Faith and reason

Two mistakes

Two mistakes about faith and reason are common. One is that faith means believing without reasons, with eyes shut. The other is that reason, if we have enough of it, leaves no need for trust. Scripture accepts neither.

The God of the Bible speaks to human minds, and creation speaks first:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

Psalm 19:1-2

Paul writes that "what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them" (Romans 1:19); God's eternal power and divine nature "have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship" (Romans 1:20). God summons a people stained with sin as if into court: "Come now, let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18). In the synagogue at Thessalonica Paul "reasoned with them from the Scriptures" on three Sabbaths (Acts 17:2), "explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead" (Acts 17:3).

Yet Scripture does not let reason stand alone either. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7): knowing starts in reverence. "By faith we understand that the universe was formed" by God's word (Hebrews 11:3), so faith is not a wall against knowing but one of its roads. And that knowing is partial: "Now I know in part," Paul admits (1 Corinthians 13:12). Faith, then, is neither a leap without reasons nor a sum that leaves nothing unknown. It is trusting God, with reasons, and asking to know more. What truth itself is, and how to speak of it humbly, is taken up in What is truth?

Believing in order to understand

Augustine, preaching on John's Gospel, came to Jesus' words, "If anyone desires to do His will, he will know whether My teaching is from God" (John 7:17). Understanding, he said, is the reward of faith: do not seek to understand in order to believe, but "believe that thou mayest understand" Augustine, Tractates on John 29.6. Anselm walked the same road. At the end of the first chapter of his Proslogion he prays: "For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand" Anselm, Proslogion 1. His first title for the book was ‘Faith seeking understanding’ Proslogion, preface, the motto the theology course explores in What is theology? and Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished truths that reason can reach from truths known only by revelation. That God exists, reason can know; that God is Trinity, or that the Word became flesh, we know only because God has made it known. So he called truths such as God's existence not articles of faith but preambles to them, and explained: "Faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature" Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.2.2. Yet nothing, he adds, prevents someone who cannot follow the proof from accepting the same truth by faith (see Thomas Aquinas).

John Calvin taught that God has planted a sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis) in every human being: "a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart" Calvin, Institutes 1.3, and no one first learns it at school, he adds. Blaise Pascal, mathematician and pioneer of science, wrote: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know" Pascal, Pensées 277. By the heart he meant not mere feeling but a knowing deeper than argument, by which, he said, we know first principles Pensées 282. He was not telling us to give up reason, only that reason is not the whole of human knowing.

Athens and Jerusalem

Not every one of the Fathers welcomed philosophy. Around 200 Tertullian of North Africa, in his Prescription against Heretics, asked: "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?" Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics 7 Yet his target was not thinking as such but the blending of philosophy into the gospel to make new teachings, and he quoted Paul's warning against "philosophy and empty deception" (Colossians 2:8). He was himself a trained rhetorician who defended the faith with sharp argument, and the line often credited to him, ‘I believe because it is absurd’, is not found in his writings in that form. The nearest, in On the Flesh of Christ 5, says of the Son of God's death that it is credible because, to the world, it is foolish: a paradox drawn from Paul on the foolishness of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18-25) Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 5. What he refused was not reason but putting the gospel under philosophy.

Then there is sin. In the very next verse after saying that creation makes God known, Paul writes:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts.

Romans 1:21

Of the Gentiles Ephesians says, "They are darkened in their understanding" (Ephesians 4:17-18). Even Anselm, the great reasoner, confesses in prayer that God's image in him is "so consumed and wasted away by vices, and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing" Proslogion 1 that it cannot do what it was made for unless God renews it.

Christians agree that sin has darkened the mind; the roads of apologetics met in the first lesson weigh how deeply. Classical and evidential apologists, and those who argue a cumulative case, hold that sinners can still weigh evidence with the reason God gave them, and that the Spirit uses it (Classical and evidential apologetics). Presuppositional apologists hold that sin has twisted thought at its starting points: unbelievers know God but suppress that knowledge (Romans 1:18), so there is no neutral ground (Presuppositional apologetics). Reformed epistemologists say that sin has dulled the sense of the divine, and that the Spirit renews it (Reformed epistemology and the cumulative case). This course picks none of them.

In conversation

Faith that seeks understanding has room for questions. The father of the tormented boy cried out, "I do believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24), and Jesus did not turn him away. So we need neither hide our faith from questions nor fear reason.

If a friend says that faith is believing without evidence, we can say honestly that Christian faith is trust with reasons, and that we do not know everything either. If a friend says she trusts only reason, we can invite her to notice with us that trusting reason is itself a trust we place before any proof, since any proof would have to use reason. Everyone starts somewhere. Offer that not as a move to win but as an invitation to look at starting points together. The next lesson, Apologetics in the Bible, watches how people in Scripture actually gave their answers.

Practice