According to Professor Czesław S. Bartnik, the scopes of both faith and culture are analogous to the human phenomenon. At the beginning, there is an individual person – hence both the faith and individual culture (microculture); then the specific community appears, and with it also the common culture (macroculture) as well as the community faith. Usually, culture is understood as an action that makes a person become more human (active aspect of culture). According to Bartnik’s personalism, the aspect of experience, any reception of the world (passive aspect of culture) should be added. The same dimensions can be seen in the experience of faith (active and passive). There is a correlation between faith (religion) and culture: religion defines culture, and culture defines religion (whereas culture is “earlier” in man than religion). The article shows that they both constitute a kind of dyad which leads to personalization of the human being (who nowadays is constantly threatened with unbelief and anti-culture – depersonalization). The culture–faith dyad is subject to the laws of history, and may assume various forms during its course. Former cultures used to be almost entirely built on natural faith in God although they had their atheist element, too. Currently, we already have an epoch of culture that strives to take an entirely atheist shape, however, even this culture does not exist without a religious (or pseudo-religious) form. However, the culture-faith dyad does not become disintegrated.

In der wissenschaftlichen katholischen Dogmatiktheologie werden vier methodologische Haupttypen angewandt: historischer, positivistischer, systematischer (spekulativer) und personalistischer. Darüber hinaus treten zahlreiche fragmentarische oder reduktionistische Methoden auf: hermeneutische, narrative, kerygmatische, intuitive, linguistische, strukturalistische und andere. Die grundsätzlichen methodologische Typen streben danach, nicht nur die Glaubenssätze, sondern die gesamte religiöse Wirklichkeit zu erfassen.

The paper summarizes the debate concerning the divine hiddenness argument. First, it presents two versions of the argument that was initially formulated by J.L. Schellenberg and subsequently discussed over the last twenty years and it marks its most important theses. Then the author indicates some possible rebuttals, segregating them according to the challenged premises. Particularly noteworthy, he argues, are these theistic answers that accuse the images of God assumed by the hiddenness argument of excessive anthropomorphism and those that try to point out higher goods justifying divine hiddenness. In conclusion the author claims that the hiddenness argument proves atheism only if by theism one understands theistic personalism. Other positions, such as ultimism or theism of transcendence, are not threatened by the argument.