Philosophy : Fear and Trembling
Philosophy for Understanding Theology, Second Edition | 
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 Fear and Trembling
This is a great book. I recommend it to anybody who likes to think hard on intellectual topics, especially those that involve religion. The story of Isaac and Abraham is one of the toughest puzzles to figure out in the Bible, yet once you understand it, you will have a much stronger faith in the wisdom of God.
5 stars, easy.
Fear and Trembling
Soren Kierkegaard's masterpiece about the fundamental issues involving religion and moral philosophy was first published in 1842. It focuses on the story of Isaac and Abraham from Genesis 22, which is the story of how God asked Abraham to kill Isaac and Abraham would have done it.
Kierkegaard tells how this was a test of faith, and how it can and should effect our involvement today as Christians in the fields of ethics and morality.
Here are a few other great books I recommend:
The Calvary Road
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing
The Mortification of Sin (A Puritan Guide)
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Fear and Trembling
The book "Fear and Trembling was originally published by Soren Kierkegaard in 1842. It is about the the story of Isaac and Abraham from chapter 22 of Genesis, and how this effects our current day ethics and morality.
The book goes into detail about the importance of being authentically religious, yet it also tells how difficult it really is. There are many issues in moral philosophy and religion, and this book makes them simpler and describes a few solutions.
 misleading product.
The description of this kindle book promises the whole text. However, the text from which it is derived is an abridgement consisting of only 1/3 of Fear and Trembling. While the material itself is of high quality this editon failed to meet my expectations. Half of the content was simply a summary of Kierkegaard (grealt resembling the wikipedia entry) instead of the actual text. It's not worth paying money for a public domain author when you don't even receive the whole work.
 Too many assumptions, not enough foundation
Here's the thing with philosophy: if you agree with all of it you either haven't read enough philosophy or you weren't paying close enough attention.
While Kierkegaard presents some very well considered thoughts about what faith is, how one comes by it and how one acts when one has it his other arguments here stand on unchecked foundations.
He never questions or even addresses whether or not Abraham's (or anyone else's) faith is well founded. Instead he assumes that all faith in God is well founded. This is a rather glaring hole since even if one assumes the Abrahamic God is real one can still have faulty assumptions about him and his will. Kierkegaard assumes faith is automatically justified by virtue of its own existence. In doing so he removes an ethical question from the equation. Is my faith justified? Ie, is this really the will of God? But including this simple question would undermine the veracity of one of his competing sources of ethics, the idea that the will of God (as we perceive it) is intrinsically ethical.
This whole book is of course meant to address whether or not Abraham's decision to execute Isaac was ethical. Once you call into question the authenticity of God's command to sacrifice Isaac you lose a lot of ground in defending Abraham's actions.
Kierkegaard goes on to discuss a variety of fictional stories with negligible relations to the story of Abraham. The only thing they do uniformly include is an element of faith or sacrifice (though none of them include a sacrifice even remotely as extreme as Isaac). He seems to think that fiction, some specifically written with a moral agenda *coughfaustcough* provide justification for unquestioning faith and prove the veracity of his claims to the real world. In reality they only show that his philosophy was instep with the fictional world of some hand picked literature.
In the bits where he is actually addressing the story of Abraham the closest he comes to justifying Abraham's actions still fall far short of any modern standard of ethics. He argues that Abraham sacrifices Isaac in absolute faith believing that God will restore his son to him. It is explained that it must be Isaac that is sacrificed because he is the best thing that Abraham has. While I certainly wouldn't doubt that Abraham cherished Isaac above all things, this assumes that Isaac's relationship with Abraham is not just as a cherished son but as a valued possession who is completely subject to the will of his father. He is a possession that can be given away, Isaac's life may belong to his father or to God but it was never his own. Hardly instep with a world that has disavowed one mans ability to own another.
So what of the fundamental question at hand? Can the Abrahamic God make and unethical act ethical, simply by commanding it? I would have said no before reading this book, and I still feel that way. Kierkegaard's arguments for God's ethical "get out off jail free card" are simply too desultory, fragmentary and lacking in foundation to convince me.
I'm not sure if I'll read Kierkegaard again. I was impressed with his early analysis of faith here and I suspect he has other ideas that would have merit. But I'm leery that his other works may also start making conclusions before establishing a viable foundation.
I think Spinoza's thought's on ethics and behavior in Ethics (Penguin Classics) are much more viable. He's also much more readable which is saying something since he wrote it 200 years before Kierkegaard.
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