Beyond Faith and Reason : Epistemic Justification in Earliest Christianity

Authors

FRANEK Juraj

Year of publication 2016
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Graeco-Latina Brunensia
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web Digitální knihovna FF
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/GLB2016-2-11
Field Philosophy and religion
Keywords Early Christian Literature; faith and reason; epistemic justification; apologetics; miracles; morality; divine inspiration
Description Much of the scholarly discussion pertaining to epistemological assumptions regarding the earliest Christian authors has been framed by a series of dichotomies, placing “faith” and “religion” on one side and “reason” and “philosophy” on the other. I argue in this paper that uncritical use of these hard-to-define and overly general concepts as blanket categories to analyse Christian writings from the first three centuries CE inevitably causes major methodological issues and could be seen as heuristically unjustified. I suggest that a more frugal approach may be initiated by reconceptualizing the traditional “faith” vs. “reason” dichotomy in terms of the concept of personal and impersonal epistemic justification.
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