of the earth; if anyone could count the dust of the earth, your
descendants too might be counted” (13:14–15). Abraham’s descend-
ants will be like the desert sands that he sees. Abraham here lives faith
as the practice of things not seen, for desert sands suggest nothing of
fertility, yet Abraham appears to maintain his faith. Abraham is the
one to whom is promised the fertility of being the father of many—
even set against the backdrop of his young and fertile nephew, who
lives in the young, fertile, and green land.
How does Abraham’s faith manifest itself? It does so precisely in
Abraham’s practice of virtue. In this passage we see most clearly
Abraham’s practice of generosity because we also see his faith. Faith
in God’s promises enables Abraham to practice generosity to others,
even to the point that someone else gets the choicest cut of land. Later,
Abraham demonstrates a similar kind of generosity when Abraham’s
men have a dispute with the Canaan ruler Abimelech over water
(Chapter 21). Abimelech’s men have taken a well that Abraham him-
self had dug. What does Abraham do? He does not insist, “No fair, I
am the one who built the well.” He does not kill Abimelech’s men.
Rather he offers seven lambs to Abimelech so that the man will pub-
licly state that it is Abraham’s well. They make a covenant together;
Abraham gets control of his own water well in that desert land through
his own generosity toward Abimelech. Abraham can be generous to
the point of showing a different relationship to Lot, to Abimelech, and
to others around him.
Such actions of generosity (or other virtues) are difficult to do, and
often impossible to comprehend, in a contemporary context. Abra-
ham’s action makes him seem to lose out, rather than achieve any great
gain. As noted above, the contemporary moralistic therapeutic deism
acknowledges God’s existence only when clear signs of therapeutic
happiness appear, and we feel generally good about ourselves. Only
when people can name the direct blessings God bestows in money or
other direct answers to human wants, can they also name God as pre-
sent. Abraham’s story suggests quite the contrary: we must learn to
see God not in the tangible blessings, but precisely in the opposite, in
the desert sands that rage and seem bleak.
It should, therefore, be no surprise that faith is in crisis. God will
seem utterly hidden to people, especially for a modern culture that
tends to insist rationality and faith in God do not belong together. The
theodical questions compel people to align apparent rational accounts
of a desolate world with the fact of God’s existence. God often loses
in that equation, at least from the human perspective. It is on this point,
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 31

though, that we must look to a deeper understanding of who God is,

as revealed in scripture and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. God will not call attention to Himself, will not present bravado
and self-aggrandizing as the modes of being. As the contemporary the-
ologian Katherine Sonderegger writes, God is “content to be the Truth,
the Wisdom, the Reality of all things, yet be unrecognized in the man-
ifold truths and discoveries of an age. He is content to be unseen….
He does not cry out or lift His voice in the marketplace; we pass Him
by as of no account; from Him we turn away our faces. And He bears
this.”21 So if we wish to walk in faith, we shall have to remember that
God is simply not going to do and be the things we expect.
Yet if we are willing to take the small steps toward generosity (as
just one among many virtues), even in times and places when others
are not being virtuous toward us, our faith may gradually become more
and more attuned to the God who is hidden. Patristic scholars dis-
cussed that aspect of faith in Abraham. In City of God, Augustine
notes,

For the keener the observer’s sight, the more stars he sees; and so we
are justified in supposing that some stars are invisible even to the
keenest eyes, quite apart from those stars which, we are assured, rise
and set in another part of the world far removed from us….This, it
should be noticed, is the context of the statement which the Apostle
recalls for the purpose of emphasizing God’s grace: “Abraham be-
lieved in God, and this was accounted to him for righteousness.” (City
of God, XVI 23)

