Justified True Belief

(●) The man three world religions call father, and the one the New Testament makes the pattern of how anybody is put right with God. + Roughly half the people alive today belong to a religion that traces itself back to one childless herdsman who left home without being told where he was going. Jews call him father by descent, Christians by faith, Muslims through his son Ishmael. All three use the word father of him, and all three mean something different by it, which is a strange fate for a man who spent his life in a tent. For Christian readers he matters for a narrower reason. When Paul had to explain justification, the old word for how a person is put right with God, he did not begin with the law at Sinai or the cross at Calvary. He went back to a sentence in Genesis about a man looking at the stars, and built the doctrine of justification on it (Romans 4; Galatians 3). Abraham is where the New Testament goes to prove that God has always dealt with people on the same terms. One thing to hold from the start. Every date attached to Abraham is traditional. He left no writings, no inscription names him, and no archive outside Scripture mentions him. The years run from the conventional birth date of about 2000 BC with the ages Genesis supplies added on, so the year of his death is simply that birth date plus the hundred and seventy-five years of Genesis 25:7. There is nothing cleverer behind it than that. Honest scholars put him anywhere from the twenty-first to the eighteenth century BC, and some doubt the chronology can be recovered at all. What survives is a narrative, told about him by others, and read ever since as the beginning of something.

(●) c. 2000 BC: Born in Ur of the Chaldeans, in a household that served other gods. + He was born Abram, son of Terah, in Ur of the Chaldeans, the family home Genesis says Terah took them out of (Genesis 11:27-31). Where that city stood is still argued. Most scholars identify it with the great Sumerian city in southern Iraq that Leonard Woolley dug between 1922 and 1934, a place of canals, wool merchants and a temple tower to the moon god Nanna; a minority, following the Near Eastern scholar Cyrus Gordon, put it further north, nearer Haran. Either way he did not come from nowhere. He came from a city with drains, contracts and a state religion. Genesis is blunt about the household. Centuries later Joshua put it to Israel directly: "Your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods" (Joshua 24:2). He is telling them where their family came from and what the family worshipped while they lived there. Whatever else the story is, it is not the story of a man raised to believe the right things. Terah moved the family north to Haran, on the trade road in what is now southern Turkey, and settled there, and there he died. His wife Sarai was unable to conceive (Genesis 11:30). The whole book turns on that one clause.

(●) c. 1925 BC: At seventy-five he left Haran on a promise, for a country he had never seen. + The call is three verses long and asks for everything: leave your country, your relatives and your father’s house, and go to a land that will be shown to you later (Genesis 12:1-3). In a world where a man’s land, clan and gods were the same thing, that is not a change of address. It is the loss of every ordinary form of security at once. The promise attached to it has three parts that the rest of the Bible keeps returning to: a land, a nation from his own body, and a blessing that spills past his family to "all the families of the earth." Set that against the man’s actual situation. He was seventy-five, his wife could not conceive, and he owned none of the land in question. He went anyway, with his nephew Lot, his household and his herds. The writer of Hebrews put his finger on what was strange about it: "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8). He is a stranger for the rest of his life, moving between Shechem, Bethel, the Negev and Hebron, living in tents in a country he has been promised and never owns.

(●) c. 1914 BC: He tried to secure the promise himself, and fathered Ishmael by his wife’s slave. + Ten years in the land, and still no child. So Sarai proposed the arrangement the surrounding culture kept ready for exactly this problem: a wife without children could give her slave to her husband and count the child as her own. Abram, Genesis says without comment, "listened to the voice of Sarai." Hagar the Egyptian conceived, the two women turned on each other, and Hagar ran into the desert, where she was met and sent back with a promise of her own (Genesis 16). Ishmael was born when Abram was eighty-six. This is not the only time he manages the situation himself. Twice he passed Sarai off as his sister to a foreign ruler, in Egypt and later in Gerar, calculating that a beautiful wife made him a target and a beautiful sister made him a useful in-law (Genesis 12:10-20; 20:1-18). Both times the ruler behaved better than he did. Both times the promise had to be rescued from its own bearer. Genesis reports all of it flatly, which is part of why the book reads as testimony rather than propaganda. The father of the faithful spends a quarter of his story trying to arrange by himself what he has been told to wait for.

