The modern age, it seemed to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, is about doubt and questioning. That made it antithetical to the very idea of faith.

Kierkegaard was fascinated by the story of the Old Testament’s Abraham, the ‘father of faith’. His Fear and Trembling (1843) recounts the three-day journey of the biblical Abraham to Mount Moriah. God has requested he go there in order to sacrifice his son Isaac as an offering.

Kierkegaard gets to grips with how Abraham could be willing to do such a thing. After all, Isaac was not just any child, but the only son of Abraham and Sarah.

The couple had gone childless for decades. Only in their old age had they been gifted Isaac. So he was especially loved and cherished.

What happens on Mount Moriah? Isaac is bound by Abraham and a fire is being stoked, when a ram comes into Abraham’s vision. It is suddenly clear to Abraham that God wants the animal, not Isaac, to be the offering.

Abraham has been tested, and found to be a man of the greatest faith. To Kierkegaard, Abraham’s absolute willingness seems otherworldly, inhuman. Who would be willing to sacrifice their only child?

At one level, Abraham is simply a murderer. But because Abraham is willing to follow through with what God wills, Kierkegaard argues that his actions represent the height of being human. Total trust in an absolute or spiritual reality is not a weakness, rather life’s highest expression.

These great leaps of faith are what binds man to the Absolute. Beyond personal strength or self-sacrifice is the greatness of one who is willingly ‘powerless’, giving all power to God.

This person can, to the rest of humanity, seem to follow a path that is mad or absurd, but only because he or she is not depending on earthly wisdom or reason.

If God moves in mysterious ways, the person who is simply a vehicle for God will also, sometimes, seem to act beyond reason.