We cannot see all the stars that might show us all the descendants, but
that fact, for Augustine, shows us the depth of Abraham’s faith and
faithful response to God.
Contemporary Christians, as I suggested above, have a truncated
view of God and faith. Christians who want to help themselves, and
others, on the path of faith might use Abraham’s faith to name that the
hiddenness, and even the resulting doubt, are means for perseverance
in faith. Perhaps the lack of sight is similar in some respects to St. John
of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul.” A generation that demands
faith to be confirmed—whether by way of moralistic therapeutic de-
ism or by means of immediate, tangible, scientific reassurances of
God’s presence in the creation/evolution debate—is not a generation
that has learned to be formed in the faith of Abraham. It is not a gen-
eration that really believes in either mystery or the very fallible nature

21Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: The Doctrine of God, vol. 1 (Minne-

apolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 143.
32 Jana M. Bennett

of its own knowledge. Yet perhaps if we too practice the kinds of vir-
tues that Abraham exhibits on his pilgrimage toward God, we might
find ourselves stumbling toward our final, blessed end in God, as well.

Building Communities of Life (Genesis 17–18:15)

The third scripture segment we consider is Genesis 17–Genesis
18:15. As we continue in Abraham’s journey, we shall see that God
becomes less hidden, but we also begin to see other aspects of faith
that we might not have understood before. For example, faith is not an
individual enterprise, but a communal one.
Genesis 17 depicts the covenant of circumcision that God effects
with Abram, who here becomes Abraham, and then Genesis 18 gives
us the famous passage of the visit from the three strangers. Here, God
does become tangibly present to Abraham in a protracted way, and
Abraham likewise makes a tangible offering to God. In Genesis 17–
18, Abraham’s faith shows us the ways he comes to know God as a
God of life. That knowledge of the God of life will then lead further,
toward guiding and shaping our neighbors and indeed our whole com-
munity. In contrast to the individualistic contemporary versions of
faith that abound, here we see that faith is not meant to be individual;
it is meant to be a communal witness to the God of life.
One of the first points to note in chapter 17 is that, as opposed to
the earlier scriptures, God directly appears to Abraham and says,
“Walk in my presence and be blameless.” Previously, we had only
seen hints of God, but God had remained hidden. In God’s initial at-
tempts to covenant with Abraham, God’s presence remains more ab-
stract. For example, in chapter 15, God makes a covenant under the
guise of a smoking pot and a flaming torch, in which he gives Abra-
ham the land his descendants will inhabit, yet still does not precisely
name any one individual who will be Abraham’s descendant. In fact,
God’s promise is more to Abraham’s descendants than to Abraham
himself: “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt
to the Great River, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the
Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Re-
phaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebu-
sites” (Gen. 15:18–20).
Here, as Abraham’s faith grows, faith is confirmed by a beatific
vision. In addition, in chapter 17, God adds to the previous covenants.
Readers learn that Abraham will be the father of a multitude of nations
and will be “exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings will
stem from you,” God says (17:6). This covenant is marked by circum-
cision, surely a physical and specific reference to fertility, but also a
direct physical response to God that coincides with God’s own direct
appearance. This covenant also features a name change for Abraham,
who had been Abram and now becomes Abraham, the fertile father of
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 33

many. The name change signifies the continuously changing relation-

ship with God; the relationship between God and Abraham is now
much more immediate and intimate. In chapter 17, the covenant of
circumcision, it is Abraham the individual who receives the special
relationship. Alongside the covenant of circumcision, this is the first
time we hear that Abraham will have a specific person who will be-
come an heir of the covenant, Isaac. The importance of circumcision
is not only that it is a physical mark of the special relationship that
Abraham and God have. The importance of circumcision is its con-
nection to Abraham’s procreativity and to God’s great gift of life.
Yet there is more. God is giving the gift of faith here, not just to
Abraham, but to his descendants. The connection between God and
Abraham will need to be passed along to Abraham’s specific future
descendants. In verse 10, we read: “This is the covenant between me
and you and your descendants after you that you must keep: every
male among you shall be circumcised.” Abraham’s new covenant car-
ries with it a responsibility, which is formation of others in faith. Rabbi
Soloveitchik helps re-envisage Abraham and his call: “With circum-
cision, another mission was assigned to Abraham: the formation and
education of a covenantal community, a community that would be
close to God and would follow a new way of life….”22 Faith is not
only about one’s individual relationship with God, but it is about nur-
turing others’ faith as well.
Patristic writers recognized such a gift. The Letter of Barnabas
goes on at some length about the way development of a community of
faith occurred:

