Martin Buber’s Two Types of Faith in Its Protestant Context Daniel M. Herskowitz / University of Oxford The relationship between Martin Buber and Christian thought is fraught with tensions. Few Jewish thinkers have been as personally close to Christians and as thoroughly conversant with Christian tradition as he was, and few have left their mark as definitely on Christian thought. Few, moreover, have been perceived as the representative of Judaism in the eyes of Christians so much as Buber was. 1 At the same time, Buber was exceptionally critical of Chris- tianity. This essay explores this charged relationship by examining the work where Buber’s critique of Christianity is most poignantly on display: Two Types of Faith (Zwei Glaubensweisen, 1950). 2 Bringing to fruition many ideas that had been developed in prewar writ- ings, this postwar work offered an account of the Jewish-Christian difference that included a damning critique of what Buber took to be one of the basic tenets of Christian faith. The initial argument of Two Types of Faith is relatively straightforward. There are, Buber announced, two basic forms of faith (Glaube): the first type of faith is faith as trust (Treue, Vertrauen), faith in; the second type of faith is faith as assent to proposition, faith that (Glauben dass). The first is based on a state of contact, on a present, direct, and personal relationship with God in which one’s entire being is invested; the second is based on The Journal of Religion, volume 104, number 1, January 2024. © 2024 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/726865 1 On Buber and Christianity, see Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (Lon- don: Routledge, 2002), 319–33. On Buber’s influence on twentieth-century Protestant thought, see Helmut Gollwitzer, “The Significance of Martin Buber for Protestant Theology,” in Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume, ed. Haim Gordon and Jochanan Bloch (New York: Ktav, 1984), 392– 96; Paul Tillich, “Jewish Influences on Contemporary Christian Theology,” Cross Currents 2 (1952): 38–42; W. Clark Gilpin, “‘Companionable Being’: American Theologians Engage Martin Buber,” in Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy, ed. Sam Berrin Shonkoff (Boston: Brill, 2018), 54–65. 2 Martin Buber, Zwei Glaubensweisen, in Werke, Erster Band: Schriften zur Philosophie (Heidel- berg: Schneider, 1962). Quotes will be drawn from the English translation: Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: Harper Torch, 1951). Some studies dedicated to this work are R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Reflections on Martin Buber’s Two Types of Faith,” Journal of Jewish Studies 39, no. 1 (1988): 92–101; Shalom Ratzbi, “Two Ways of Faith: Its Role and Place in Martin Buber’s Thought,” Chidushim: Studies in the History of German and Cen- tral European Jewry 17, no. 2 (2015): 1–96; Orr Scharf, “A Tale of Light and Darkness: Martin Buber’s Gnostic Canon and the Birth of Theopolitics,” Religions 10, no. 242 (2019): 1–18. 79