The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Can there be any rational justification for the faith we choose to live by -- or, really, for the faith into whose tradition we have been socialized and acculturated? Or, in the slightly different terms of Balfour's statement, on what terms can the creed we have in fact accepted be most reasonably held?

That these are indeed the proper questions of believers qua believers is clear enough. But the questions proper to the theologian (including the dogmatic theologian) qua theologian are significantly different -- and more like the question that Balfour takes to be proper to the philosopher, who asks, what faith or creed does reason require us to accept? No doubt, the most basic and important issue between Gerrish's position and my own is that he quite misses the significance of this difference, and thus fails, finally, to uphold consistently the difference as well as the unity between faith and witness, on the one hand, and theology (including dogmatics), strictly and properly so-called, on the other.

Another aspect of this difference between believers and the theologian is that the critically reflective question of the credibility of one's beliefs is not, and cannot be, answered simply by exhibiting their coherence with what one otherwise believes and, in particular, with what everyone else seems to believe, too. At the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory, where our questions are the properly theoretical questions of meaning and truth, the issue is not what is believed, but what is worthy of belief -- and that applies to all of the beliefs whose belief-worthiness or credibility is there called into question. A theologian would proceed uncritically, and thus be a theologian in name only, if she or he did not recognize the need to validate critically all of our beliefs -- those with which we expect our religious beliefs to be coherent no less than our religious beliefs themselves.

I could also put my point by saying that, whereas I am concerned with credibility or belief-worthiness, finally, in the strict sense of truth, Gerrish is concerned with it only in the broad sense of fixing belief.

As for his epigraph from Balfour (34), the contrast it draws is exactly the contrast I draw (e.g., in Faith and Freedom: 117 f.) between "critical reflection" and "rationalization," where the first refers to "the process of determining in a reasoned way whether positions already taken are, in fact, worth taking," while the second refers to "the process of giving reasons for positions already taken."

1 June 2000

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