Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann isn’t offering believers a consolation prize; he’s drawing a line between religion as intellectual anesthesia and religion as moral nerve. The “theism worthy of our respect” is deliberately framed as a minority position: faith that doesn’t lean on the usual props of design, harmony, and “look at the world, therefore God.” He’s writing against a certain mid-century confidence that theology can be shored up by cosmology or tidy proofs. For Kaufmann, that kind of faith is too dependent on the world behaving nicely.

The punch is “in spite of that.” It turns theodicy inside out. If the world is full of gratuitous suffering, injustice, and divine silence, then faith based on the world’s apparent order isn’t just naive; it’s evasive. Respectable theism, in his view, is what remains after the universe has refused to cooperate with your metaphysics.

Invoking Buddha’s atheism is a strategic provocation: Buddhism earns its profundity by not requiring a benevolent creator to make sense of pain. Kaufmann insists that a theism can match that depth only when it stops bargaining for cosmic reassurance. Job and Jeremiah matter because they argue with God rather than advertising Him. They dramatize faith as protest, not as proof: an ethical relationship that can include accusation, grief, and refusal to flatter the divine. In Kaufmann’s subtext, the believer worth taking seriously sounds less like an apologist and more like a dissenter who won’t let God off the hook.