Learn abundantly, therefore, children of love, about everything: Abra-

ham, who first instituted circumcision, looked forward in the spirit to
Jesus when he circumcised, having received the teaching of the three
letters. For it says, ‘And Abraham circumcised ten and eight and three
hundred men of his household.’ What then is the knowledge that was
given to him? Observe that it mentions the ‘ten and eight’ first, and
then after an interval the ‘three hundred.’ As for the ‘ten and eight,’
the I is ten and the H is eight; thus you have Jesus. And because the
cross, which is shaped like the T, was destined to convey grace, it
mentions also the ‘three hundred.’ So he reveals Jesus in the two let-
ters, and the cross in the other one.” (9:7)

Abraham is father of Christian faith because typologically, he hands

on faith in Christ. His formation of Isaac, and through Isaac whole
generations of Israelites, also includes us and our own formation.
The community of faith in the God of life becomes even more clear
in the next chapter, Chapter 18, the passage where Abraham and Sarah

22 Soloveitchik, Abraham’s Journey, 158.

34 Jana M. Bennett

receive three strangers, whom commenters frequently name as God.

So again, God becomes no abstraction, but pays a protracted visit to
Abraham and Sarah. Isaac is again introduced as the child of promise,
but this time to Sarah and Abraham both, rather than just to Abraham.
Despite being at an age that seems to contradict new life, Sarah will
be the mother, and Abraham the father, and they shall together show
the world that God is a God of life.
The passage emphasizes that just as God is a God of life, our faith-
ful human response must also be in service of life. We see this in the
ways Abraham and Sarah practice the virtue of hospitality, especially
in verses 6–8. The haste with which Sarah prepares the food show-
cases how important hospitality is in this harsh land, where strangers
have walked miles and really do stand in need of sustenance, both food
and water, at every possible venue. To fail to bestow hospitality is to
fail to bestow life on wayfarers.
When the New Testament authors discuss Abraham, they empha-
size this connection to life. Abraham is referenced in both the gospels
and the letters as someone who “will be raised from the dead.”23 The
author of the Letter to the Hebrews directly names the stories from
Genesis 17 and 18 to “demonstrate that Abraham himself is the ‘first
shadow’ of the resurrection from the dead.”24 The renewal of Abraham
and Sarah’s procreative faculties are seen typologically as connected
to resurrection of the body, and the New Testament writers name this
often. In Romans 4:19, we see Paul using the word “nenekromenon”
to refer to Abraham’s procreative capacity before Isaac: that is, pro-
creation is dead for him; essentially, he is a dead man. Similarly, in
the Letter to the Hebrews: “By faith Sarah herself received power to
conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him
faithful who had promised. Therefore, from one man, and him as good
as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as
many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore” (Hebrews
11:11–12, ESV). Life overcomes death for Abraham and Sarah; faith
in God is emphasized as faith in the God of life.
The building of Abraham’s narrative, then, draws us ever closer to
the God of life. Abraham’s journey of faith has developed from virtu-
ous response to a hidden God now to a point where now he sees and
witnesses to God Himself through circumcision and hospitality. Abra-
ham’s practice of virtue has always been with others, and thus com-
munally focused, but now God’s covenant is being shown as the be-
ginnings of a community of faith. Abraham’s embrace of covenant and
community draws him into God’s life, which in fact is a celebration of

23 David H. Wenkel, “Abraham’s Typological Resurrection from the Dead in Hebrews

11,” Criswell Theological Review 15, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 55.
24 Wenkel, “Abraham’s Typological Resurrection from the Dead in Hebrews 11,” 51.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 35

life. Dry desert sands, aging and apparently infertile bodies, still have
the capacity to show us God’s own life. For contemporary Christians,
this again helps us take up the theme of hiddenness discussed before,
as well as emphasizes that properly speaking faith in God means faith
in a particular, living God who loves life.

