The Middle Ages and the Reformation

Faith seeking understanding

Two books of Anselm, whom we met in Faith and reason, show faith seeking understanding at work in apologetics. The Proslogion starts from the psalm: "The fool says in his heart" (Psalm 14:1) that there is no God. We believe God to be that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even the fool understands these words when he hears them, so such a being exists at least in his understanding. But if it existed in the understanding alone, we could conceive of something greater, the same being existing in reality too; so it must exist both in the understanding and in reality. Anselm ends the argument as a prayer: "and this being thou art, O Lord, our God" Anselm, Proslogion 3.

A monk of his own day, Gaunilo, replied that by this logic a perfect island would have to exist merely because we can conceive of it. The debate goes on in The moral and ontological arguments, and Anselm's life in the Theology course's Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology.

Why God Became Man was written as apologetics. Those who asked Anselm for it, he says, wanted not to reach faith through reason but to delight in understanding what they believed, and to be "always ready to convince any one who demands of them a reason of that hope which is in us" Anselm, Why God Became Man 1.1: Peter's words, the motto of this course (1 Peter 3:15). Unbelievers mocked as an insult to God the claim that he was born of a woman, hungered, thirsted and was crucified 1.3; the objection of Celsus from the last lesson was alive a thousand years on. Anselm proposed to set Christ aside, as if nothing were known of him, and follow reason: the debt of sin is one that only man ought to pay and only God can pay, so one who is both God and man had to come.

In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas asked in his Summa Theologiae whether God exists, and set out five ways: from motion, from efficient causes, from possibility and necessity, from degrees of perfection, and from the governance of the world. Whatever is moved is moved by another; the chain cannot go back for ever; so there must be a first mover, moved by no other, "and this everyone understands to be God" Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.2.3. In the same article he first stated, honestly, the objection that evil exists. The Scripture beneath his reasoning is Paul's, cited in the article before I.2.2:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

The five ways arrive at a first mover, a first cause, a necessary being, a most perfect being, and an intelligence that orders all things to their ends. Aquinas goes on to ask what this being is like, but the Trinity and the incarnation, he held, are known only by revelation. Their modern forms and the objections to them come in The cosmological and design arguments. In the Summa contra Gentiles he held that with Jews one may argue from the Old Testament, but with Muslims and pagans, who share no Scripture with us, one must begin from the natural reason to which all assent (his theology as a whole is in Thomas Aquinas).

Reason under the Word

The Reformers did not give up reason either. John Calvin took the fact that religion is found everywhere as evidence of a sense of the divine in every heart: "even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact" Calvin, Institutes 1.3.1. But to eyes dimmed by sin, Scripture is like a pair of spectacles: "Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly" 1.6.1.

How, then, are we sure that Scripture is God's word? It would be easy, Calvin grants, to show by arguments that it came from God; yet "the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason" 1.7.4. The Spirit who spoke through the prophets must seal their words on our hearts. Paul writes:

We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.

1 Corinthians 2:12

Still, in the very next chapter Calvin sets out such arguments at length, among them Scripture's antiquity, fulfilled prophecy and the witness of the martyrs, and calls them secondary helps to our weakness Calvin, Institutes 1.8. The Presbyterian churches' Westminster Confession likewise lists the arguments by which Scripture "doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God", and then confesses that our full assurance is "from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts" Westminster Confession 1.5.

Martin Luther saw reason in two places. In the affairs of this world he praised it as a great gift of God, and at the Diet of Worms in 1521 he said he could not recant unless convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason. But when reason tried to set its own terms for being made right with God, or to judge God's word, he rebuked it in the harshest terms. In the Heidelberg Disputation he set the theologian of glory, who would look through created things into the invisible things of God, against the theologian of the cross, who knows God where he has shown himself, in suffering and the cross Luther, Heidelberg Disputation. As Paul says, "the world through its wisdom did not know Him" (1 Corinthians 1:21). What the Reformers refused was not thinking, but reason seated as judge over the word of God (see Luther: the theology of the cross and justification and Zwingli, Calvin and Reformed theology).

Pascal: the heart and the wager

Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician, died while preparing a defence of Christianity; his notes for it survive as the Pensées. He admitted that reason cannot settle whether God exists, but insisted that the choice cannot be avoided: "you must wager. It is not optional." And he weighed it: "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing" Pascal, Pensées 233. This is not a proof, but a reason to begin seeking for someone whom reason has brought only to the threshold. He also wrote that the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know Pensées 277. Hebrews says that God "rewards those who earnestly seek Him" (Hebrews 11:6). The objections to the wager, and the replies, are in Pascal and Nietzsche: what is at stake in believing in God or not?

In conversation

The apologists of these centuries stood in different places. Anselm and Aquinas held that reason serves faith and can walk a long way with the unbeliever; the Reformers, that reason stands straight when it works under the Word; Pascal appealed to the heart where reason stops. This course hears them as voices that complete one another.

Calvin comforts good people who are troubled because, while the wicked murmur against God's word, they have no clear proof at hand to silence them: they forget, he says, that the Spirit is the earnest and seal that confirms the faith of the godly Institutes 1.7.4. In a conversation you need not win every objection on the spot. Think as you pray, as Anselm did; hear the strongest objection first, as Aquinas did; stand beside the seeker, as Pascal did. The next lesson, The modern age and today, comes to the age in which reason set itself up as the judge of all.

Practice