Martin Buber’s Two Types of Faith in Its Protestant Context

This essay explores the fraught relationship between Martin Buber and Christian thought by critically analyzing and historically contextualizing his Two Types of Faith (1950). In this work Buber applies the distinction he puts forth between faith as relational trust (“faith in”) and faith as intellectual ascent to propositional truth (“faith that”) onto the early Israelite and Christian communities of faith. He also uses this distinction to criticize contemporary Protestant theology for continuing the Pauline notion of “faith that” rather than Jesus’s Jewish “faith in.” By examining the notion of faith developed by three central German Protestant theologians, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Emil Brunner, this essay demonstrates that Buber’s claim cannot be squared with the main line of Protestant theology from 1870 onward to Buber’s own time and that the entire discussion in Two Types of Faith can be understood as situated within the Protestant discourse he was admonishing.

Duke Scholars

Author Daniel M Herskowitz Religious Studies