Towards the Land of the Children

Abstract

After the flood and after Babel, the fortified city in which humanity had sought the wrong type of salvation without diversity and dispersion on the fertile land, the covenant and salvation are continued with the calling of Abram, who leaves his father’s house and starts out on a journey, trusting a voice that is calling him. Faith and trust: because every faith is trust in a promise. Noah had saved us by building an ark, remaining in detention in the company of his family and the animals, waiting for the withdrawal of the waters. Abram, however, responds to the call of that same voice by starting a journey to a promised land. Even in the call of Abram we can find a universal grammar of religious as well as civil, professional, artistic, and entrepreneurial vocations. Abram arrives in the land of Canaan and finds the Canaanites there: the promised land is populated by others.

There was he who was great through his strength, and he who was great through his wisdom, and he who was great through his hopes, and he who was great through his love; but Abraham was greater than all of these.

(Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling).