Reformation Poetry’s Glimpse into Death Found in Faith, and the Life Given through Grace
By Benjamin Scott Campbell
What things come to mind when you think of the Reformers? The 95 Theses. Geneva’s company of pastors. Martyrdom. And, of course, poetry.
Wait, what?
When we think of Luther, Cranmer, and so on, poetry isn’t usually the most natural connection. The same may be said of Theodore Beza, a less famous successor of John Calvin. Although his legacy was largely defined by theology and biblical scholarship, Beza was also a gifted poet. While Beza’s early poetry bordered on risqué, like the controversial Iuvenilia Poemata, in his later years, he crafted a moving tragedy: The Tragedy of Abraham’s Sacrifice.
Beza was no stranger to the likes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and Abraham’s Sacrifice follows a structure which will feel familiar to readers of Greek tragedy—a hero faced with a catastrophe of such magnitude that it arouses either our pity or our fear.
But Beza goes further. He draws back the curtain on the familiar Genesis 22 story and invites us to eavesdrop on the conflicted prayers, grieving love, and agonizing steadfastness of Abraham. In this brief study, I hope to introduce you to a play that is as intimate a character study as it is a theologically rich account of the catastrophic act of faith.
Fiction Embodying Theology
At the climax of Beza’s play, Abraham leads his son Isaac up Mount Moriah to the place of sacrifice. Reading it, I felt the impossibility of the patriarch’s position: Will he really sacrifice his own son? That he has the necessary faith never appears to be in doubt. Whether he has the strength to act on it appears less certain.
Yet as Isaac sets the wood and fire in order, Abraham retreats—like Jesus in Gethsemane—to strengthen his faith to action by prayer.
“[Isaac] is thine own, I had him of thy gift.
Take him therefore. Thou knowest best how to shift.
I know thou wilt to life him raise again,
Rather than that thy promise should be vain,
Howbeit Lord, thou knowest I am a man,
No good at all or do or think I can.
But yet thy power which aye is invincible,
Doth to belief make all things possible.”1
With these lines Beza aptly marries the promise of Genesis 21:12, the crisis of Genesis 22:2, and the faith of Hebrews 11:19. Reading it felt like placing my spiritual eye on the lens of Beza’s telescope and seeing three distinct mountains brought together as the united range they are.
In the first case, God assures Abraham that Isaac is the son of the promise. In the second, God commands him to sacrifice that very son of the promise. And in the third, Abraham places his faith in God’s promise. What a showcase of fiction’s power to embody theology! It was the promise of God that strengthened Abraham’s faith to act.
Yet Beza is as careful a pastor here as he is a theologian. He doesn’t rush to easy answers or Christian-sounding axioms. He recognizes this is a human story; he welcomes the Patriarch’s humanity. And in the Patriarch, he welcomes us to embody theology too.
Prelude to a Catastrophe
As I read on, Abraham at last tells his son what God has commanded. Meek as a lamb, Isaac consents and is bound. (His lines are worth an article of their own.) Heart breaking, hand unsteady, Abraham draws the knife:
In one belief I ever do remain,
That not one word of God doth happen vain.
But now my hand, high time it is that thou
Do gather strength to execute thy vow. . .
And here, as Abraham confesses faith, Beza does something remarkable in between these lines. I wasn’t sure what it was at first: a singular stage direction: “Here the knife falls out of his hand.”
. . .That by thy killing my only son,
you kill me.2
That teared me up, I must confess. Here is a heart-stopping picture of faith and works. Abraham believes God would sooner raise Isaac from the dead than lie. He’s already seen God work the impossible. He opened Sarah’s womb! In a word, Abraham possesses the gift of faith. But now that faith is tested. Isaac must not only be bound; he must be sacrificed. Faith must act.
And the act of faith is rarely ever pretty. Often, it’s catastrophic.
No Other Way
Reading this Tragedy, I got to thinking: Is faith really faith unless it costs me something, not just something in general but in particular? Not just time, money, plans. Is faith really faith unless I sacrifice, as it were, “my son, my only son Isaac, whom I love”?
