How should one interpret Abraham's behavior on mount Moriah? Kierkegaard emphasizes the stark nature of the choice facing Abraham, the "knight of faith." In effect, Abraham has been ordered to murder his own innocent son as a human sacrifice to God. It's important to keep in mind a few things:

• one must distinguish Abraham's situation from, say, Agamemnon's. The latter sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of society, but, Kierkegaard notes, he can argue that his daughter's death is necessary for the common good. In this respect, Agamemnon still moves within the realm of morality. This is not true in the case of Abraham who, Kierkegaard claims, has relinquished morality altogether. We are witnessing what can be called "the suspension of the ethical."
• Abraham doesn't seem to believe that the rightness of an action consists in God's approval of it. We can see this in his argument with God about the fate of Sodoma, when he appeals, so to speak, to God's better side (Genesis 18, 23-33). So, Abraham must view the killing of Isaac as wrong, indeed, as murderous.
• Abraham's decision is not taken on the spur of the moment. It takes him and Isaac three days to get to the top of the mountain. He has time to think: he is going to kill his own son, whom he loves, one would think, with the desperation, focus, and concentration that the impending doom must elicit.
• Abraham's decision is, from the point of view of morality, appalling. Think of your neighbor, or your own father, doing such a thing. Think about your reaction to the Branch Davidians setting fire to their building and shooting some of their children in the head. Why doesn't Abraham stand up and tell God:" Look here, I'm just not going to do it. If you want a human sacrifice, take me." Or even better, and more dramatically: "I won't do it. What's more, you can break my knees, but I'll never bow to you again." Or: "Gee! Those mushrooms I ate yesterday must have had something in them! I had a bad trip."
• It won't do merely to say that Abraham knows that God will spare Isaac, and therefore he's not really committed to killing his son. God, Genesis 22, 1 tells us, is testing Abraham. Or, at a minimum, if we assume that God already knows what Abraham will do, God wants Abraham to come to understand with greater clarity what faith requires. Without Abraham's commitment to murder his own son, the whole story makes no sense and becomes stupid and trivial.

What then? How are we to understand the suspension of the ethical? Is Abraham, to put it bluntly, a murderous fanatic? Is this, what it is to have faith? If so, both reason and morality would seem to dictate becoming an atheist (not a bad idea, in my view). Kierkegaard's answer to these problems is unclear. He thinks that the suspension of the ethical requires a leap of faith which cannot be justified rationally. But, in addition, he also seems to think that the leap of faith cannot even be reconciled with reason: it is, one might say, irrational to have faith. Kierkegaard himself, writing Fear and Tembling under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, claims to be unable to make such a leap.
Kierkegaard also thinks that Abraham believes, as he goes up the mountain, that he will get back the son he had been commanded to sacrifice, that God will ultimately spare Isaac. Indeed, as Adams points out, the leap of faith requires not only a concentration of one's earthly attachments, but also a double movement s of "infinite resignation" and of faith proper, by which one receives back what one has given up to God. Moreover, these two movements must be made simultaneously and not sequentially because to have faith is to receive and love things only through God. Of course, how one can resign something and get it back at the same time is hard to understand. But going through these two movements, actually living them, is even harder. This too Johannes de Silentio is unable to do.  Babette's Feast gives a cinematographic representation of this difficulty and, with its hopeful ending, hints at a possibility of resolution.