Abstract

The particular sense or use of the word ‘faith’ that I am seeking to understand is that which occurs when the religious man, and more specifically the Christian believer, speaks of ‘knowing God’ and goes on to explain that this is a knowing of God by faith. Or again, when asked how he professes to know that God, as spoken about in Christianity, is real, his answer is ‘by faith’. Our question is: what does ‘faith’ mean in these contexts? And what I should like to be able to do is to make a descriptive analysis that could be acceptable to both believers and non-believers. A Christian and an atheist or agnostic should equally be able to say, Yes, that is what, phenomenologically, faith is – though they would of course then go on to say radically different things about its value.