“If this is not faith, then Abraham is lost, then faith has never existed in the world precisely because it has always existed.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
That sentence is the knife edge Kierkegaard’s entire argument balances on. Published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio — John of the Silence — Fear and Trembling is not a theological treatise in the conventional sense. It is an extended, almost obsessive meditation on a single biblical scene: Abraham walking three days to Mount Moriah, knife in hand, with the son God had promised him.
The book’s title comes from Philippians 2:12: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Kierkegaard treats that phrase not as a rhetorical flourish but as a precise description of what faith actually costs. Abraham does not know the outcome. He cannot explain his actions to Sarah, to Isaac, to anyone. And yet he goes — not in resignation, but, Kierkegaard argues, in faith. That distinction — between giving something up forever and believing you will receive it back — is the beating heart of this short, ferociously concentrated book.
Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling in the wake of breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen, a decision that haunted him for the rest of his life. Whether the book is theology, autobiography, or both remains contested. What is certain is that no other 19th-century work so relentlessly refuses to make faith easier than it is.
What This Book Argues
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author, Johannes de silentio, makes a single, uncompromising claim: Abraham’s action at Moriah cannot be understood through ethics. Hegelian philosophy — dominant in Kierkegaard’s day — held that the ethical is the universal, the standard by which all actions must be judged. By that standard, Abraham is a murderer. The only alternative, Kierkegaard insists, is that a category exists beyond the ethical, and that category is faith.
Silentio does not claim to understand this category himself. He repeatedly says he cannot make the “movement of faith.” He is an observer, a poet of the religious, not a knight of faith. This self-admitted limitation is part of the book’s design: it draws the reader to the edge of what can be said, then stops. What lies beyond the edge is faith — and faith, by its nature, cannot be explained.
The central distinction the book draws is between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. The knight of infinite resignation gives up what he loves and accepts the loss as final. He makes peace with the pain. The knight of faith gives up what he loves — and then, “by virtue of the absurd,” believes he will receive it back. He does not stop believing, even when belief contradicts every rational possibility. Abraham believed God would either not require the sacrifice or would restore Isaac. That double movement — renunciation followed by expectation — is what Kierkegaard calls faith.
“The knight of faith is the one and only happy man, the heir to the finite, whereas the knight of infinite resignation is a stranger and an alien.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Major Themes
1. Faith Cannot Be Mediated by Ethics
Kierkegaard opens Problema I with the question: “Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?” The word teleological is doing the heavy lifting — it means for the sake of a higher purpose. Tragic heroes like Agamemnon (who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the Greek fleet) or Jephthah (who sacrificed his daughter to fulfill a public vow) transgress ethical norms, but for a purpose the community can understand. Their sacrifice serves a recognizable higher good. Abraham’s does not.
Kierkegaard’s point is not that Abraham is above ethics, but that his relationship with God places him in a category where ethics cannot reach. He is not a tragic hero. He is something else entirely — and if that “something else” does not exist, then Abraham is either lost or a murderer. The Christian tradition cannot have it both ways.
“The tragic hero gives up the certain for the still more certain, and the observer’s eye rests confidently upon him. But the one who gives up the universal in order to grasp something still higher that is not the universal — what does he do?” — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
This is the argument that drew the sharpest criticism, particularly from Emmanuel Levinas, who argued that allowing an individual’s relationship with God to override ethical obligations to others is a form of violence — a warrant for anyone who claims divine command to harm the innocent. Kierkegaard does not answer this objection directly, but the structure of the book suggests a response: Abraham’s faith is incommunicable, not secret. He cannot justify his action to others because the justification belongs to God alone. The knight of faith offers no public defense because none is possible.
2. The Double Movement: Infinite Resignation Then Faith
Kierkegaard describes faith not as a single step but as two distinct movements. The first is infinite resignation: giving up what one loves most, accepting that it is gone forever, making peace with the loss. Silentio says he can understand this movement — it is painful but intelligible. The second movement is faith: believing, against all evidence, that what was given up will be returned. This is the movement by virtue of the absurd.
