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Wilfred Cantwell Smith on faith and belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William J. Wainwright
William J. Wainwright
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
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Extract

In a series of important and influential books, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has convincingly argued that religious traditions are misunderstood if one does not grasp the faith which they express, that these traditions are not static but fluid, and that as a result of greater knowledge and increased contact between members of different traditions, we have entered a period in which it is no longer possible for the traditions to develop in relative isolation. This paper is devoted to an important aspect of Smith's thought – his distinction between faith and propositional belief.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 353 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

page 353 note 1 I will focus on three of these works – The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), Faith and Belief (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981). They will be identified as Meaning (M), Faith and Belief (F) and World Theology (WT) respectively. I will also occasionally refer to Belief and History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977) which will be identified as Belief (B).

page 354 note 1 The ignorance in question is not ignorance of other religious ‘patterns’ but ignorance of the faith expressed through these patterns. Early Christians, for example, were familiar with pagan patterns and believed them to be false or inadequate.

page 354 note 2 Some of their beliefs, their missionary practices, etc.

page 356 note 1 Examples of bedrock truths are, perhaps, ‘the future will resemble the past’ and ‘the earth was not created two minutes ago (there is a real past).’

page 356 note 2 That their brakes won't fail could be justified within their conceptual framework, but in fact they simply act on it without ever having investigated it or called it into question.

page 358 note 1 Smith also points out that what may appear to be straightforward statements of doctrinal belief are sometimes best interpreted as performatives. He shows, for example, that early baptismal formulas are performatives, not propositional affirmations, though he concedes that their use does enable us to ‘infer [Smith's italics] several things about the “beliefs“‘ of those who employed them to commit themselves to Christ and His church (F 256). I would suggest that this way of putting the point is misleading for it obscures the fact that the (logically felicitous) use of performatives not only provides ‘evidence’ (F 257) for a person's beliefs but logically entails having certain (propositional) beliefs. For example, the felicitous use of ‘I promise to return your book’ entails believing that I now have it or can get it, etc. (It would be logically odd to say ‘I promise to return your book even though I do not have it and can't get it.’) The fact that (many) religious utterances are best interpreted as performatives has, therefore, no tendency to show that doctrinal conviction is not essential to faith.

page 359 note l Cf. Faith, p. 101Google Scholar, where Smith implies that those who think that propositional belief is necessary to faith ‘mistake’ the ‘subjective side’ of the relation to the transcendent for its ‘object,’ and Faith, p. 146Google Scholar, where he says that people don't believe propositions but what they mean.

page 361 note 1 Though of course some of the presuppositions or implications of a false proposition can be true (without qualification). Notice too that the fact that a sentence's meaning is (partly) determined by the meanings of other sentences with which it is connected (so that ‘no proposition [i.e., sentence] has meaning in itself’ [B 26]) does not imply that the meaning which is (partly) determined in this way is not either true or false.

page 361 note 2 See, e.g., The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 353 f.

page 364 note 1 Smith concedes in passing that there might be problems with the criterion, and adds that descriptive statements must at least be intelligible, if not acceptable, to participants (T 101). If the criterion is weakened in this way, however, it will exclude little or nothing. Reductive and false accounts of my faith and tradition are perfectly intelligible to me.

page 364 note 2 Cf. World Theology, pp. 97f. But also see pp. 98 f.