Therese Foote writes:

> The distinction I had in mind was:  On the one hand, belief as
> a 'Fuerwahrhalten', a holding-something-to-be-the-case, 'thought
> with assent' as St. Augustine put it - intellectual assent to
> the truth of a particular proposition.  On the other hand,
> faith as a decisive commitment of the whole person to someone
> or something.  The one is a purely epistemological category,
> while the other may be called an existential category.  By
> epistemological I mean that it is concerned with giving an
> account of the nature of scientific knowledge (episteme) and
> how it is obtained and so on.  By existential I mean that it
> is concerned with the various ways for the human subject of
> existing.  The latter category is broader than the first and
> includes the first - that is, faith will have an epistemological
> element to it, but is not a purely epistemological phenomenon.  

This, if I understand it correctly,
is a distinction between epistemic belief which
serves as a substitute for knowledge,
and faith as a spiritual bond between man and God.
The distinction parallels a fundamental difference
between the Old Testament and the New.
The dominant theme of the Old Testament is faith
as the proper relationship between man and God:
faithfulness of God to his people,
and faithfulness of his people to their God.

The New Testament, on the other hand,
echos with the call for epistemic belief in Jesus
as the Messiah, as the Son of God.
The New Testament makes the ancient relationship
of faith between man and God contingent
on the epistemic belief in Jesus' divinity.
Jesus appears as the mediator between man and God.
"No man," he says, "cometh unto the Father, but by me."
(John 14:6)

The hypothesis that epistemic belief and faith
should be inherently separable is inconsistent
with the requirement of the Gospels:
that to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ
is the indispensable precondition for salvation.
To suggest that we might forgo the vexatious
reflections of epistemic belief in favor of the
immediacy of faith, is to exchange the imperatives
of Christianity for the religion of the Hebrews,
for the faith of Abraham, of Job, of the Psalmist,
of Jeremiah and of Isaiah, a faith which may entail
numerous ethical and ceremonial obligations,
but never demands, as means to salvation,
assent to propositions beyond experience.
Indeed, it may be plausibly argued
that Judaism rejects, or should reject,
epistemic belief as an insidious instrument of idolatry.

Christianity demands of us, unconditionally, the epistemic
belief that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus explicitly required
this belief of his disciples; the early church demanded this
belief of those whom it persuaded to the new religion.
After Jesus' death, the belief requirement was enlarged: to
include the Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection, the Ascension,
and Jesus' seat in Heaven at the right hand of God the Father.
The new religion's need for epistemic belief became enshrined
in its Apostolic and Nicene creeds.

The reliance on epistemic belief is integral to historical
Christianity. The insistence on dogma as the object of belief
has been the source of endless controversy and strife,
the well-spring of intolerance, and the source of the pervasive
and ineradicable antisemitism that in the eyes of some of us 
has become Christianity's badge of shame. 

The theologians whose minds have shaped Church doctrine
from the earliest times to the present seem to have understood
intuitively that epistemic belief, the imposition of verbal tenets
upon individual conscience, has been essential to Christianity's
historical success.  Converts to Christianity must in many
instances have hungered for doctrine, and the compulsion
of the epistemic belief to which they assented became to them
a source of comfort and inspiration.

But epistemic belief alone is clearly inadequate to human spiritual
needs.  We need to trust our fathers and our mothers, our siblings,
our spouses, our children, our friends, and most significantly our God.
Both trusting faith and epistemic belief are needs integral to the
human experience.  Christianity's power is attributable not least
to its success in fusing epistemic belief as articulated in its creeds
with a faith that radiates and resounds from its poetry and its music.
If Christianity began with the demand to acknowledge Jesus
as the Messiah, it flourishes by expanding the faith
which binds man to God the Father to encompass Jesus as well,
as friend, as brother, if not indeed as lover and as bridegroom.

The circumstance that epistemic belief alone is insufficient
to man's spiritual welfare does not mean that it is not also essential.
The need for epistemic belief is separate from the need for faith.
It is less obvious but no less efficacious.
If the need to trust reflects the isolation
and forlornness of the individual in the universe,
the need to believe reflects the incompleteness and the
incongruity of his conceptual world.  For the past two millenia
Christianity has filled, - or, its detractors will say,
exploited both needs.

Philosophers and scientists are oblivious to the need to
believe, preoccupied as they are with completing the Tower
of Babel on schedule. They have ignored what the poet tells us
even the clever animals know: that we humans are not securely
at home in the conceptual world.

    "und die findigen Tiere merken es schon,
    dasz wir nicht sehr verlaeszlich zu Haus sind
    in der gedeuteten Welt." - Rilke, Duino Elegy I

That is why we are forever grasping at the straws of 
epistemic belief.  Therese Foote, if I understand her
correctly, is prepared to jettison epistemic belief
for the sake of the faith that she values highly, but
so radical a revision of Christianity seems to me
inconsistent with history.  I suspect that for many
Christians epistemic belief creates a spiritual environment
indispensable to their faith in God.

To the extent that one has difficulty in reconciling
the epistemic demands of Christian beliefs
with common sense, with practical experience, and
with contemporary scientific theory, one might,
before such beliefs are discarded, reflect on
our loyalties to common sense, to practical
experience and to the scientific dogma that we
take for granted, and consider the possibility
that these loyalties themselves constitute our
real religious convictions, convictions that
require to be scrutinized critically for the
idolatry they might entail. Such scrutiny might
enable us to confront the paradoxes of Christianity
with greater equanimity, and bestow on us at minimum
the blessing of not being offended by Jesus and by
the paradoxes which he presents to us. 
"et beatus est quicumque non scandalizatus in me,"
(Luke 7:23) Such scrutiny would have the incidental
consequence of clearing for us a more direct access
to Kierkegaard's account of his religious experience.