(●) c. 1901 BC: At ninety-nine he was given a new name, Abraham, and a mark cut in his body. + Thirteen silent years went by after Ishmael’s birth. Then God appeared again and restated the covenant, the binding agreement between the two of them, with two changes. Abram, whose name means "exalted father," became Abraham, and the reason Genesis gives for the new name is "I have made you the father of a multitude of nations" (Genesis 17:5). Sarai became Sarah. Renaming a man was what a king did to a servant he was taking into his own house. The second change was circumcision, required of every male in the household, including the slaves and the foreign-born. Agreements of that weight were normally sealed with a sign in the ancient world: a heap of stones, a shared meal, a scar. This one was cut into the body of every man who belonged to the household, in the organ by which the promised offspring would come, so that the sign of the promise was carried where nobody could display it and nobody could forget it. Abraham laughed when he was told Sarah would bear a son at ninety (Genesis 17:17). So did she, listening behind the tent door, when three visitors repeated the promise (Genesis 18:12). The boy’s name, Isaac, means "he laughs."

(●) c. 1900 BC: Isaac was born to a hundred-year-old father and a ninety-year-old mother. + "Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him" (Genesis 21:5). Twenty-five years had passed since the call, which is long enough for a promise to start looking like a misunderstanding. The single thing the entire promise depended on, a son from his own body, arrived only when both parents were long past any natural possibility of it, and that is precisely the point the New Testament later draws out: the child of the promise was not a human achievement (Romans 4:19-21). The joy did not arrive clean. Sarah demanded that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away, and the text says the matter "very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son" (Genesis 21:11). He sent them into the desert of Beersheba with bread and a skin of water. God met the boy there too, and promised to make a nation of him as well (Genesis 21:13, 17-20). The family that would carry the blessing to all nations begins, then, with a son sent away and a son kept, and both of them given a future.

(●) c. 1875 BC: On a mountain in Moriah he raised a knife over Isaac, and was stopped. + The command is the hardest sentence in the book: take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain that will be shown to you (Genesis 22:2). Jewish tradition calls the episode the Aqedah, Hebrew for "the binding." It is three days’ walk from the command to the mountain, and Genesis records almost nothing that Abraham said on the road: one line to the servants, that he and the boy would go and worship "and return to you," and one line to Isaac, that God would provide the lamb. Three days is a long time to say that little. How old Isaac was, Genesis never says, and the guesses are far apart. Josephus, the Jewish historian who retold the Scriptures for Roman readers in the first century AD, makes him twenty-five (Antiquities 1.227); a rabbinic reckoning that ties the binding to Sarah’s death makes him thirty-seven. That spread is why any year given for this episode is a convention rather than a measurement. He built the altar, bound his son, and took the knife. A voice stopped him, and a ram was caught in a thicket by its horns. He named the place YHWH-jireh, the LORD will provide (Genesis 22:14). Nothing here should be softened. A modern reader is right to be appalled by the command, and being appalled is not a failure to understand the chapter; it is most of the way to understanding it. The surrounding cultures did practice child sacrifice, and Israel’s law would later condemn it in the strongest terms it possessed (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 12:31; Jeremiah 7:31, where God says such a thing never came into his mind). The story ends with the sacrifice forbidden and a substitute supplied, which is the direction the whole Bible runs. Whether that resolves the moral problem is a serious question, and it is argued at length in Common Objections, under the binding of Isaac.

(●) c. 1825 BC: He died at a hundred and seventy-five, owning one field and one grave. + Sarah died first, at a hundred and twenty-seven, and the chapter that follows is one of the most ordinary in Genesis: a long, courteous, stubborn negotiation with the Hittites of Hebron over the price of a burial cave (Genesis 23). Abraham refuses to be given the land and insists on paying, four hundred shekels of silver, weighed out in public. The cave of Machpelah and the field around it is the only ground in the promised land he ever owns, and he buys it to bury his wife in. He sent his servant back to his own kindred to find a wife for Isaac, and lived to see Rebekah brought home (Genesis 24). He took another wife named Keturah and had more sons by her, and he settled his estate on Isaac before he died (Genesis 25:1-6). "These are the days of the years of Abraham’s life, 175 years" (Genesis 25:7). Isaac and Ishmael, the son kept and the son sent away, buried him together in the cave he had bought. He died holding a grave plot, one son of the promise, and a word. Hebrews says he was still looking for a city (Hebrews 11:10, 13).