Silentio illustrates with the image of a young man in love with a princess. The knight of infinite resignation renounces the princess, accepts that he will never have her, and lives in the pain of that renunciation. The knight of faith makes the same renunciation — and then believes, absurdly, that he will have the princess anyway. He does not give up the desire; he gives up the claim on the outcome while continuing to believe in the outcome.
This double movement reframes the familiar platitude that Christians should “give everything to God.” Kierkegaard’s version is more demanding: you give everything to God and you believe God will give it back. Not because you deserve it, not because it makes sense, but because God is faithful. Abraham walked toward Moriah believing both that he would kill Isaac and that Isaac would live. That contradiction is not a problem to solve; it is the definition of faith.
3. The Knight of Faith in Ordinary Life
One of the book’s most striking passages describes a knight of faith whom Silentio imagines meeting on the street. He looks like a tax collector — ordinary, unremarkable, happily absorbed in daily life. He enjoys his dinner, takes pleasure in his work, builds nothing dramatic or visible around his faith.
“He looks just like a tax collector. I examine his figure from top to toe to see if there might not be some crack through which the infinite would peek out. No! He is solid through and through. His stance? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finitude.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
This is one of Kierkegaard’s most theologically generative images. Faith does not require visible drama. The person with the deepest interior life may look no different from anyone else. This is both an encouragement — the ordinary believer may be a knight of faith — and a warning: you cannot identify faith by its outward appearance. The religious cannot be reduced to the observable. Any church that judges spiritual reality by external metrics runs directly into this wall.
4. Silence as the Condition of Faith
The pseudonym itself — “John of the Silence” — signals the importance of this theme. Problema III asks whether Abraham was ethically justified in concealing his intention from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. Kierkegaard’s answer depends on a distinction he draws between aesthetic concealment (for dramatic effect or personal gain), demonic concealment (motivated by guilt or sin), and the silence of faith.
Abraham’s silence, Kierkegaard argues, is not a choice but a necessity. Faith is incommunicable — not because it is a secret, but because it operates in a category where language, which is inherently universal and shared, cannot reach. Abraham cannot explain his action to Sarah because the action has no public justification. To attempt to explain it would be to translate it back into the ethical framework it has transcended — which would destroy it.
This has sharp implications for any community that demands verbal testimony or public accountability for private faith. Kierkegaard does not argue that believers should be silent about everything. But he insists that the deepest movement of faith — the moment when the individual stands alone before God with no mediator — cannot be communicated. It can only be lived.
5. The Absurd as the Category of Faith
Kierkegaard uses “the absurd” not as a term of dismissal but as a technical category. The absurd is what reason cannot process — not because it is irrational, but because it exceeds rationality. The knight of faith believes the absurd: that God will restore what has been given up, that the impossible will happen, that death will become life.
This is not blind credulity. Kierkegaard’s Abraham knows — intellectually, rationally — that killing Isaac means losing Isaac. He does not pretend otherwise. The absurd is not a denial of reality but a belief that operates beyond what reality can guarantee. It is the conviction that God’s faithfulness is more real than the most certain facts.
Critics like Alasdair MacIntyre have charged that this amounts to irrationalism — that if faith operates beyond reason, there is no way to distinguish genuine faith from delusion. Kierkegaard’s defenders respond that the absurd is not against reason but beyond it: faith does not contradict what reason knows, but it refuses to let reason have the final word.
Practical Applications
- Read Genesis 22 slowly, repeatedly. Kierkegaard’s method is to dwell on the text until it disturbs. He does not rush past the terror of the binding to find a quick theological resolution. His example teaches that Scripture should be read not merely for information but for transformation — and that transformation often begins with disorientation.
