The Order of Faith and Reason

It is our final question of properly ordering faith and reason that will bring us to the exact nature of the two “virtues of knowing” I have in mind. There is a sense in which reason (in the form of knowledge) will be a virtuous foundation to faith, and then there will be a sense in which faith will be a virtuous impetus to more knowledge (gained via further reason). In short, knowing will be virtuous on both “sides” of the act of faith.

Let us first ask: In what sense does reason serve as a legitimate basis of faith? It does so in at least two ways.

First, all faith is reasoned insofar as the will chooses to believe things about God, or things that God says, that we do not understand or that we fear may be false. But this act of the will is still the mind choosing, and the mind never chooses but what it thinks it has a good reason to choose. This is the case even in order to trust a personal agent about things of which the one trusting has no knowledge. An example of this first way is the aforementioned trust that Abraham had in God for what would happen to Isaac. He did not know that and could not reason toward a knowledge of its outcome. However, what he did know about God served as premises to the conclusion of a very reasonable personal trust.

Second, reason can ground faith in that the articles of faith follow, in experience, more foundational articles of belief which can be rationally demonstrated, and thus no longer require faith, or perhaps never did. Two examples here would be the existence of God and the immateriality of the soul. Natural revelation has something to say about both, and yet not everyone is equally adept at transcribing the message. Faith is required. Yet it does not follow that even for the “simple,” rational reflection will not come about those same objects in due time. In the first way, reason is the form of faith, and in the second way it is a foundation. Discussions on this usually only have that second sense in mind.

Yet reason is always active in the acts of faith. Even an atheist like William Rowe points this out about the elements of faith. He distinguishes: “since trusting some person or institution generally involves accepting or believing certain statements about them, faith in someone or something presupposes beliefs that certain statements about them are true.”1

In both of the above senses, reason is undergirding faith, whether in one’s personal relating to God or in one’s tracing out their system of belief.

This is the first virtue of theological knowing: Reason grounds faith insofar as faith operates on the basis of things known. It is this first virtue that fideism fears as an impiety. Hence it is often said that “reason,” or “philosophy,” or “natural revelation,” or “apologetics,” must not be “at the foundation” of one’s theological system. However these statements are more often baldly asserted than seriously defended. There are some basic predicates that need to be known about a thing before that thing can function as an object of trust.

Helm remarks that, “It is desirable that the existence of God is provable by natural reason, but perhaps not necessary. And certainly it is not necessary before that article of faith may be believed. There is, nevertheless, an appropriateness to natural theology, since ‘faith presupposes natural knowledge’”2 Reason both clarifies truths believed and demonstrates so that such truths can be believed with greater certainty, or in some cases, seen to be true for the first time. In each of these functions, reason is preparing the way for greater horizons in which new exercises of faith will be summoned.

The answers to “Why this deity over that?” or “Why this book over that?” are unavoidable. As the English philosopher John Locke noted: ‘Whatever God hath revealed, is certainly true; no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith; but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge.’”3 Again, this “judgment” does not exalt itself to a throne above God’s word. Someone may be guilty of that, but this is pride that is to blame and not the faculty of reason per se. 

There is an inevitability of reason as the “processing form” of all articles of belief. Now a kind of equivocation must be challenged at this point. We often speak of articles of reason, articles of faith, and mixed articles. This is a helpful division in its place. What can become obscured (and surely has) in the way we moderns interpret this breakdown is the sense in which reason is the essential faculty that is processing all such articles in their every detail.

In other words, the reason that is “foundational” is not merely functioning this way “at the foundations,” that is, in an apologetics encounter or in the prolegomena section of a text of dogmatics. Reasoning from antecedent to consequent, from inductive gathering of facts to abstract categorizations, is what is always occurring.

And the form that this takes is seldom ever prescribed in explicit biblical phraseology. Those three categories (articles of reason, articles of faith, and mixed articles) may legitimately form three distinct circles in one sense, yet in another important sense we must understand that there is a larger circle encompassing all three. Whether one has a distaste for using the word “worldview” to designate this largest circle, because we have all suddenly found out the term’s historical lineage in German Idealism, is quite irrelevant.