Drawn into God’s Own Story (Genesis 22:1–19)

That knowledge of the God of life leads, finally, to the Abra-
ham/Isaac sacrifice story contained in Genesis 22:1–19. The problem
of the story begins directly in verse 1: “Some time later. God tested
Abraham.” Multiple questions arise from this test. First, why would
God, who knows all, need to test Abraham? Then verse 12 only adds
to the questions: the angel of the Lord proclaims, as the mouth of God,
“Do not lay a hand on the boy. … Now I know that you fear God.”
God knows now, since Abraham has brought his son to the very brink
of sacrifice—but God did not know then. Then, too, there is the ques-
tion of sacrifice itself, and how a God who appears not to know, would
require human sacrifice in order to know. In terms of faith, a difficulty
is that God appears to be unstable, which then suggests an instability
to faith in God.
The thin general faith of the contemporary period meshes well nei-
ther with the idea of testing (which contradicts the moralistic and ther-
apeutic aspects of moralistic therapeutic deism) nor with the idea of
sacrifice of the son, as indicated above. As I alluded above in my dis-
cussion of Enlightenment views of faith, this particular story has ap-
peared as irrational, in part for its account of faith. Our age of seeing
religion as the opposite of science, would likely push us to reject that
God who demands a parental sacrifice of a child. Christians whose
faith displays some of the weaknesses indicated earlier, can seem to
be assenting, in faith, to an inexplicable God that they cannot justify
in relation to science. Further, the response of moralistic therapeutic
deism suggests a faith that allows us to hold God down, to see him as
a “nice” god who really would never test faith in such a way, which
does not allow for the fullness of faith that Abraham exhibits in this
passage. When we focus on the sacrifice, without all that has come
before, it can seem that faith only or mostly tends toward moments of
heightened decision, rather than the journey of small steps that I indi-
cated earlier. Yet if we have been attentively on the pilgrimage with
Abraham thus far, this story of sacrifice shows, instead, that the whole
journey of faith leads, finally, to a whole life in God.
Readers over the centuries have contended with the problem of the
test, but typically answer by suggesting that God already knew that
Abraham would prove himself. The fifth-century bishop Theodoret of
Cyrus writes:
36 Jana M. Bennett

God did not test Abraham in order to learn something that He already
knew, but to teach everyone else that He had good reason to love
Abraham. That was why he tested his love of God for three days and
nights. Abraham, torn between nature and faith and pulled both ways,
decided favor of faith. Now, this was a shadow of the divine plan im-
plemented for our benefit; for the sake of the world, the Father offered
his beloved Son. Isaac was a type of the divinity, the ram of the hu-
manity. The actual time was also of equal length; three days and nights
both cases.25

Theodoret’s typological reading suggests not only that God already

knows Abraham, but also that God already knows about the sacrifices
that lie in the future, via God’s own Son. Theodoret also provides one
possible way forward on the question of testing, that notably connects
to what has been discussed above. Abraham has already exhibited
faith; here his step-by-step pilgrimage in faith leads inexorably to a
vision of God’s own life, in which we learn that God in Christ gives
Himself eternally to humanity.
Even if this is the answer to the question of “Why the test?” there
remains the question of the manner of the test. Yet, in light of all we
have considered thus far in scripture, we might consider whether the
test is: will Abraham continue to believe that God is a God of life, that
God will choose for Isaac? The author of the Letter to the Hebrews
clearly sees this; the author appreciates Abraham’s faith in simply set-
ting out on the journey from Terah. Hebrews in fact spends several
verses commenting on the faith of Abraham and Sarah before arriving
at the sacrifice of Isaac: “By faith Abraham, when put to the test, of-
fered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was ready to
offer his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac descendants
shall bear your name.’ He reasoned that God was able to raise even
from the dead, and he received Isaac back as a symbol” (Heb. 11:18–
19). For Hebrews, Isaac is the symbol that prefigures Jesus’s resurrec-
tion from the dead. Thomas Aquinas writes as well:

