Edris Rezaei

Understanding the nature of faith has always been a concern for believers, theologians, and philosophers of religion; and therefore, we have a long history of it. One of the ways to explain the nature of faith is to offer various models of it. In this article, based on John Bishop's categorization of faith models as 1) knowledge, 2) belief, 3) trust, 4) doxastic venture, 5) non-doxastic venture, and 6) hope in the "faith" entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an effort has been made to first explain each of these models. Subsequently, relying on the degree of attention these models pay to three components: 1) cognitive, 2) affective, and 3) volitional, as criteria for evaluating them, it has been demonstrated which of these models have undergone reductionism. According to these criteria, the model of faith as knowledge has undergone reductionism, as it fails to adequately address the affective component in its definition of faith. The models of faith as trust, non-doxastic venture, and hope have not been subject to reductionism as they have considered all three of the aforementioned criteria. However, given the various interpretations of faith models as belief and doxastic venture, the assessment of reductionism or non-reductionism for each interpretation varies accordingly.