Luther in particular stresses the act of personal appropriation and
attachment. For Luther, God justifies the sinful and gives the gift of
faith. In believing that all this is done‘for me’, the individual is
attached to this heteronomous reality. This strongly unilateral divine
event is to some extent balanced in early modern views. Hobbes and
Locke present a secular version in which the personal conviction of
the recognizer is crucial. Zinzendorf employs the emotional language
of bridal mysticism to depict the social interaction between the
individual and the divine being.
These views focus on the self-preservation of the human recog-
nizer in various ways, including personal commitment, conviction
that needs protection, and faith that is appropriated in terms of a
gift. The recognizee does not receive similar attention: the second
paradigm focuses on the transformation and preservation of the
recognizer. For Luther and Calvin, the immutable God controls
the destiny of humans. For Hobbes and Locke, the object of the
personal conviction is not discussed. Some mutability in the recognizee
may nevertheless belong to the issue. For Calvin, the knowledge of the
divine object varies according to the state of the knower. A strongly
mutual heteronomy is available in Ficino, for whom the lover and the
beloved mutually discover one another in the self-preserving acts of
recognition.
A third paradigm is that ofexistential attachment, a view that
begins with Spalding and is continued at least until the times of
Bultmann and Barth. In this paradigm, the act of religious recognition
opens up the possibility of understanding the religious object
adequately. Recognition is thus a condition of possibility, a sort of
epistemic or cognitive precondition. The crucial feature of such recog-
nition is not, however, the cognitive content but the attachment of the
recognizer. Only after such attachment does the cognitive horizon
become available in an adequate manner.
In this third paradigm as well, the basic move occurs upwardly in
Spalding, Bultmann, and Barth. The recognizer is supposed to affirm
some higher reality before she can understand that object adequately.
At the same time, the higher reality does not dominate the scene as
with thefirst and second paradigms. Rather, the recognizee only
becomes a capable participant after thefirst act of existential attach-
ment. This implies a sort of mutability in the recognizee by which the
subjective act of recognition changes the recognizee’s status so that
the recognizer can start discussing it.
198 Recognition and Religion