In this thought-provoking clip, Cy Kellett engages with Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin as they tackle a challenging question about the morality of sacrificing a child to God, drawing parallels to the story of Abraham. Jimmy skillfully navigates the complexities of this inquiry, highlighting the horror of such an act while encouraging deeper reflection on the nature of faith and morality. Join them as they explore this sensitive topic with clarity and insight.
Transcript:
Cy: Should I kill my child as a sacrifice to God? If God will ask me to do that, like he asked Abraham. This is a question I once got from an atheist, and I never found a good answer.
Jimmy: So there are a number of ways we could approach this question, and it’s basically being used. It’s probably not a sincere question coming from the atheist. It’s probably being used as an attack on Christianity and Judaism.
And one way of dealing with it, which is not actually the answer I’m going to propose, but one way of dealing with it would be to turn the situation around on the atheist. This could be useful for purposes of helping the atheist think a little more broadly, because the idea of killing your child is utterly horrific to us.
And frankly, it would have been utterly horrific to Jewish people in the Old Testament too. So that’s really what’s given this objection its force: the intuition that we have today that killing a child, especially your own, is utterly horrific. And I’m not saying it’s not. It is.
But it could be useful to help the atheist think a little more broadly. By saying so, can you imagine any situations where you might undertake action that would lead to the death of your child?
Let’s suppose that your child has a horrible, incurable, lingering disease that is causing your child to have enormous pain. Well, there are various people today, and actually I oppose these people, but there are people today who would say if this child is in just enormous unending agony, then they should be put out of their misery.
And there would be people who would advocate euthanasia for such a child. Those people tend to be common, or at least more common among atheists. So I think it could be helpful to say to the atheist, you know, could you imagine euthanasia in that kind of situation?
Now, I believe euthanasia is immoral, but the atheist may not. And that may help open the atheist’s eyes. What would not be immoral in my view is palliative care, where you give pain-relieving drugs to the child, even knowing that taking those pain-relieving drugs may hasten their death.
But you’re not actively trying to kill them; you’re trying to relieve their pain. The same thing applies at the other end of life with older people. They can take pain-relieving drugs even though it may hasten their death, as long as they’re not directly causing the death. What you’re trying to do is just relieve the person’s pain.
So palliative care is different than euthanasia, but with euthanasia, there are many atheists who don’t have a problem with it. And so you can then say, well, okay, so what if it turns out that God is real and your child is in this circumstance, and God tells you, “Hey, your child is in enormous pain and is going to remain in enormous pain. You should just go ahead and use euthanasia.” Would you obey God then?
A lot of atheists at that point might say, yeah, if God really spoke to me and told me that this is the best thing for my child, I would do it. I’d be surprised to get a phone call from God like that. But, you know, if this were the circumstance, I could see doing this.
Okay, now that’s not how I would approach the situation, but this could help open the mind of the atheist to thinking about this a little more broadly instead of just leaping to condemn Judaism and Christianity.
So now let me step back and answer the question from a Jewish Christian perspective. There have been two general approaches to answering this type of question, and it doesn’t just apply to this; it applies to other things too.
But the two positions are divided based on the question: Is taking innocent human life an intrinsic evil, meaning it’s always wrong? One school of thought, represented for example by St. Thomas Aquinas, says no, taking innocent human life is not always wrong.
All life is a gift from God, so it’s up to God to determine how much of that gift we receive. It’s also up to him to determine the circumstances by which life ends. So if God tells us in a particular case to take life, it’s legitimate to do that.
He’s just saying, okay, this person’s got this much of the gift; now’s their time to die. I’ve chosen you to be the means through which they die. So go ahead and kill this innocent person.
That’s how Aquinas and various other thinkers in Christian history would look at the sacrifice of Isaac. They would say that God really did tell Abraham to do this. It wasn’t ultimately God’s will that he go through with it, but it was morally legitimate for Abraham to receive this instruction from God and act on the assumption that he is going to go through with it.
Now, the author of the Book of Hebrews notes that, because he didn’t say this explicitly, but he notes that in this event, he says Abraham considered God able to raise the dead. That’s presumably based on the inference that God had promised that Abraham’s seed would be reckoned through Isaac, and Isaac hadn’t had any kids yet.
So if God’s gonna fulfill his promise to Abraham and Abraham kills Isaac under God’s instruction, well, then God must be gonna raise Isaac from the dead, so he’s not gonna be permanently dead. He’ll be able to continue to go on and have descendants through which Abraham’s line will be reckoned.
So that also changes the moral complexity of the situation, if that’s the kind of thing that Abraham was envisioning.
So that’s school number one of how to approach this: that taking innocent life is not always wrong. If God really tells you that he’s determined that the person is to receive this much of the gift of life and so forth, the other school would say no, taking an innocent human life is always wrong.
Therefore, this passage is not to be taken in the straightforward historical way that the first school takes it. Instead, it’s teaching us a lesson.
So what lesson? One or more lessons? What lessons would this story be teaching us? Well, number one, it’s teaching us that God was willing. I’m sorry, that Abraham was willing to be very faithful to God, even at personal cost. Okay, that’s a good thing.
But what else is it teaching us? That God does not want child sacrifice? Because there were ancient Near Easterners who, like, burned their children to Moloch and so forth. They were even doing that in. Even though it would be horrifying to many Israelites, there were some that actually did it.
There was a place in the Valley of Hinnom, right next to the temple in Jerusalem called the Tophet. At the Tophet, they would do child sacrifice. Because there was this presence in Israel at the time of child sacrificers, a clear message needed to be sent that this is not what God wants.
So how can you convey that message? Well, one way would be taking the patriarch of all of us, Abraham, and showing him in a situation where God rejects this. That’s the actual interpretation that I would take of the passage. I don’t think it’s meant as a straightforward historical account.
I think it’s meant to teach us that faithfulness is good, but don’t let that turn into child sacrifice. God will provide something else.
Cy: Marcin, thank you very much. I hope that that was a helpful answer to you. I do appreciate the question. Lots more questions to get to.