Abraham in his old age believed God promising that in Isaac he would
be blessed in his seed. He also believed that God could raise the dead.
Therefore, since he believed that God’s commands must be obeyed,
nothing else remained but to believe that He would revive Isaac, by
whom his seed would be called. (Commentary on the Letter to the
Hebrews, 11.605)

25Theodoret of Cyrus, The Questions on the Octateuch: On Genesis and Exodus, vol.
1, Greek text revised by John F. Petruccione, trans. Robert C. Hill (Washington DC:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), Q. 74. Also interesting here is The-
odoret’s typology of the hypostatic union of Christ using ram and Isaac together.
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 37

Here, we witness again that God is a God of life, especially via the
Resurrection. Isaac’s sacrifice therefore witnesses to God’s own self-
sacrifice, but also to God’s conquering of death.
Second, on the question about sacrifice of one’s son, we might note
that Genesis 22:1–19 is not only about Isaac’s sacrifice but also about
Abraham’s own self-sacrifice. “Take your son Isaac, your only one,
the one whom you love” (22:2). Even the thought is costly, but the text
lingers on the fact that Isaac is Abraham’s only, irreplaceable heir.
Rabbi Soloveitchik expresses with eloquence the kind of self-sacrifice
he envisions of Abraham as parent:

“Offer your sacrifice!” That is the main command given to the person
of religion…. The Holy One, Blessed be He, says to Abraham, “Take
your son, your only one, Isaac, etc.” In other words, I demand of you
the supreme sacrifice…. Don’t fool yourself that after you heed my
voice I will give you another son in place of Isaac…. You will think
about him every day. I want your son whom you loved and whom you
will love for ever…. Your life will turn into a long chain of suffering
of your soul. All of this notwithstanding, I demand this sacrifice.26

To be faithful is to become self-sacrificial in small and large ways.

We turn away from our own love of self and love of the world as we
want it to be, toward love of God and others, and a world that remains
mysterious. Abraham could not know what God would do with the
ram. Yet he had come to know God, and because he knows God, he is
able to see the world as mysterious, but God as present in the mystery,
nonetheless. He continues to take steps in faith.
In verse 3, Abraham silently assents to God’s request to take his
only son and sacrifice him. Here his faith has no words; Abraham
simply assents. Later, Abraham and Isaac discuss the coming worship
of God that they will do together. Notice that there is a collective sense
of worship. Green’s study of rabbinic resources suggests that there is
also a collective sense of sacrifice here, such that “the sacrifice of
Isaac and Abraham’s personal self-sacrifice are morally analogous.”27
Even more, a midrash on Genesis 22:1–19 describes Isaac as someone
who, with his father, chooses self-sacrifice, so that both are following
God.28 Such a view of sacrifice extends my earlier discussion of Abra-
ham’s faith as becoming something that is communally focused rather
than individually ascribed. Faith becomes something that we practice
together.

26 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in BeSod haYachid ve-haYachad, ed. Pinchas Peli (Jerusa-

lem: Orot Press, 1975), 427–28.
27 Ronald Green, “Abraham, Isaac, and the Jewish Tradition: An Ethical Reappraisal,”

Journal of Religious Ethics 10, no. 1 (1982): 8.

