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‘Faith-In’ and ‘In-Faith’—Reply to Professor H. H. Price
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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In two recent essays,1 H. H. Price has offered an interesting approach to the ‘reducibility theory’ which yields several important distinctions that should be drawn between various meanings of ‘belief-in’ and ‘belief-that’ These distinctions go far towards illuminating the uniqueness or—depending upon your point of view—oddness of religious faith.2 It may be useful to examine Price's ‘reducibility theory’ and the basic distinctions he has drawn in order to point the way toward a related analysis of usage which he neither undertakes nor considers explicitly—that of the distinctly different function (i.e. meaning and use) of a similar if not equally commonplace expression: ‘in-faith’. This latter analysis is called for, it seems to me, for several reasons. In the first place, Price himself vaguely suggestsmdaash;but does not discuss— the possibility that talking about being ‘in the faith attitude’ is not necessarily the same as talking about believing or having faith-in ‘Someone’. Secondly, it may be argued that the use of the expression ‘in-faith’ conveys, in certain instances, much more of the uniqueness of the theist's position than do the expressions ‘belief-in’or ‘faith-in’. Thirdly, the claim—sometimes made—that the faith ‘situation’ (‘experience’, ‘encounter’, ‘meeting’, ‘confrontation’, or whatever it may be) transcends the grasp of reason is perhaps more readily pointed to by using the expression ‘in-faith’.
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References
page 247 note 1 Price, H. H., ‘Faith and Belief’in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John, Hick (New York. St Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 3–25;CrossRefGoogle Scholar‘Belief “In” and Belief “That”’, Religious Studies, vol. I, no. I, pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
page 247 note 2 I share this appraisal of Price's contribution with R. W. Sleeper who, in his recent analysis of Price's article ‘Belief “In” and Belief “That”’, says ‘We are all considerably in debt to Professor Price for his extremely lucid analysis which will, I think, go a very long way towards filling the lacuna to which he points’ (‘On Believing’, Religious Studies, vol. II, no. 1, p. 75).Google Scholar However, as I will indicate later, there is little, in addition to our common point of departure, upon which Professor Sleeper and I can agree. His stated purpose is to set forth the ‘metaphysics of believing’ that he contends Price has ignored, while mine is the two-fold purpose of (I) pointing up an inconsistency in Price's reasoning that, in part, defeats his central thesis concerning the irreducibility of religious ‘belief-in’ and of (2) closing the door to any immediate need for a descriptive metaphysic of either ‘belief-in’ or ‘belief-that’.
page 248 note 1 Price, , ‘Belief “In” and Belief “That”’ p. 10.Google Scholar
page 248 note 2 Ibid. p. 18.
page 248 note 3 ‘In the logician's sense of the word “existential”’, according to Price, ‘existential belief-in’ is simply a case of believing an ‘existential proposition’ which is the reduction of a ‘factual belief-in’. As Price notes, however, ‘existential philosophers have introduced a new and entirely different sense of the word “existential”; and in their sense the word would apply …where belief-in seems, on the face of it, to be irreducible to belief-that’ (Ibid. p. 10).
page 249 note 1 Price, ,‘Belief “In” and Belief “That”’ p. 25.Google Scholar
page 249 note 2 Ibid.
page 249 note 3 Ibid. p. 22.
page 249 note 4 Ibid. p. 23.
page 249 note 5 Ibid. pp. 24–25.
page 249 note 6 It should be noted at this point that Sleeper accepts, as established, Price's epistemological and psychological distinctions between belief-in and belief-that. However, he is concerned to pass beyond these distinctions and press towards a description of the ontological status of a ‘person’ (in the Strawson sense of the concept of ‘person’ as logically primitive) who is a believer and, further, to show that this status will vary according to whether a person is in the situation of ‘believing-that’ or ‘believing-in’ (‘On Believing’ p. 82). It will be my contention that Price has not made a consistently clear case for the prior distinction and, therefore, that Sleeper's metaphysical extension of Price's position is without a firm foundation.
page 249 note 7 Price sets aside, as relatively uninteresting, the type of factual belief-in God that is clearly reducible to a belief-that God exists.
page 249 note 8 Price, , ‘Belief “In” and Belief “That”’ p. 26.Google Scholar
page 250 note 1 Price, , ‘Faith and Belief’ p. 11.Google Scholar
page 250 note 2 Ibid. p. 12.
page 250 note 3 Ibid. p. 17.
