Recognition and Religion A Historical and Systematic Study

4.2.5. Integrating Principle

While recognition is not among the most frequent concepts of West-
ern Christianity, it has a long and continuous history that at times
comes to the forefront of religious reflection. Among the most dis-
tinctive sources, I have highlighted the LatinRecognitions, Ficino’sDe
amore, Spalding’sReligion, eine Angelegenheit des Menschen, and
Bultmann’s entries on knowing and faith in the Kittel dictionary.
Other historically significant sources include the Pastoral Epistles,
Bernard’sSermons on the Song of Songs, Luther’sLecture on Romans,
Calvin’sInstitutes of the Christian Religion, and several texts of the
modern ecumenical movement.
When religious recognition appears in these sources, it normally
illuminates some core notion of religious life and conviction, including
conversion, justification, and new life, the nature of faith, love, and
religious knowledge, cognitive access to God and divine truths, and the
nature of subjective religious attachment. Hardly any of these can be
considered as peripheral. Although the texts that deal with recognition
sometimes employ contextual features, such as feudal law, bridal mys-
ticism, or inter-church relations, they address universal matters of
religious doctrine and life in most cases.
For this reason, the study of recognition has a theological import-
ance that is also independent of any philosophical comparison. The
most ancient theological locus of religious recognition is that of
conversion. This topic is later closely connected with theological
epistemology. Doctrines of justification, faith, and love play a signifi-
cant role. For theologians, the most important overall feature of
religious recognition may be its role in the constitution of externally
based religious identity. In the LatinRecognitions, this idea unifies the
discourses of conversion, religious knowledge, salvation, and Chris-
tian life. Religious recognition thus serves as an integrating principle
of various theological discourses.

4.2.6. Theological Content

Within this integrated totality, the three paradigms nevertheless
shape the theology of recognition in different ways, relating it to a
variety of doctrinal issues. Thefirst paradigm of conversion is biblic-
ally connected with the call of Jesus to repentance andmetanoia,
change of mind. In the LatinRecognitions, the religious person

210 Recognition and Religion