What is Christian Faith?

Three pages arguing that a religion is a life rather than a set of propositions, and that the churches are drawing their lines tight enough to keep thinking men out.

by Charles Sanders Peirce6 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1893(aged 54)
Original language: English

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Overview

Paul Carus, who edited The Monist, had spent the previous year printing attacks on Peirce's metaphysics there, and that quarter's number carried Peirce's one long reply. In July 1893 Carus also printed this: three pages in The Open Court, the other magazine he edited, five months after a companion piece by Peirce on religion and science. It is not an argument so much as a statement of position, and its opening paragraph shows why. A man can be an accomplished theologian without ever having felt the stirring of the spirit, as the colour-blind have discussed the laws of colour-sensation and drawn interesting conclusions; but the question at the head of the article can only be answered out of one's own religious experience. His answer is that religion is a life and not a belief, and that it decays along a fixed route — from perception to trust, from trust to belief, and from belief to an abstraction that theologians then quarrel over until nothing living is left. What is distinctive in Christianity, on his account, is not a metaphysics of the godhead but a precept about how to live. He points at the Didache, the early Christian manual that Philotheos Bryennios found in a Constantinople library in 1873 and published a decade before Peirce wrote. It sets out two ways, one of life and one of death, and asks nobody to assent to a creed. The Way of Life is love. The rest is addressed to the churches: stop drawing the lines so tight that educated men cannot enter. To those talking of founding a church for the scientifically trained, Peirce says wait a few years if you can — and if you cannot, at least do not begin by excluding anybody yourself.

Key concepts

What is the Didache, and why does Peirce point at it?

An early Christian manual, lost for centuries and found by Philotheos Bryennios in a Constantinople library in 1873, published roughly a decade before Peirce wrote. It lays out two ways, one of life and one of death, and asks nobody to assent to a creed. Peirce takes it as evidence of what Christian teaching was before doctrine.

What does Peirce mean by saying religion is a life, not a belief?

That what makes a person religious is how they live, not which propositions they hold. On his account belief decays along a fixed route — perception hardens into trust, trust into belief, belief into an abstraction theologians quarrel over until nothing living is left. The Way of Life, in the formula he borrows, is love.

Why does he say only personal experience can answer the question?

Because a man can be an accomplished theologian without ever having felt the stirring of the spirit, as the colour-blind have discussed the laws of colour-sensation and drawn interesting conclusions from them. Positive knowledge, like a lawyer's knowledge of the courts, rests on long experience, and religion is no exception.

What is Peirce actually asking the churches to do?

Stop drawing the lines tight enough to keep educated men outside them. He wants a church broad enough that a person of scientific training could enter without professing doctrines they cannot hold, and he tells those proposing to found a separate church for such people to wait if they can, and not to begin by excluding anybody themselves.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Religion Is a Life, Not a Creed

An accomplished theologian may never have felt the stirring of the spirit, as the colour-blind have drawn interesting deductions about colour; so the question can only be answered out of a man's own religious experience.

Belief decays along a fixed route: perception hardens into trust, trust into belief, and belief into an abstraction that theologians quarrel over until nothing living is left. The "Didache", recovered from a Constantinople library a decade earlier, is the evidence that the earliest Christian teaching set out two ways and asked assent to no creed. The Way of Life is love. The rest is addressed to the churches — stop drawing the lines tight enough to keep educated men outside them.

faith
religious faith
lived belief
christianity
church
doctrine
doctrinal authority
anti-sectarianism
ecumenism
religious pluralism
love
ethics
religious experience
church reform
science and religion
intellectual humility

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Within this work

passages held: 6
distinct concepts: 23
by passages held, corpus-wide: #832

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories
The earliest item on this shelf, and the root of everything after it: the three-part scheme of quality, relation and representation reappears in the logic papers of 1877–78 and again in the evolutionary cosmology of the 1890s.
EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man
Where Peirce clears the ground. The four denials reached here — no intuition, no introspection, no thought without signs, no conception of the incognizable — are restated as premisses at the head of the sequel.
EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief
Written for readers with no philosophy behind them: the first instalment of a six-part course in the logic of science, serialised in a general-interest monthly. Everything the other 1877–78 papers do rests on the account of doubt, belief and inquiry set out here.
EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith? you are here EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten
The one book review on this shelf, from the years after the Coast Survey when Peirce lived partly by notices and dictionary work. It is the only piece here in which he is weighing someone else's system rather than building his own.
EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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