Work #1632 · Late period
Two Types of Faith
Buber's 1951 'Zwei Glaubensweisen' — Jewish-emunah vs. Greek-Christian-pistis as two modes of religious faith
Martin Buber
· 1951
· German
· Comparative theological monograph
Tradition: Jewish dialogical philosophy / Jewish-Christian comparative religion / philosophy of religion
Buber's 1951 'Two Types of Faith' — Jewish emunah ('trust') versus Greek-Christian pistis ('belief that') as the two modes of religious faith
Published in 1951 as 'Zwei Glaubensweisen', 'Two Types of Faith' contrasts two fundamentally different modes of religious faith. Hebrew 'emunah' (faith as trust, fidelity, life-in-relation) characterises classical Jewish religion and (Buber argues) Jesus's own teaching. Greek 'pistis' (faith as cognitive assent to propositions) characterises Pauline-Hellenistic and subsequent Christianity. The book reads the New Testament (especially the Sermon on the Mount) as a Jewish text that Pauline Christianity then Hellenised. The work is a major mid-twentieth-century Jewish-philosophical engagement with Christianity.
Author
Editions cited
- Zwei Glaubensweisen (Manesse-Verlag, Zürich, 1951); English trans. Norman P. Goldhawk, Two Types of Faith (Routledge, 1951)
School Embodiments
Rabbinic Judaism
25%
Major Jewish-philosophical engagement with Christian faith.
"Hebrew emunah — trust, fidelity, life-in-relation — differs structurally from Greek pistis." (Two Types of Faith, ch. 1)
Defining comparative philosophy-of-religion text.
"Two modes of religious faith." (Two Types of Faith, subtitle)
Phenomenology
14%
Phenomenological-comparative methodology.
"Faith as relational mode, not propositional content." (Two Types of Faith, ch. 2)
Hermeneutics
14%
Hermeneutical re-reading of the New Testament as Jewish text.
"The historical Jesus belongs to the world of emunah." (Two Types of Faith, on the Sermon on the Mount)
Engagement with Christian theology, especially Pauline.
"Paul's Hellenisation of the Jewish heritage." (Two Types of Faith, ch. 9)
Comparative-religious frame without flattening differences.
"Two faiths, real and irreducible." (Two Types of Faith)
Internal Tensions
Major mid-twentieth-century Jewish-philosophical engagement with Christianity.
⧖
I. Time
1951.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Direction: Uni-directional
Dimensionality: One
✦
II. Space
Jerusalem.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Relational
Curvature: Flat
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◉
III. Matter
Comparative-theological monograph.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◎
IV. Observer
Late Buber.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Knowledge Extent: Immediate
Knowledge Retainment: Partial
Physicality: Both
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: Personal
⚡
V. Energy
Late-comparative-religious energies.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Single book.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Two Types of Faith resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing.
47%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time.
47%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide.
47%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet.
32%
Is regret rational?
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer.
32%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future.
32%
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is the world created from nothing?
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance.
55%
Is the physical world fully real?
Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting.
55%
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good.
55%
What is money?
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features.
54%
What is a nation?
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character.
54%
What makes someone male or female?
Sex is a real biological kind with given content.
54%
Should we edit the human germline?
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given.
54%
Observer · 37 dilemmas, all mainstream
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
When does a person begin?
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence.
54%
What is marriage?
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make.
54%
What is our place in nature?
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.
48%
Should we colonize space?
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship.
48%
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Genetic modification is cultivation by other means.
48%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure.
44%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness.
44%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Held in continuous divine or ancestral remembering — neither stored discretely nor purely reconstructed.
44%
What happens to "you" when you die?
A soul continues into another mode of being.
37%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer reaches because God or a cosmic ordering acts on the prayed-for.
37%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
What looks like coincidence is providence — there is no such thing as a real coincidence.
37%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
The dead are present through divine memory, communion of saints, or ancestor presence.
35%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The human observer is in time, but God's vantage is not — and foreknowledge is not foreordering.
33%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditation participates in a real eternity — divine or cosmic — that the bounded human observer ordinarily cannot reach.
33%
Does prayer change God's mind?
God sees from outside time; prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it is part of how providence is enacted.
33%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
No — minds are not the kind of thing we engineer.
30%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Moral standing comparable to humans requires what only humans have.
29%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Without ensoulment, an organoid is tissue, not a person.
29%
What makes someone the same person over time?
You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect.
29%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's.
29%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The soul accompanies the person; engineering can't transfer it.
29%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Distance doesn't dilute obligation; communion of saints / divine relation spans the cosmos.
29%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Defer to credentialed traditions; experts are the modern analog.
28%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
Revelation is the paradigm case of authoritative knowledge.
28%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM has no soul to whom revelation could be addressed; the question doesn't apply.
28%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
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How is knowledge of reality produced?
—
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Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
—
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Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
—
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What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
—
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Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
—
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Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it.
39%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access.
39%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible.
39%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was.
39%