Faith and reason are related to each other in different ways. More often than not, those relationships occupy the attention of philosophers and theologians into a kind of tunnel vision. Of itself, this may be quite harmless. All sorts of academic pursuits are best attended with a narrow focus. However, such a focus must exercise sensitivity to related questions when the matter is irreducibly part of a more holistic phenomenon. Such is the case with faith and reason. The mind and will of a single soul instrumentalize faith and reason in concert, a harmony that sounds forth against the claims that each is often said to be in tension with the other. In such a “tension thesis,” the alleged disharmony is viewed from either end.

The concern to test the claims of faith by the standards of rationality is assumed to stand in an inverse relationship to the concern to ground religion in the certainty of faith. To be about the business of one of these is to be utterly suspicious of the other. The fideist would have a faith of sheer will, in those reasons of the heart that Pascal said reason knows nothing of; and the rationalist would expect nothing less, as this is precisely the “checking one’s brain at the door” of the church he pits against his peculiar modern notion of “reason.” So the long history of alleged conflict between faith and reason is much older than the similar conflict narrative between religion and science. The one narrative is as false as the other, though a demonstration of this would be subject for another essay.

My only appeal here will be to those already committed to Christian theism, so that this is no sense a work of apologetics. The purpose of this essay will be to inquire into the right relationship between faith and reason at the foundations of theology. That is to say, it is about the right ordering of the pair in a self-consciously Christian intellectual enterprise.  

To be more specific, as so much attention in epistemology has shifted from truth criteria to the notion of “the ethics of belief,” we will reunite what the rationalist and fideist extremes have torn asunder. This will be done precisely to suggest virtues other than those that the secular academic agenda presses upon us. My thesis is simply this:

There is a knowledge (thus attained by reason) that precedes faith, and there is a faith that (by reason again) leads to knowledge. Not only are both of these movements of the soul virtuous, but the intentional harmonization of these two movements, I will argue, is the only way to have fulfilled one’s epistemic duties. These are the two most basic virtues of knowing.

Now in order to establish this thesis and draw out some of its primary implications, the essay will explore the following: 1. the definition of faith and reason; 2. the virtue of faith and reason; 3. the criticisms of faith and reason; and 4. the order of faith and reason. 

The Definition of Faith and Reason

It has been said that most philosophical disagreements can be reduced to a failure to attend to unnecessary linguistic differences. However overgeneralized this sentiment may be, nevertheless, the failure to define terms up front is sure to cause the proverbial comparison of apples and oranges. We must wonder how many of the false tensions between faith and reason are actually the consequence of faulty definitions of one or the other, or both. In the interest of avoiding this preliminary mistake, we must first take seriously the different meanings commonly assigned to faith and reason. We must even go so far as to rule on which are most pertinent to our inquiry. 

The Bible nowhere offers a technical definition of faith, yet 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.”

Distinctions must be made between that specific action that 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.

Swinburne 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 Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or William James.1

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. 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),”4 and Mastricht further emphasizes that belief which receives the person and work of Christ with desire.5

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. 

Now what about the definition of reason? There are four concepts of reason that will concern us.

We can speak of reason as 1. human faculty, 2. human activity, 3. theoretical body of knowledge, and 4. a transcendent principle.

Most obviously, reason is a faculty and activity of man, whereby he can reflect about both the self and reality outside of the self. If there is a distinction between senses 1 and 2, it is only that “reason” is often used to speak somewhat abstractly about the capacity of man to think. It is this meaning ascribed to Aristotle’s basic distinction between man and beast. To say that humans are the “rational animal” is to say that human beings “possess reason.” 

Now we move outward from senses 1 and 2, which are “in” the mind, to a theoretical construct which minds may also, in a different way, come to possess and communicate with each other about. To borrow from Paul Helm, we may distinguish between a “procedural” sense and “substantive” sense of reason.6 The procedural really regards senses 1 and 2, whereas the substantive brings us to sense 3. Sometimes the word reason is used regarding its substance as a product, or “what it has told us,” as opposed to its procedure, that is “what it does.” We can get an idea of this third use in the claim that such and such is “contrary to reason.” When someone says this, what they have in mind is that some proposition or theory is in conflict with “what we know” about this or that subject matter.

