Religious Knowledge

This book addresses the place of religious knowledge in religion, particularly in the Christian tradition. It gives attention to the relation between faith and knowledge, the natures of faith and knowledge, and to other issues that involve religious knowledge. The concern is not whether received religious knowledge qualifies as genuine knowledge, but with divergent views about the place of religious knowledge in religion. The book begins with an examination of the difference between knowledge and belief in their general concepts and presents reasons why belief as faith, and not knowledge, is central to the Abrahamic religions, while contrariwise knowledge is more esteemed culturally.Within Christianity there is an ambivalence about religious knowledge, found in the New Testament and in later Christian writings. In one manifestation the discounting of religious knowledge is found in the mystical tradition of unknowing, traceable to Dionysius in the late fifth to early sixth century. Some religious thinkers have explicitly accepted and proposed ways to religious knowledge, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, while others, notably Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, cast knowledge and seeking it as incompatible with faith. The proposed book gives attention to the relation between faith and religious knowledge. Two antithetical religious intuitions, both at home in religious reflection in the Christian tradition, are presented and explored. For one faith requires a struggle with doubt. For the other faith requires a certainty that excludes doubt. For the first religious knowledge would destroy faith. For the second religious knowledge is compatible with faith and completes it.As the book's discussion brings out, the issue of the place of religious knowledge in religion, in Christianity in particular, can change with a change in the way religious knowledge is understood. Several different constructions of religious knowledge are identified The book's final chapter has as its subject religious knowledge in its relation to religious wisdom. It is observed that in a significant biblical strand wisdom is personified in the Jewish and Christian traditions, while in the Christian tradition wisdom, like the Word, is personified as Christ. Given this personification and identification, it is argued, Christian believers may enter a relationship to wisdom that merges with a relationship to Christ or God that is distinct from having religious knowledge. Though the focus of the book is on the Christian tradition, other traditions are referred to, and one chapter is on the place of religious knowledge in nontheistic religious traditions.