ABSTRACT
My subject is the nature of religious faith and particularly what can be said for its claims. I begin by laying out the route that the argument will follow. First, using some of Wittgenstein’s remarks I want to disentangle the claims of faith from dubious historical and metaphysical claims. I am not at all interested in defending a faith that would require that we believe what, by normal standards of evidence, are highly problematic historical assertions, nor do I think that the legitimacy of faith should be a matter of metaphysical truths which lie just a bit beyond our normal capacities for verification. To be very clear, if one cannot disentangle faith from such understanding, I think its claims do not deserve commitment. So after offering such an analysis, I propose to move to another stage. Wittgenstein’s discussion focuses us on a sort of authority, and to develop more completely that idea we need to turn to Kierkegaard’s justly famous account of Abraham in Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard leads us through an examination of faith that places it outside the confines of rationality conceived as prudence or self-interest, even outside the ethical understood as a form of tragic heroism. For Kierkegaard, faith is a matter of an absolute relation to the absolute. As such, there cannot be reasons for such a relation outside of that relation itself. Now it might seem that given such an account of faith, it will be beyond criticism, and in a certain sense it is-but, at the same time, I hope to show that there are at least three critical strategies that can be deployed. One is the traditional strategy of genealogy, for which I turn to Nietzsche. A second is the strategy of reinscribing one discourse within another-the religious, say, within the ethical. The third strategy is in some ways a more radical approach that depends on the ‘claim’ that all structures of meaning are contingent. To understand this last claim, I again take up certain remarks of Wittgenstein and follow out their implications for faith and the religious.
