Making Room for Faith — Possibility and Hope

Abstract

From my graduate school days when I first read Jerry Gill’s work, through the days when he introduced me to the Society for Philosophy of Religion and encouraged me as a scholar, I have had reason both to admire and be grateful to him. I continue to benefit from his ways of thinking in this rich and provocative paper, ‘Faith Not without Reason’. I find congenial Gill’s suggestion that Kant and Kierkegaard both made ‘room for faith’ by mitigating or undercutting dichotomies between reason and faith, as well as between intellect and volition. In part this is because I would expect affinities between Kant and Kierkegaard (based on the principle that ‘the enemy [SK] of my enemy [Hegel] is my friend’), and in part because I expect great minds to undercut or transcend traditional dichotomies. I am in sympathy with his claim that both Kant’s understanding of the ‘bounds’ of reason and his view of analogical or metaphorical uses of language preclude the need to oppose reason and faith starkly, and hence the need to set reason aside. Moreover, I have elsewhere argued at length that one can find in Kierkegaard’s writings resources for transcending the dichotomy between intellect and will, between passive and active.1 Thus, I am in sympathy with his suggestion that Kierkegaard points us beyond a rationalist/volitionalist divide. In principle, then, I could affirm and further develop Gill’s ‘possible and fruitful’ readings, but what I want to do here instead is sketch an alternative way in which to see Kant and Kierkegaard making ‘room for faith’. My alternative is not intended to undermine Gill’s readings, but in the process of developing my alternative, I will, in effect, raise some questions about Gill’s readings.