What His Life Taught

(T1) A person is credited with righteousness for trusting God, not for having earned it. + Think of what happens when somebody posts a bond for a stranger. The stranger has not suddenly become a reliable man. What has happened is that another person’s money and another person’s good name have been put to his account, and he now stands in court on them. That is close to what the Hebrew verb in Genesis 15:6 is doing. God takes Abram outside at night, tells him to count the stars if he can, promises him descendants like that, and the next line says the old man believed him and that God "credited it to him as righteousness." The word translated "credited" is the ordinary Hebrew verb for reckoning something to somebody’s account, and the law uses it both ways. A sacrifice eaten too late will not be credited to the man who brought it (Leviticus 7:18); the tenth the Levites give out of the tithe is credited to them as though it were grain off their own threshing floor (Numbers 18:27). The Greek word Paul reaches for when he quotes the verse comes out of the account books too. Theologians call this imputation: a standing put to a person’s account rather than produced by him. Paul then builds his whole argument on where the sentence sits. Abraham is declared righteous in Genesis 15, before he is circumcised in Genesis 17, and centuries before the law is given at Sinai. So the verdict cannot have depended on the mark, and cannot have depended on the law, because neither existed yet (Romans 4:9-13). What Abraham had was not a doctrine. It was a childless man well past seventy taking God at his word about a family, and being credited with righteousness for it.

(Q) "Then he believed in the LORD; and He credited it to him as righteousness." + Source: Genesis 15:6 (ESV). The setting is a night sky and an argument. Abram has just complained that he remains childless and that a servant stands to inherit everything, and God answers by taking him outside to look up. Paul quotes this verse in Romans 4:3 and Galatians 3:6, and James quotes it too (James 2:23), which is why it became the most argued-over sentence in Genesis (T1).

(T2) God binds himself by covenant, and takes the penalty clause on his own side. + Genesis 15 contains a scene that looks bizarre until you know the legal custom behind it. God tells Abram to bring a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon; Abram cuts the animals in half, leaves the two birds whole, and lays the pieces out facing each other with a path between them (Genesis 15:9-10). Then he waits all day driving off the birds of prey, falls into a deep sleep at sundown, and sees "a smoking oven and a flaming torch" pass between the pieces. Cutting an animal in two and walking between the parts was one of the ways a serious agreement was ratified in that world. It was a self-curse acted out, a signature written with a knife: may this be done to me if I break my word. Jeremiah reports a covenant in Jerusalem sealed exactly that way centuries later, and names the officials who walked between the halves of the calf (Jeremiah 34:18-19). Treaty texts from the wider ancient Near East use a slaughtered animal to the same purpose. What makes the Genesis scene extraordinary is who walks. Abram does not. He is asleep. Only the smoking oven and the flaming torch, standing for God, pass between the pieces, which means that the one swearing the oath and the one who would bear the curse for breaking it are the same. The penalty clause, in other words, is written on God’s side of the agreement. Christian theology has read a great deal into that. A covenant where one side carries the whole obligation is not a contract between equals; it is a promise underwritten by the one who makes it, and it does not fail when the other side does. Which is fortunate, given how Abraham behaves in the very next chapter.

(Q) "Now it came about, when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, a smoking oven and a flaming torch appeared which passed between these pieces." + Source: Genesis 15:17 (ESV). Abram has been asleep since sundown and takes no part in the ceremony he prepared. The next verse states the result: "On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram" (T2).

