Whoever simply thinks and, in the process, believes that what is thought must be immediately comprehensible, he does not yet know what thinking is. Whoever thinks in this way has never thought.
Thinking is preparedness for the simple.
Thinking has taken charge of the care for the matter among humans.
Faith and Thinking.—The fissure does not involve a between that simply divides the two, as if the fissure merely existed for its own sake. The fissure to faith is thinking itself, granted that it is indeed a thinking and not simply a manner of tinkering around with general conceptions based on one’s own fancies.
Understood in a Christian manner, faith is the unconstrained trust in the claim of god, who as father speaks through Jesus as his anointed son and is thus the redeemer from sin. Faith is standing in the grace of the son of god. Faith knows nothing other than redemption from sin. While faith is a form of knowledge, it is never a form of thinking. No fissure arises between faith and knowledge. But the fissure between faith and thinking can also never arise through faith, for faith is only concerned with the salvation of the soul, but never with beings as such in their being. Faith considers thinking foolishness. Faith—there is only Christian faith—does not concern itself with thinking, i.e. it does not attend to the task of thinking as such. Faith is even indifferent to its separation from thinking. Faith can neither “be” the fissure to thinking, nor can it be concerned with thinking. Only the theologians, | i.e. the authentically faithless ones, promote idle talk about faith and knowledge. They want to elevate faith through “science,” or at least make faith suitable for cultural consumption. In the place of the fissure, which they never catch sight of, they invent a culvert that has been artificially filled nearly to the brim (filled up with their own business of mediation). Heathens are encouraged to cross over this vertigo-inducing culvert to reach faith.
One can never leap over this culvert; a leap is only possible where the fissure is. By now the perplexity has become so great that even philosophy has begun to “have faith.”
Christianity and Christianness.—Christianity is metaphysics that presents Christian faith as knowledge.
Christianness is faith in Christ in the figure of Christ.
Whoever thinks against Christianity does not think against Christianness; for there are two reasons why thinking cannot think against Christianness: first, when it thinks “against” anything, thinking only has itself to think against itself; on the other hand, and as a consequence, because thinking as thinking is the fissure to faith, it does