By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
If the determinative use of religious utterances is broadly cognitive, this is because our underlying faith in the ultimate worth of life has an objective ground that evokes and justifies it. We believe that our lives are ultimately meaningful because there is a ground of meaning that makes them so. Consequently, any religious utterance functioning to answer the question made possible by this basic faith necessarily functions implicitly, if not explicitly, in a broadly cognitive way, by enabling us so to understand the ground of faith as to be reassured about our ultimate worth.
On the other hand, the broadly cognitive use of determinative of religious utterances is to be clearly distinguished from any kind of merely intellectual use. For if faith's being objectively grounded accounts for the use of religious utterances being broadly cognitive, the objective ground of faith is of interest to faith only as its objective ground, as authorizing -- giving and demanding -- faith. Indeed, one can say that religious talk about the ground of faith is always talk about the encompassing mystery of my own existence (das Woher meines Umgetriebenseins) as authorizing faith, even as religious talk about faith is always talk about the self-understanding authorized by that mystery.
As Bultmann puts it, "if immediate address calls for a faciendum, it always does so on the basis of a factum that is perceived at the same time. If ... the factum is already understood, the communication of the faciendum can move into the foreground, or even be the only thing spoken about; conversely, the factum can move into the foreground, or be the only thing mentioned, if the faciendum can thereby be taken for granted" (Glauben und Verstehen 1:158 f.).
1 July 1980; rev. 23 August 2003
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