(T3) The God who judges the world can be argued with, and expects to be held to justice. + Told that Sodom is about to be destroyed, Abraham argues. He stands in the road and negotiates the way a man works a seller down over the price of a field, from fifty righteous men to forty-five, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, to ten, each time pressing the same principle: it would be wrong to sweep away the innocent with the guilty (Genesis 18:22-33). Notice the assumption underneath the haggling. Abraham is not flattering a powerful being or buying him off with an offering, which is most of what the temple religion he grew up beside had to offer. He is appealing to a standard of justice and taking for granted that God is bound by it, and God does not rebuke him for the presumption. The poems and prayers that survive from that same Mesopotamian world knew perfectly well how to complain to a god, and they do it bitterly; what is unusual here is a man holding one to a rule of right and getting an answer. There is a whole doctrine of God hiding in that: he is not merely the strongest party in the transaction, he is good, and being good he can be reasoned with about what goodness requires. This is also where the Bible starts a long tradition of arguing with God rather than around him, running through Job, Habakkuk and a good third of the Psalms. Complaint addressed to God is treated in Scripture as a form of faith, not a breach of it.

(Q) "Far be it from You to do such a thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" + Source: Genesis 18:25 (ESV). Abraham has walked partway to Sodom with his visitors and stops on the road to press the case. The question is left hanging, and the rest of Scripture answers it in the affirmative (T3).

(T4) Where obedience runs out, God supplies the offering himself. + On the road up Moriah, Isaac asks the obvious question: here is the fire and the wood, where is the lamb? His father’s answer is either evasion or prophecy, and Genesis does not tell you which: God will provide the lamb for himself. What happens on the mountain is that the sacrifice is stopped and a substitute is supplied. A ram is caught in a thicket, and it dies in the boy’s place. Abraham names the site YHWH-jireh, a sentence rather than a word, the LORD will provide, and Genesis adds that the saying was still current when the book was written (Genesis 22:14). Two things follow, and they pull in different directions. The first is that the God of Abraham does not want children killed for him, and Israel’s law says so in the harshest language it has (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 12:31). The second is a pattern the rest of Scripture keeps tracing: the offering that satisfies is the one God provides rather than the one the worshipper produces, from the Passover lamb whose blood marked the doorposts on the night Israel left Egypt, to the sacrificial system, to John the Baptist pointing at a man and calling him the Lamb of God (John 1:29). Christian readers from the second century onward have found the Father and the Son in this chapter, a father and his only son climbing a hill with the wood on the son’s back. That is a reading, not a claim the text makes about itself, and it is worth marking the difference.

(Q) "Abraham said, 'God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.' So the two of them walked on together." + Source: Genesis 22:8 (ESV). Isaac has just asked where the lamb is. The line "the two of them walked on together" appears twice in the chapter, once before the question and once after it, and the repetition is doing work: whatever passed between them, they walked up the mountain side by side (T4).

(Q) "Your father Abraham was overjoyed that he would see My day, and he saw it and rejoiced." + Source: John 8:56 (ESV). Jesus is arguing in the temple with opponents who have just claimed Abraham as their father. This line draws the retort that he is not yet fifty years old, and his answer to that, "before Abraham was born, I am," has them reaching for stones (John 8:57-59). Whatever else it means, it is the reason Christian readers have never been able to treat Abraham as merely the first Jew.

What Later Believers Made of Him

(†) Paul made him the proof that God has always justified people the same way. + The first serious crisis in the church was whether Gentile converts, the non-Jews coming into a movement that had so far been entirely Jewish, had to become Jews first. Paul’s answer, in Romans 4 and Galatians 3, is an argument about dates. Abraham was declared righteous in Genesis 15; he was circumcised in Genesis 17; the law came 430 years later. So he was justified as an uncircumcised man with no law to keep, which makes him the father of believing Gentiles as much as of Jews, and makes faith the standing arrangement rather than a new concession. The move is more radical than it looks. Paul is not saying the Old Testament permits his doctrine. He is saying the Old Testament teaches it, and that anyone reading Genesis carefully should have seen it coming. "So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith" (Galatians 3:9). This is where the Reformers came back, and hard. Luther lectured his way through Genesis for ten years at the end of his life and treated 15:6 as a hinge; Calvin read it the same way, as righteousness received rather than achieved. Abraham was not the whole of the sixteenth-century argument over justification, which turned on Romans and Galatians and on how to hear James. But he was the test case every party had to account for, because Paul had made him one first.