Let me offer just one example to illustrate what I mean by this inevitability of reason as the processing form of all articles of belief. And I will appeal to a doctrine over which Thomas Aquinas has been somewhat misunderstood. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an article of reason in the same way as the doctrine of God per se is. In other words, natural theology can help us to infer that God exists and even tells us about a few of his attributes. Not so with the Trinity. Nothing in the nature of general revelation, by itself, necessarily concludes in knowledge of the Trinity. However, whether (A) “God is triune” or (B) “God is not triune” does not leave reason out of the matter. The Trinitarian and Unitarian both have faith in one or the other, in their initial approach. However, as Rowe summarizes: “reason guides faith by showing that the statements to be accepted on faith have been revealed by God. As Aquinas tells us, ‘Faith … does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God.’”4 

To use perhaps a simpler example of a relevant passage, Hebrews 11:3 speaks of faith as the means by which one affirms that God created all things; but is this affirmation a denial that one can know what one only previously believed? That would not seem to cohere with Psalm 19:1-3 or Romans 1:19-20, which seem to very definitely suggest that mankind as a whole does know true things about God. His relationship to the world as its Creator would seem to naturally fit in those general revelation categories. So the author of Hebrews here cannot be speaking to a hard division between articles of faith and articles of reason. 

Now let us proceed to the second virtue of knowing by asking this question: In what sense does faith find legitimate fulfillment in understanding? The human mind is designed to want to know. Helm speaks of an “incompleteness” concerning faith: not a failure on its part, but “an evidential incompleteness which prevents faith from being knowledge … Such incompleteness is usually regarded as unsatisfactory, but remediable to some degree, and hence not intellectually crippling … The believer desires an intellectual deepening to the beliefs of his faith which he does not at present possess.”5 

It is this second virtue of knowing — in the familiar maxim, “faith seeking understanding” — that the rationalist impulse can hardly even approach. He is too busy with his caricature. When he hears faith preceding reason in any way, he has no other categories for such a “second class reason” but that is being tacked on as a cheap justification for those who were not tough-minded enough for free thought in the whole course of life. Lewis is helpful here again, in another essay, where he says,

“Reason may win truths; without Faith she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases. There is nothing we cannot be made to believe or disbelieve. If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust and power and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth.”6

The last thing to consider, in putting these two virtues together, is how reason and faith exist in a humble and hungry harmony given the limits of divine revelation. We have only briefly mentioned the proper function of reason in the context of what is true. But there is another consideration to proper function, and that is what is fitting for us to know as God’s creatures and as his children.  

Scripture sets the limits of theological reasoning at the line between the hidden and the revealed (Deuteronomy 29:29), but there is a static and a dynamic way to understand the relationship between these two categories. To write the word “secret” above the line and “revealed” below the line does not settle the question as to what inquiries may be virtuously pursued. Making a case for where this line actually is (and is not) is subject for another essay. I mention it by way of conclusion to remind the reader that a great deal of what we settle for in operative models for faith and reason has more to do with a spiritual version of virtue-signalling than it does careful analysis of the Christian tradition and the text of Scripture.  

Concluding Remarks

This paper has sought to establish two virtues of knowing against the typical rationalist and fideist claims: There is a knowledge (thus attained by reason) that precedes faith, and there is a faith that (by reason again) leads to knowledge. The criticisms of fideism against the first virtue of knowing were seen to be fail for three reasons: because such foundational knowledge is not competing with the virtue of faith which God calls for, it is wholly informative for the substance of faith, and is unavoidable in any event. The criticisms of rationalism against the second virtue of knowing were found wanting as well. The tradition of “faith seeking understanding” does not turn out to be the caricature of superstitious belief marshalling pseudo-evidence in a desperate attempt to adorn religion with a mere show of rational justification. 

This matters not only for apologetics, but for my own more immediate project in theological prolegomena. The prevailing antithesis between faith and reason precisely “at the foundations” of systematic theology is a persistent myth whose time for retirement has come.

___________________

1. Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, 75

2. Helm, Faith and Understanding, 31.

3. John Locke quoted in Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, 77.

4. Rowe, Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction, 76

5. Helm, Faith and Understanding, 15.

6. Lewis, “Religion: Reality or Substitute?” in The Seeing Eye (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 58.