Epistemologists widely acknowledge that each of us, including the most intellectually original, clever and learned among us, is deeply indebted to others for whatever knowledge we have. Others’ conveyance of information to us is known as testimony, and their testimony gives us testimonial knowledge only to the extent that we trust them as sources of information. Some philosophers think this transaction is the function of a natural, God-given faculty by which from early childhood we give more or less automatic credence to what our elders tell us. But as we grow older, we develop dispositions to discriminate reliable from unreliable informants, and we learn strategies for testing them for reliability. When such a disposition to intelligent trust is well formed, it can be thought of as an intellectual virtue.

Christian faith is sometimes construed as a disposition to trust God, including trusting what he says. But to trust God's word seems disanalogous from trusting human testimony, inasmuch as the question whether our elders and other human informants exist doesn't much come up, whereas the very existence of God seems contestable, and even where his existence is admitted, his nature may be disputed. ‘Before’ you can believe God, you need to believe in God, and that can seem venturesome to somebody who is immersed, as most of us are, in a secularised or religiously plural world.

This collection of new philosophical essays explores the connections among the concepts of religious faith (in most cases, Christian faith), trust, testimony, knowledge, rationality, disagreement and virtue(s). The authors are well-known practitioners of philosophical epistemology or philosophy of religion. Some are highly sympathetic to Christianity and others are in varying degrees critical of religious faith.

Jay Wood expounds and defends what the Christian tradition, and especially Thomas Aquinas, has said about the nature of faith and its epistemic value (it is an intellectual, as well as a moral, virtue). Paul Moser argues that one's ‘evidence’ for God's existence and character properly depends on entering into a redemptive friendship with God, because the knowledge of God is essentially interpersonal acquaintance. Eleonore Stump expounds Aquinas’ understanding of the relation between will and intellect, using recent psychology's insights about I-thou knowing (mind-reading) to develop an account of faith's role in generating wisdom.

Lara Buchak uses contemporary decision theory to outline some possible accounts of the relationship between rational faith and justified belief. Trent Dougherty argues that ordinary Christians are often justified in their testimonially acquired theological beliefs inasmuch as they proportion their belief to the evidence in their possession.

John Schellenberg argues that faith could be a virtue were it detached from belief and constituted instead by imagination. Elizabeth Fricker argues against Richard Foley that from our necessary trust in our own epistemic faculties it doesn't follow that we should trust other people's, and John Bishop avers that the analogy between trusting others and trusting God is weak. Evan Fales argues that testimony about God is no proper basis for belief in him, on the grounds that such testimony is epistemically sub-par because of the paucity of evidence for God's existence. Sanford Goldberg and Jennifer Lackey argue that the right response of religious believers to the presence of equally smart, informed and epistemically virtuous unbelievers is for the religious to mitigate their confidence in their beliefs.

Nicholas Wolterstorff counters that such a policy would be ill advised because many of our reasons for religious belief and unbelief remain mysterious to us. Linda Zagzebski distinguishes first-personal reasons for belief, such as trusting your intuitions and the attacks that aim to undermine such reasons (your intuitions are nothing but a by-product of an ability that made your ancestors successful reproducers), from third-personal reasons for belief, such as the order in nature, and the attacks that aim to undermine them (the order in nature is better explained by something else).