(†) James used the same man to insist that real faith shows up in what a person does. + James takes Abraham, quotes the same verse Paul quotes, and draws what sounds like the opposite conclusion: "Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?" (James 2:21-24). Two apostles reaching for the same proof text, the one verse each of them rests his case on, and two apparently contradictory verdicts. The usual and, on the evidence, the right resolution is that the two are answering different questions. Paul is asking what puts a person right with God and answering: trust, not performance. James is asking what kind of trust that is and answering: not the kind that consists in agreeing with a proposition, since "the demons believe—and shudder" (James 2:19). Moriah is offered as the proof that Abraham’s Genesis 15 faith was the living kind, demonstrated decades after it was credited to him. Christians have not always kept both halves. The tradition has swung between a faith with nothing to show and a religion of effort with no rest in it, and Abraham is the figure both sides reach for, which is a fair sign that he belongs to neither.

(†) Three religions claim him as father, and the claims are not compatible. + Jewish tradition holds him as the first Jew and the founder of the covenant people by descent through Isaac and Jacob, and reads the Aqedah as the supreme act of obedience, remembered in the ram’s horn sounded at the new year. Rabbinic legend fills in the childhood Genesis leaves blank, most famously with the story of the boy left minding his father’s idol shop, smashing the stock with a club and blaming the one statue he left standing. That comes from Genesis Rabbah 38:13, a collection of rabbinic commentary on Genesis compiled centuries after Christ, and not from Genesis at all. Islam calls him Ibrahim and counts him among the greatest of the prophets. It holds that he and Ishmael raised the foundations of the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine at Mecca that Muslims face when they pray. And it tells its own version of the idol breaking, in which he shatters all but the largest and invites his accusers to put their questions to that one (Surah 21:51-70; a surah is a chapter of the Qur’an). On the sacrifice, the Qur’an does not name the son; early commentators were divided, with the Muslim historian and Qur’an commentator Tabari among those arguing for Isaac, and the reading that came to dominate identifies him as Ishmael. The Qur’an also presents him as neither Jew nor Christian but a hanif, a pure monotheist prior to both. Christians read him through Paul and through Jesus’ own claim in John 8:56, as the father of everyone who believes, whatever their ancestry. These three readings cannot all be right, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to reach for a shared-heritage sentiment that none of the three traditions actually holds. What can be said is that the disagreement is about what happened and what it meant, which is the kind of disagreement evidence and argument can address.

(†) The hard parts of his story are hard, and Scripture never tidies them up. + Abraham does not come through Genesis as a moral hero, and the book makes no attempt to present him as one. - He passed his wife off as his sister twice, in Egypt and at Gerar, exposing her to a foreign king’s harem to protect his own skin, and was rebuked both times by the pagan he had deceived (Genesis 12:18-19; 20:9-10). His defense when caught, that Sarah really was his half-sister (Genesis 20:12), makes it a half-truth told to save himself, which is not much of a defense. - He fathered a child by an enslaved woman at his wife’s suggestion, then let that woman and her son be driven into the desert. Hagar is the one person in Genesis who gives God a name, El-roi, the God who sees her (Genesis 16:13), and the text’s sympathy for her is unmistakable. - The command on Moriah remains a genuine moral difficulty, not merely an apparent one. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard built a whole book on it, arguing that faith here suspends ethics, which is either the deepest reading of the chapter or an admission that it cannot be squared. The question is argued at length in Common Objections, under the binding of Isaac, and it is not treated there as easy. - His faith was not steady. He laughed at the promise (Genesis 17:17), and Paul’s description of him as a man who "did not waver in unbelief" about the promise of God (Romans 4:20) is plainly a summary of the man’s life as a whole rather than a report of every day in it. That the account keeps all this in is itself worth noticing. National founding stories do not usually make their founder a liar, and a people inventing a father would not have invented this one.