Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion. It gives attention to both the nature of faith and knowledge and the relation between faith and knowledge. A wide range of divergent views about the place of religious knowledge in religion are explored.
Questions examined include:
- How religious knowledge is to be considered religiously
- The significance of religious knowledge for faith
- How modern scientific knowledge relates to religious knowledge
The views of Aquinas and Kierkegaard are compared and contrasted and the influence of Wittgenstein's denial of a place for knowledge in religion assessed. Later chapters consider the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religions and the relationship between religious knowledge and religious wisdom.
It is concluded that personification in religion allows relationships that are not reducible to knowing truths.
Synopsis
Chapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: Knowledge and BeliefChapter 3: Religious Ambivalence in the Christian Tradition About KnowledgeChapter 4: Curiosity and Scientific Knowledge in Opposition To Religious KnowledgeChapter 5: Aquinas and KierkegaardChapter 6: The Neo-Wittgensteinian Treatment of Religious KnowledgeChapter 7: Kierkegaard's Two Treatments of Religious KnowledgeChapter 8: Faith and KnowledgeChapter 9: Religious Knowledge in Nontheistic TraditionsChapter 10: Religious Knowledge and Religious Wisdom
Synopsis
This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly within Christianity. The book begins by examining the difference between the general concepts of knowledge and belief, the relation between faith and knowledge, and reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions.
The book explores the ambivalence about religious knowledge within Christianity. Some religious thinkers explicitly accepted and sought religious knowledge, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably S ren Kierkegaard, cast knowledge and seeking it as incompatible with faith. The book also examines two antithetical religious intuitions about knowledge, both at home in the Christian tradition. For one, faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other, faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first, religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second, religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it.
Though the book focuses on the Christian tradition, it also considers other traditions, including a chapter on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions. The final chapter examines how coming to Wisdom as personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions may be distinct from attaining religious knowledge.