- Sit with what cannot be explained. The book models a discipline of refusing to resolve paradoxes prematurely. For believers accustomed to confident answers, Fear and Trembling offers a counter-discipline: learn to say “I do not understand this yet” without panic.
- Examine whether your faith includes the second movement. Many Christians grasp the first movement — giving things to God, accepting loss. But do you also make the second movement of believing God will restore what you have surrendered? Kierkegaard’s own admission that he cannot make this movement is an invitation to examine yourself honestly.
Lineage and Legacy
Kierkegaard wrote in sustained opposition to the Hegelian philosophy dominant in 19th-century Europe, which he believed dissolved the individual into the system and made faith a matter of intellectual assent rather than existential commitment. He stood within the Lutheran tradition but was a sharp critic of the established Danish church, which he considered a parody of Christianity — comfortable, respectable, and spiritually empty.
Fear and Trembling was largely ignored during Kierkegaard’s lifetime. He predicted otherwise in his journals: “Once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book.”
He was right. In the early 20th century, translations into German, French, and English ignited the existentialist movement. Karl Barth drew on Fear and Trembling for his dialectical theology, using Abraham’s incommunicable faith to emphasize the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity. Jean-Paul Sartre cited the book’s treatment of Abraham as the paradigmatic case of existential choice — though Sartre stripped it of its theistic framework. Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas all engaged the text deeply, making it one of the most philosophically generative works in the Western canon.
No direct evidence connects Brother Watchman Nee or Brother Witness Lee to Kierkegaard or Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s work entered English-language theological circles primarily through existentialist and neo-orthodox channels — Barth, Brunner, Tillich — rather than through the Plymouth Brethren or Keswick traditions that shaped the recovery’s early influences. That said, the questions Kierkegaard raises — about the individual believer’s direct standing before God, the limitations of institutional mediation, and the irreducible inwardness of genuine faith — resonate with concerns that are very much alive in recovery circles today.
Honest Assessment
What this book does well: Few books in the Christian tradition press the reader so relentlessly on what faith actually is. Kierkegaard refuses every shortcut — no abstract doctrinal affirmation, no appeal to community consensus, no rational proof. He forces the reader to confront whether their faith is faith or something easier: religious sentiment, moral conformity, intellectual assent. The distinction between infinite resignation and faith is genuinely illuminating, and the image of the ordinary knight of faith — the tax collector on the street — remains one of the most powerful depictions of lived spirituality ever written.
The book’s limitations: Kierkegaard’s argument operates entirely within the subjective — the individual’s internal relationship with God. He has almost nothing to say about the corporate nature of faith, the church as the body of Christ, or the role of community in discerning God’s will. A reader who treats Fear and Trembling as a complete account of the Christian life would emerge with a deeply privatized, isolated understanding of faith.
The book also assumes Abraham’s certainty about God’s command without examining how one knows a command is from God. The dangerous-precedent objection — that Kierkegaard’s framework could justify any atrocity claimed to be divinely commanded — is real and serious. Kierkegaard’s silence on this point is not a minor gap; it is a structural vulnerability in his argument.
Kierkegaard’s prose is deliberately difficult — digressive, ironic, layered with pseudonymous distance. This is part of his method, but it also means the book is genuinely hard to read. The reader who picks up Fear and Trembling expecting straightforward theology will be frustrated. This is literature as much as philosophy.
Read This If…
Read this book if you have ever suspected that the faith you were taught is too tidy — too certain, too explainable — and you need someone to show you what it looks like when faith actually costs something.
Not suited for readers who are looking for a systematic theology of faith or a practical guide to the Christian life. Fear and Trembling destabilizes more than it builds. It is a book for those who are ready to be unsettled — not for those who need to be reassured. Readers in recovery contexts who value doctrinal clarity and corporate discernment will find Kierkegaard’s relentless individualism both challenging and, in places, theologically insufficient.
Kierkegaard claimed he wanted to make faith difficult — because it is difficult, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something cheaper. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, he delivers on that promise.