faithcoerce God, and he instead preaches about the necessity of justification
by faith in order to be saved. Over the course of Christian history, other
religious thinkers offer reflections on, and definitions of, faith; this is
particularly true of more contemporary thinkers.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) defines faith as uncertainty held fast
with passionate inwardness. For Kierkegaard, objective certainty with
respect to faith is its most dangerous enemy because faith is a venture and
a risk. Faith throws one into despair and out of this comes consolation that
means greater suffering. Faith is also beyond reason and against it. In his
work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes about the example of
Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, his favorite son, in response to a command
by God, an order contrary to the ethical demand not to kill. Kierkegaard
uses the example of Abraham’s faith to serve as a representation of
Christian faith that is opaque and irrational. Since Christ is the absolute
paradox, the object of Christian faith is the absurd, the paradoxical, and
the incomprehensible. The absurd is a technical expression for the convic-
tion that with God all things are possible. To adopt this absurd and para-
doxical faith, a Christian must be mad and take a leap of despair.
Within the Abrahamic traditions of monotheistic religions, faith also
plays a central role in Islam where it is counted as one of the five pillars of
the religion. In fact, the confession of faith (shahādah) represents the first
pillar of Islam, and it affirms that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad
is His prophet.” When a Muslim recites this formula sincere intention
(niyyah) is essential. This implies that religious acts, such as the confession
of faith, must not be done in a perfunctory or mechanical way. Proper inten-
tion is also a defense against inattentive and external performance.
The Hindu Bhagavad Gītā, a section of the much larger epic
Mahābhārata, attempts to synthesize three paths to salvation: knowl-
edge, good deeds, and devotion, with the author favoring the final means.
Devotion is both a means to a goal and the goal itself. A self-forgetting
love, seeing the world as a manifestation of God, and surrendering to the
deity are all requirements of the path of devotion, but the basic require-
ment is faith (śraddhā). The religious insights of this text are developed
further by the Hindu thinker Rāmānuja (1050–1137), whose philosophi-
cal position represents a qualified non-dualism because the ultimate real-
ity is not devoid of characteristics and is qualified by the self and the
world. According to Rāmānuja, the path of knowledge leads to devotion,
at which time the self is completely subservient to God, and one takes
refuge at the feet of God, provoking the grace of God and gift of faith.
Faith plays a major role in the later development of Buddhism, and
contributes to it becoming a worldwide religion. Pure Land Buddhism is
the best example of this trend. The Pure Land is a paradise, governed by