Faith

Terry Eagleton gives a neat summary of Alain Badiou’s account of faith, an account that seems to me to be quite close to the biblical view of faith in several respects:

“ . . . the kind of truth involved in acts of faith is neither independent of propositional truth nor reducible to it.  Faith for him consists in a tenacious loyalty to what he calls an ‘event’ – an utterly original happening which is out of joint with the smooth flow of history, and which is unnameable and ungraspable within the context in which it occurs.  Truth is what cuts against the grain of the world, breaking with an older dispensation and founding a radically new reality . . . . For Badiou, one becomes an authentic human subject, as opposed to a mere anonymous member of the biological species, through one’s passionate allegiance to such a revelation . . . . Truths and subjects are born at a stroke.  What provokes a subject into existence for Badiou is an exceptional, utterly particular truth, which calls forth an act of commitment in which the subject is born.”

Badiou doesn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but if He did, Badiou would recognize that as the kind of truth-event to which one might commit his whole soul.