page 251 note 1 Price, , ‘Faith and Belief’ p. 71.Google Scholar
page 251 note 2 Ibid. p. 21.
page 251 note 3 Ibid. p. 22.
page 251 note 4 Ibid. pp. 22–3.
page 252 note 1 Price, , ‘Belief ” and Belief ”That”’ p. 23.Google Scholar Italics mine.
page 252 note 2 In asking this question I mean to imply that while Price may be on the right track, his analogy between a supposedly irreducible disinterested belief-in a friend and an irreducible belief-in God not only ‘breaks down’ (as he himself admits) but it also sends him off in the wrong direction. Sleeper discusses this point at length and suggests that what is lacking is a ‘bond of being’ that might ‘unite the two analogues’ (‘On Believing’ p. 80). It is not clear, however, that Sleeper has been successful in demonstrating that the use of this ‘bond of being’ for the purpose of analogical predication can ever be anything other than either a theological or a metaphysical ‘bias’.
page 252 note 3 Although I do not intend to proof-text this thesis in any extensive fashion I think the following remarks by Karl Rahner are to the point and worth quoting at length:
‘It follows that the object of faith is not something merely passive, indifferently set over against a subjective attitude of it, but simultaneously the principle by which it is itself grasped as object. This statement of course only acquires its full significance on the assumption that the actual support given to faith under the grace of the Holy Spirit is not a merely ontological modality of the act of faith beyond conscious apprehension, but also a specific effect in consciousness (which is not necessarily to say that it is reflexively distinguishable). This effect makes it possible to apprehend the objects of faith given through the hearing of the external announcement, under a “light”, a subjective a priori under grace (the formal object), which b not available to someone without grace’ (Theological Investigations, vol. I, God, Christ, Mary and Grace [Baltimore. Helicon Press, 1961], p. 51).Google Scholar
page 253 note 1 If, as Sleeper suggests, a ‘descriptive metaphysics’ is possible (which I seriously doubt), the starting point would not be that of determining what it is that the believer is doing (Sleeper's position) but, rather, of determining what it is that is happening to the person who no longer is a believer but who, instead, is in-faith. In other words, the metaphysician would have to attempt to determine the ontological status of the person who is existentially in-grace or——as some theologians put it who is a ‘new creature’ or who has been ‘born again’.
page 253 note 2 Price, ‘Faith and Belief’ p. 24.
page 253 note 3 Although there are certain theological as well as logical problems concerning ‘identity’ that must be met, it could be proposed that in-grace and in-faith are simply two ways of talking about one and the same ‘event’—namely the ‘moment’ of ‘encounter’ between God and man. From the Godward side the encounter is spoken of in terms of grace while from the human side it is spoken of in terms of faith. While attractive in terms of its simplicity, this proposal needs a thorough-going analysis that cannot be offered here.
page 254 note 1 In the concluding paragraph of his first article Price comes quite close to this position when he suggests that
‘If theism is the metaphysics of love, it is not very surprising that love should come first in the epistemology of faith as elsewhere. It might have been expected that such awareness of God as we have when we are in the attitude of faith would just be the cognitive aspect of our love for him, and that very little more can be said about it, except in metaphors and parables. And the ordinary religious person, one who is not a philosopher of religion or a theologian, might well say, “I do not very much mind whether it is a case of belief or knowledge or something different from either. All that matters is that one should try to love him who first loves us; and that is good enough for me.” Perhaps it is good enough for anyone.’ (‘Faith and Belief’p. 25.)
Besides the fact that Price gives no clue as to how this ‘metaphysics of love’ might be spelled out (and Sleeper's effort to do so notwithstanding), this curious conclusion by Price must be considered as rather much an after-thought on his part and one that clearly is not consistent with the case he has been attempting to make for an irreducible belief-in God. At the same time it should be noted that Sleeper is missing the point when he agrees with the criticism made by Keith Gunderson, who argues that what is ‘good enough’ for the man in-faith is really not good enough at all because we have no ‘criteria’ for ‘telling whether or not our belief in God is well-grounded’. Sleeper and Gunderson to the contrary, it may be the case that it is part of the peculiar meaning of in-faith that the man of faith accepts the ‘experiences of God’ as ‘self-verifying’ or ‘self-authenticating’. Interesting enough, however, the claim of self-authentication is not, so far as I can see, logically entailed in the ordinary meaning of either belief-that or belief-in. (Cf. Keith Gunderson, ‘Are There Criteria for “Encountering God”?’, Faith and the Philosophers, pp. 57–8.)