ABSTRACT
Faith and religion occupy a prominent position in Buber’s thought, both biographically and systematically. In our exploration of these topics against the background of the central issue of immediacy, we face a difficulty from the outset in that etymologically “religion” is probably related to a coming back. In other words, the concept implies a situation previously present which is, in a sense, continuously restituted. Faith implies an attitude of confidence or hope. Once that attitude is posited within the scope of religion it implies the relation between confidence and hope, and implies that which gives rise to or reinforces these. The hope is well-grounded in the divine essence as a responding and even benevolent entity. People hope that God will respond to them and their hope is based on confidence in the essence of God. Hence, both in religion and faith there is an inherent relationship between the attitude and the pole to which it refers. Systematically speaking, these attitudes are open to a phenomenological investigation in terms of acts of intentionality because those acts are fundamentally exhibited a structure of correlatign. As to the religious attitude the main issue is whether the human being and God involved in a correlation are of equal status, or as Hermann Cohen observed, God is the “center of gravity” in that correlation.
