approaches. At the same time, König’sdefinition has some interesting
parallels to Hobbes and Locke. Like his British contemporaries, König
conceives religious faith in terms of individual affirmation. For all
three, the core of religious faith is seen at this personal, individual
level. It may be added that all three see the issue of salvation as the
core of religion.
König does not teach human autonomy in the manner of British
philosophers. People remain deeply heteronomous and passive in his
Lutheran theology. Even this may, however, link König with the
British thinkers and create some distance from the broader tradition
of recognition, as none of the three considersagnitioto be a dialogical
or reciprocal relationship. Instead, it is a human acknowledgement of
given religious truth. While Bernard assumes a feudal mutuality and
Luther describes how God and believers justify one another in the
event of salvation, the seventeenth-century thinkers focus on the
human subject who performs the acts of acknowledgement and
appropriation.
Although König’s view offiduciacontinues the earlier traditions of
commendatioand religious appropriation, the tripartite nature of
faith lends it a character that is not found as such in Bernard or
Luther. The definition quoted above assumes that individual appro-
priation is only possible when the object is first ‘known and
approved’. This makes sense philosophically, and the analytical
method may not assume a temporal succession. Theologically, how-
ever, the long tradition of religious recognition assumes that the
believers attach themselves to truths which they do not yet grasp
intellectually.
In Bernard and Luther, recognition and faithful attachment pre-
cede rather than follow from theoretical knowledge. The Pseudo-
ClementineRecognitions(see section 2.1 in this volume) underlines
that conversion andagnitio veritatisare not intellectual or philosoph-
ical events but religious matters that present themselves as alterna-
tives to philosophy. Unlike these models, König’s sequencenotitia,
assensus, andfiduciaassumes an intellectualist approach that makes
faithfulness dependent on knowledge. This being said, König never-
theless weaves together (i) the tradition of recognitive knowledge
(agnitio) in conversion, (ii) the role of justification by faith, and (iii)
the personal appropriation (commendatio,applicatio,appropriatio)
in an impressive manner, uniting traditions which previous authors
had regarded separately from one another.
120 Recognition and Religion