28 Green, “Abraham, Isaac, and the Jewish Tradition,” 8–9.
38 Jana M. Bennett

In verse 7, Isaac asks where the sacrifice is, and Abraham pro-
claims: “God will provide the sheep for the burnt offering” (22:8),
which in fact is what we see happen in verses 11–13. The first-born
son is not, in fact, the sacrifice that God desires in his covenant rela-
tionship with Abraham; God provides the sacrifice, and will do so
again, with Jesus Christ.
Isaac’s near sacrifice does offer a climactic point in the story, so it
makes sense that Kant, Kierkegaard, and others should have fastened
on this point. In a typological reading, however, Isaac’s near-sacrifice,
and the typological revelation of Jesus’s sacrificial love on the cross,
become the touchstone. Yet if that sacrifice is all that is seen, readers
may miss that the whole of Abraham’s narrative demonstrates a life of
faith, begun with small steps. Those small steps of faith may yet lead
to great faith, which is seen in small and large acts of generosity, hos-
pitality, and other virtues. Readers miss, indeed, that Abraham’s re-
sponse to God is one of recognizing and trusting in the God of life who
had already been revealed to him, and with whom he had already been
living.
It is significant that Christians read this part of Abraham’s story at
the Easter Vigil, meant to help us reflect still more deeply on Christ’s
sacrificial love, on the depths of God’s love for us, the “scandal of the
cross” (as Paul has it in 1 Cor. 1:23). We notice how so much of Abra-
ham’s story is God’s own story: Isaac carries the wood for the sacri-
fice; Abraham and Isaac travel three days. At the Easter Vigil, we are
faced with the courageous momentous decision to choose this God in
great faith; we are asked to be like Abraham. So many of the lives of
the saints depend, too, on this kind of heightened utter courage: who
can risk all on behalf of God? Yet also in this context, we seem to be
asked quite a momentous question: Who can truly be a martyr, give
away all possessions, go and live with the poor, drink the pus of plague
victims, and more? What makes so many of the saints’ stories so great
to tell is that they, like Abraham, exhibit a shock value kind of faith.
For all those who wrestle with faith in God in modernity, it is the
small steps and even the halting steps that will eventually become a
recognizable pattern of faith in God. Recognizing the significance of
those small steps, perhaps as part of gradual reflection on (for exam-
ple) how science and faith belong together, is important for contem-
porary faith formation.

CONCLUSION
It remains, then, to offer some conclusions regarding my reading
of Abraham and the question I began with, about how Christians might
emphasize a much thicker, more complex, and stronger faith. I suggest
that Abraham’s step-by-step pilgrimage that led him ever more toward
God offers a practical approach. Rationalistic, deductive faith insists
on people already being able to assent to what may seem impossible
 On Pilgrimage with Abraham 39

or at odds with science, culture, and more. Abraham’s pilgrimage sug-

gests we can counsel people to begin with small steps from where they
are. What small steps in faith might we offer to those young adults
who profess Christ yet hold a view of God that is not a Christian view?
What small steps toward discussing the Church’s understanding of sci-
ence and faith as integrally related might we offer? In the case of un-
affiliated people, the conversation may begin much differently, at a
place where a person expresses serious doubts. We might
acknowledge the doubts and find ways to enable even the tiniest of
steps in faith.
Moreover, Abraham gives us an opening and opportunity to dis-
cuss the modern dislike of “organized religion” with those who may
have some account of faith but who are unable to see the benefit of a
community of faith. However, while community is something with
which Abraham surrounds himself throughout his journey, it is im-
portant to note that the particular community of faith does not show
up till he is further along in the journey. In other words, a straight up
invitation to church may not be a small enough step for some of the
people we encounter.
That small step, in turn, requires our own faith as scholars and
teachers. We must be willing to acknowledge that we can never fore-
see a person’s whole journey in faith, nor are we the author of any part
of their faith. God alone is the teacher, author, and shepherd. We shall
definitely be called upon to respond to our faith with generosity and
hospitality toward others. We shall have the opportunity to proclaim
the Gospel in all the ways that we can, including through sharing
Abraham’s pilgrimage of what it means to be drawn into God’s own
life.
What if, via Abraham, the decision people are asked to make about
faith is not about the decisions made at crisis points, but rather about
the continuous decision to see the God of life everywhere that despair
seems to exist instead? The Christian life that moral theologians need
to describe is about being willing to step into the light of faith, even
with small, halting steps, and persist for the long haul. Abraham truly
is a father of our faith because he leads us, step by halting step, toward
our Risen Lord and Savior.

Jana M. Bennett is professor and chairperson of the Department of Religious

Studies at the University of Dayton. She is the co-author (with David Clout-
ier) of Naming Our Sins: How Recognizing the Seven Deadly Vices Can Re-
new the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Catholic University of America Press,
2019), and author of Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Sin-
gle Life (Oxford, 2017).