Of Information and Belief: On Fideists

Below is a repost from Of Information and Belief. He just posted a quick comment on Fideism in the parish setting (which the OED describes as "Any doctrine according to which all or some knowledge depends upon faith or revelation, and reason or the intellect is to be disregarded"). It's an interesting point that really does deserve some discussion. On the second topic - of pedantic pundits of things purportedly pedagogical - I think enough has been said. Avoid those people like the plague; for them the Church is a mental exercise, a hobby, a club, a place to pontificate, and they will lead you unsuspectingly into Pinocchio's Land of Toys.

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I have met more pious fideists who are Orthodox than in any other segment of what we generally refer to as “Christianity.” I do not believe I am the first person to have noticed this, though I am genuinely surprised that more people have not called attention to it. Of course, some of these people I have encountered may be unwitting fideists and, really, if you had to spend time with someone and talk about, oh, I don’t know, “God,” wouldn’t it be far more tolerable and certainly much more spiritually healthy to spend that time with a fideist than the coffee hour scholars who haunt Orthodox parishes across the country, letting everyone and their brother “in” on the fact the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom only bears a faint resemblance to the one he wrote or that the whole “monophysite thing” was just a big linguistic misunderstanding?