Classical thought introduces us to sense 4 where the old thinkers referenced the Divine Reason, whether in the appeal of various Greek schools to the logos, or as it was appropriated in medieval Christian thought. In the terms of Platonic realism, it is this being of Reason in which all finite acts of reasoning are participating whenever such may be called “right reasoning.”

Put slightly different, an act of right human reason is the mind conforming to the Divine Reason. This most objective sense of the idea of Reason may be witnessed as late as in Chesterton and Lewis. Thus, “The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason,”7 or “It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own. The problem is whether you or I can be such a self-existent Reason.”8

This concept has also been closely associated with “the light of nature,”9 or in the Thomistic explanation of how natural law is “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,”10 or further back in Augustine’s concept of divine illumination.11 This accords with the objective sense of reason that was spelled out by Turretin:

“Human reason is taken either subjectively for that faculty of the rational soul by which man understands and judges between intelligible things presented to him (natural and supernatural, divine and human); or objectively for the natural light both externally presented and internally impressed upon the mind by which reason is disposed to the forming of certain conceptions and the eliciting of conclusions concerning God and divine things.”12

More confusion enters into our definitions of reason when we are situating fallen reason to reason per se. Owen Anderson comments, “It is often maintained that ‘human reason’ is corrupt, or is different from God’s reason. This is true if by ‘reason’ it is meant ‘reasoning,’ or ‘thinking process.’ But here ‘reason’ refers to the laws of thought which cannot be corrupt (as if a is a—the law of identity—were changed after the Fall), and they are universal for all thinkers.”13

This particular confusion will become important when we examine the fideist objections to rational foundations. Some iterations of fideism will make this “fallen reason” central to their critique. The notion that there is something like an essential reason that is unaffected by the fall is anathema to such a view. At best one can speak of a pristine, or original reason, which may indeed be subject for redemption, but which cannot be foundational in the movement from the natural mind to the truths of special revelation.  

One more word should be said about what reason is not, especially as it regards its relationship to faith. Used in the sense of the human act of reasoning, this subjective “reason” is not the absolute judge which determines what is true.

We speak of “judgments” of reason, or of reason evaluating evidence. Rightly so. However, this kind of judgment is not like a ruler or calculator, but rather like the eye that looks out toward the ruler or calculator. It subjectively judges within, and after, and according to, the objective judgment.

This is the case both for the procedural and substantive forms articulated by Helm.

The procedural sense is obviously subjective in that this is “reason” as human activity; but the second is also subjective, relatively speaking. It is that body of knowledge presently taken to be established knowledge. Now that may seem to be wholly objective (as opposed to the reasoning activity). But this “body of knowledge”—by whom or what is it established? If we are speaking of necessary truths, in that case we are dealing with the object of that knowledge being what it is. Usually, however, modern man has gotten used to speaking in this way about advances in our knowledge of facts of material science, as in the more self-congratulatory rendition, “We now know x.”

Clearly the above third, substantive, sense of reason will presuppose a working definition of knowledge as well. Even to the degree that “x amount” of the members of that set of “knowledge” is true, the question as to how this helps the mind judge on some additional truth is not yet dealing with actual knowledge, but only potential knowledge. To that extent, this third sense of knowledge is not wholly objective just insofar as it is not exhaustive. In Christian theological terms, we would say that this knowledge (scientia) is not equal to all knowledge (omni scientia).

At any rate, human reason discovers truth. It does not determine the truth. Even the set of objective knowledge by which we say that something in opposition is “contrary to reason,” even this knowledge is provisional, and thus the “reason” we ascribe to it is only a relative manner of speaking. So when we speak of human reason (whether as procedure or product) determining what is true, or rendering a judgment on that truth, clearly we must mean this only in a secondary or subjective sense.

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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.

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

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

4. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, II.15.8.3.

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

6. Paul Helm, Faith & Understanding (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 5.

7. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image Books, 1990), 31.

8. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 40.

9. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.6

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-1, Q.91, Art.2

11. Augustine, Confessions, IV.15.25, V.6.10; cf. F. C. Copleston, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 20; Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (Providence: Cluny Media, 2020), 109, 122, 126-27.

12. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.8.1

13. Owen Anderson, The Clarity of God’s Existence: The Ethics of Belief After the Enlightenment (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 42.