The promise itself is on the line. Faith seems poised to surrender the very thing that gave it strength to act. And why? Because no matter how strongly I cling to God’s promises, my strength is not enough. In Beza’s words, “Thou,” not I, “knowest best how to shift,” for only his power is “invincible.”
The act of faith is thus not our triumph but our defeat, a personal catastrophe so basic we often forget it: obedience to God, no matter the cost.
Caught between my mortal ignorance and the divine command of the merciful God in whom I’ve learned to trust, I’d almost prefer to be as powerless as I was at regeneration—alas! I must act. I’ve passed beyond the pale of mere mortal feats, yet mortal I remain. Oh, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24) The chasm appears impassable. All the world, my very heart screams for another way!
But there is no other way.
The Eucatastrophe
As Abraham falters, Isaac pleads with his father to fulfill his duty quickly:
Away with all this fear of yours I pray.
Will you from God yet longer time me stay?
The Patriarch takes up the knife again with lethal intent, answering his son with a singularly christological stanza:
Alas who ever yet so stout a mind
Within so weak a body erst did find?
Alas my son I pray thee me forgive
Thy death. It kills me that thou may not live.
Throughout the play, Beza’s characterization of Isaac is consistently Christlike. For this reason, Abraham’s words go beyond Isaac to the cross of Christ. “Forgive,” Abraham cries, not “my sin” but “Thy death,” for that was Sin. Was Christ not the Son of Abraham, the Son of the promise? As Abraham readies death undeservingly for his Son, he knows it is death to him too.
And like the great classical plays on which it was modeled, the climax of Abraham’s Sacrifice hinges upon a sudden reversal. But instead of catastrophe, Beza writes something altogether different: eucatastrophe.
What is eucatastrophe? The word, as you perhaps know, is from Tolkien. He understood it as “a cosmological event and a compositional device” denoting both a revelation and a reversal from sorrow to joy.3 In Beza’s case, eucatastrophe is directed with as much intensity as he can employ at the moment of greatest crisis: The gracious moment God intervenes.
There is an old legend that identifies Mount Moriah with Golgotha. Whether fact or fiction, the truth is Jesus so identified with Isaac as to embody himself, to offer his own life both in his place and in ours. That is the eucatastrophe of faith: grace. Not our faith, but God’s grace in Christ.
Empty Hands
Sometimes, it’s easy to think of faith as a way to twist God’s arm. If I just believe enough, God will do it for me. On the contrary, faith is personal catastrophe; faith does not save but, in a sense, destroys us. This is what Beza so clearly communicates in his Tragedy. It is a tragedy precisely because faith costs Abraham; it costs us everything. And once we’ve sacrificed everything, entrusting even God’s “precious and very great promises” (see 2 Peter 1:4) back to Him, what have we left to offer Him?
Nothing. Soli Deo Gloria.
True faith that lays us low prepares us to be lifted up again. Hands emptied of all claims, we, like Abraham, are ready to receive from God the only good gift that saves: his grace. And in the eucatastrophe of faith, that grace is provided in our Lord Jesus Christ.
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Benjamin Scott Campbell (MDiv, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary) is a licentiate in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He teaches Latin in Colorado Springs. He and his family worship at Black Forest Reformed Church. His first novel, The Book of Esau, will be published Christmas 2024. He occasionally uploads to YouTube.
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1 Theodore Beza, The Tragedie of Abraham’s Sacrifice, trans. Arthur Golding, Limited Edition, Philological Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Studies) 1906, lns. 770-777. All other quotations, unless marked, are cited from the same work, lns. 894-897, 888-899, 907-908, 909-912.
2 My translation. This is a strict translation of the original (and more poignant) French, “Et qu'en frappant mon seul fils, tu me tues.”
3 Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev, “‘Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-earth’ by Austin M. Freeman,” Mythlore 42, no. 1, (Fall/Winter 2023), 230-234.