Defining Faith in Relation to Reason

The Bible nowhere offers a technical definition of faith, although Hebrews 11:1 has often been cited as a definition of sorts:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Just a little bit of time spent in that famous chapter will prompt us to realize that distinctions must be made between that specific action which we would call “saving faith” as opposed to the more general equivalence between faith and belief as such.

Making these clear distinctions will prevent one error very common in Lutheran and Reformed circles. I refer to the conflation of epistemology and soteriology, when it comes to matters of grounding belief. This has led to several pathways into anti-intellectualism, as we will see.

At first, I will turn to Richard Swinburne for our typology. He distinguishes between Thomist, Lutheran, and Pragmatist conceptions of faith. These are shorthands, as he recognizes that these concepts are by no means confined to the thinking of Aquinas, Luther, or William James.1 I am merely borrowing Swinburne’s breakdown for the sake of organization, but will deviate from some of the substance of his classification as his aim does not pertain to the relation between faith and reason at the foundations of theological thinking per se. Likewise it should be clear that this discussion of faith is focused exclusively on its nature as it relates to reason in the formation of one’s larger set of religious beliefs. 

The first view (Thomist) is a theoretical conviction, what Swinburne calls a “belief-that,” such that the subjective act is only as good as the perception that the object of faith is the case.2 However Thomas did not use the word “belief” as more modern philosophers have. He adopted the view of Hugh of St. Victor, that “faith is a form of mental certitude about absent realities that is greater than opinion and less than knowledge.”3

One way to view this is in a radical dichotomy: if one has knowledge of x, he cannot be said to have faith in x, and vice versa.

This is one consideration that is said to issue forth into the threefold division between articles of reason, articles of faith, and mixed articles. Faith is necessary even for many matters that can be known by reason—e.g. that God exists—since not everyone has the leisure to study, nor intelligence to grasp, the traditional arguments.4 That is true as far as it goes. 

The second view (Lutheran) accepts the first definition as a foundational element, but adds to it personal trust. Very much in the same spirit as Luther, the Reformed Scholastics enumerated three elements. Turretin, for example, spoke of “knowledge, assent, trust (notitiam, assensum, fiduciam),”5 and Mastricht further emphasizes that belief which receives the person and work of Christ with desire.6

The supreme Object of faith is the personal God, and it is in His character and promises we place our very life, and not merely the prospects of our theoretical models.

While this view of faith is more holistic, and therefore (I would argue) more in keeping with biblical descriptions, it can also lead to a fixation on that fuller conception that disallows finer distinctions between epistemological treatments of faith and soteriological treatments of faith.

The third view (Pragmatist) highlights the act of the will apart from the element of knowledge, or of certainty in belief. It is important to note that for James, such an act of the will was not to leverage religion for what works in this world, however that may be of the crass form that Pragmatism has come to take in American culture. For James it was much more principled. We will come back to what that principled argument was for James when we examine his response concerning the ethics of belief.

For the present, we only note that this pragmatist faith is self-consciously weighing the virtue of the believing act over against suspending that belief, and that what “tips the balances” are those ultimate consequences that are at stake in matters of faith—consequences that are not at stake in lesser matters where it is virtuous to suspend one’s rational judgment.

Is there also a virtuous “obstinacy” of faith, as C. S. Lewis called it? In his essay by that title, Lewis speaks of Christians occasionally setting aside evidence contrary to faith, even though they did not come to faith by accepting its propositions against the evidence.7 It may often seem like Christians hold to a double-standard in this respect: either one is loyal to Christ or else unprejudiced toward truth. But this is misleading. Lewis moves the reader from the false picture of the man of science (for reality) and the man of faith (afraid of reality), bringing us instead to the more real-world examples of “getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain.”8 

In the real world, reason does not stand dispassionately at the worldview buffet table, mixing and matching apart from desperate faith. In the position of that dog or child, reason and faith must work together on the way out of the escape room. With each act of favorable divine condescension to us, the level of rational certainty about the Divine Rescuer increases, even as more faith is summoned for the next difficult step in our ascent.

Lewis adds, “If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give Him our confidence in spite of this.”9

This raises the question, though, as to whether what many Christians call “certainty” in faith is not actually mere stubbornness. If so, then it is a stubborn loyalty to One who has proven trustworthy. 

Can it be, though, that some prejudice on these greatest of questions is virtuous? What postmodernism has identified as the Enlightenment “prejudice against prejudice” is surely naive. All human beings have presuppositions. If Locke was correct that a newborn baby comes into the world as a tabula rasa, then it is just as certain that there can be no “erasing the blackboard” of a normal human mind at any point thereafter. So while we can say that this general prejudice is unavoidable (and not necessarily immoral), we sense that there is a specific prejudice that is immoral. What then is the difference between these?

Perhaps we can say that immoral prejudice in such a question occurs when one’s passion disallows further inquiry in a matter where persistent commitment is either (a) harmful to others or else, (b) not ultimate to the self (or both), and of course (c) in a case where contradictory data is readily available. But it is (a) and (b) that the evidentialist version of the “ethics of belief” largely ignores. We may be prejudiced about our favorite restaurant, and, unless that indulgence forces someone else with high cholesterol to gorge themselves there, there seems to be no immorality involved in preventing further debate. However, in the case of choosing between the propositions, “Jesus is Lord” and “Muhammad is the final prophet,” there can be no indifference. Neither can there be any mistaking the fact that commending the wrong lord or prophet is to sentence our hearers to divine judgment.

Under the weight of such consequences, our certainty may be deconstructed as a mere coping mechanism. Whatever this implies for apologetic encounters, the theologian has made his choice. He is commending an entire life and worldview as if it were the very truth of God. The notion that one can avoid this responsibility by rationalism’s “further investigation” or by fideism’s non-systematic “humility” is all a cheat. 

It is commonly supposed that faith and reason, even if not at odds, at least stand in an inverse relationship in terms of experiencing one in such a way that the other is excluded, or one might say “crowded out.” Before evaluating various thinkers who hold this view, it will be well to ask whether Scripture suggests this. I maintain that it does not. Although the two are distinct, and although one or the other is appropriate in a way that the other is not, yet they are not so alien to each other that they are competing for the same task in a fully virtuous soul.

Consider, for example, the oft-quoted verse from 2 Corinthians 5:7, where Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” It does not pit faith against reason, but faith against sight. In other words, it is a trust in God against the fears that naturally arise out of the distressing circumstances of this life. Might reason be faulty in just this same way? Certainly. That is, human reason may “take the side” of sight rather than the outlook of trusting God. However, when it does so, it will be acting irrationally.

To act contrary to ultimate reality is, to that extent, to act contrary to right reason. Hence it is always unreasonable to act contrary to faith in God. It is objectively unreasonable.

We can see that the ethics of belief has also come under the subjective turn. What is meant by “reasonable” is never allowed to rise above what one or many take to be their latest reasonings. Consider also in the example of Abraham, so often used to highlight a “faith-against-reason” paradigm, that the Scriptures say he reasoned that God was able to raise Isaac (Heb. 11:19), and so his faith, while unknowing what God would do, knew the God who would do it.

Faith does relate to epistemology, but many people will speak of this relationship in such a way that conflates faith identically with knowledge. Moreover, faith does indeed relate to the reason that we believe ultimate things (cf. Heb. 11:1, 3, 6). However, this still does not make faith an alternative to reason. It is always reason that knows and always faith that trusts.

To give an example of the view I am attempting to push back against, Scott Oliphint relates faith and reason in this way:

“When discussing faith, what we primarily refer to is any truth, or belief in a truth, that is beyond the ability of reason to prove. When we use the term reason, we refer to any truth, or belief in a truth, that is or can be known without the aid of any source external to it.”10

Now aside from the problem associated with the idea of faith being made irrelevant by rational demonstration, which we have already seen addressed at a cursory level by Aquinas, the last part of this statement by Oliphint is particularly troubling. Granting that reason also contemplates one’s own subjectivity, for the most part reason is more like a window than a mirror. The point is to look outside. The idea that reason would be defined by its antithesis to external sources can only be explained by a conception of faith and reason competing either as alternative forms of knowing the same objects or else as competing fields of such knowledge. Both mistakes are legion in these studies.     

Often the notion of an inverse relationship is more sophisticated than recasting faith as a kind of “knowledge,” but instead it is bound up in the following notion: Since faith is an act of the will, it must choose freely; but since persuasion of the mind conditions free choice, more rational persuasion equals less freedom. One example of this line of thinking comes from William Rowe: “For it is impossible that one and the same propositions should be (at the same time) both an object of knowledge and an object of faith.”11

Now, if Rowe means, much more specifically, that for person A, object of knowledge B is either known sufficiently for A to express reasons C, D, and E for B to obtain, or else A simply has faith in B’s reality—if that is all Rowe means, then we could not disagree. However, to simply match up A’s “reason” versus “faith” to object B and that be the end of it, is exactly the sort of oversimplification that allows faith and reason to be set in competition for the same job description.

But the idea that Rowe represents here in simple terms is this: If the proposition is demonstrated, it is seen to be true; but if it is seen to be true, there is nothing left to take on faith. The thing is known. Such a “faith” would not be a virtuous faith because it would not be genuine faith at all.

So the argument goes. While we cannot settle these debates outside of a larger context in the philosophy of religion, it will suffice to present the common conceptions of faith relating to reason, and both to revelation. Regardless of what dimensions an author is highlighting about the relationship between reason and faith, the reader would do well to keep in mind the simple principle that it is always reason which thinks and faith which trusts.

____________________

1. Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 105-117.

2. Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 105; cf. 3-4.

3. Hugh of St. Victor, in Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 107.

4. cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.4.2-4.

5. Turretin, Institutes, II.15.8.3.

6. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, II:4-6, 8-9.

7. C. S. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1987), 16.

8. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” 23.

9. Lewis, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” 24-25.

10. K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2006), 4.

11. William Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning), 2001.