MysteriousFaith

The Great Hope of the World

If God is a God of order, then He is honored by the use of the faculty He gave us that separates us from the animals - the ability to use our basic cognition. He has nothing to fear from reason unless He is in fact the God of fundamentalists - a God that does things only because He can and because He chooses to, not because it is the right thing to do. But is this the God we see reflected in the world around us? Is this the God of science?

The Great Hope of the World

What are we to give primacy to, reason or faith? Where does the great hope of the world lie: in the life of reason or in the life of faith? Can it be both? If it can be, how are we to decide how far to allow faith to displace reason, or vice versa? Where faith requires us to accept something unethical or immoral as being of God, where do we accommodate the much more sensible idea that these things were simply not of God, and instead the creation of man? If religion can always appeal to the Divine yesterday instead of the human today, how are we to grapple with what is now of God and what is now of man? This is not a new struggle, and is perhaps a struggle seen most easily outside the charged questions posed by faith, and inside the more mundane questions of philosophy. Charles Freeman in his book The Closing of the Western Mind: the Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason begins his analysis with a comparison between Plato and Aristotle: “In Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco the School of Athens, Aristotle and Plato are shown among the assembled philosophers. Plato’s hand points upwards to the heavens, Aristotle’s down towards the earth. They represent not only themselves but two contrasting approaches in the quest for certainty. For Aristotle, certainty has to be found in this world through the painstaking accumulation of empirical evidence and reasoned deduction from it. It is always subject to reason and challenge through the acquisition of new evidence accumulated by the senses. Outside the world of abstract mathematics and logical syllogisms, knowledge is always provisional. Plato, by contrast, rejects the world of the senses altogether. It holds no real value in comparison to the immaterial world of the Forms, where truth alone resides. The way that these two approaches to certainty were developed in the next centuries and woven into the fabric of Christianity will form a major theme of this book.” (page 34) Freeman is attempting to illustrate that Western Christianity would struggle to balance between its fixation on what its brightest minds held as unknowable ideas in opposition to what the secular world was arguing on the basis of empiricism, reductionism and Enlightenment rationalism. Thomas Aquinas’ comments on the unknowable nature of the Trinity seemed in his day and now to set too few Christian apologists in their place as they attempted in full confidence to argue for the absolute centrality of an idea their best thinkers did not then nor now understand. Can we live a life entirely based on reason? Do we already? If we are honest, do we not base our every decision in life on what reason suggests we should do? Or are we sacrificing too much here? Should we rather embrace faith, believing that only within the mystery of religious teaching can we find those truths that will remake our world and reshape human hearts?

To me, it is impossible to intelligently argue that faith comes before reason. No one trusts someone who asks them to believe “just because.” Even for those who attentively live the life of faith, did they not come to faith through reason? The argument that faith comes before reason overlooks the reality that if faith did so, it was the result of cultural setting or familial experience, and not a pursuit of objective truth. Where raised Catholic, we tend to remain Catholic not because we pursue truth for the sake of truth, but because our heritage tells us this system of belief can be trusted. You may substitute any particular religious tradition for the word “Catholic” - it matters not a wit what faith, identity or political ideal we choose to substitute here. In these situations, our pursuit of truth tends to only be a pursuit of those ideas that support our particular tradition. If, however, we change our system of belief we tend to do so for one of two reasons: either a bad experience dulls our desire to follow a certain religious path, or we wrestle with what is truth until we no longer can say honestly that we believe what we were once taught. The point here is not to argue for one faith to be better or more reasonable than another, but rather to draw our focus again to the role we give - whether implicit or explicit - to reason over faith. Our reason “why” may be as simple as being how we were raised, or more complex as having wrestled with the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection or similar defining theological event; but in both cases we do not have blind faith, we have faith for a reason, and that reason is the genesis of our faith.

Within this dialogue, the limitation of words becomes increasingly obvious. Should we say “spirituality” instead of “religion”? “Reformation of the heart” instead of “faith”? What is it we hope to find when we individually come to our beliefs? I would propose we look for two things. First we want (more genuinely for some, less for others) objective truth. Second we desire to be changed, to be transformed, to be uplifted into an ideal that would otherwise never be encountered in our earth-bound now existence. The reality that modernity is based on is that some forms of truth are truly objective: thermodynamics, physics, chemistry and biology are all based on objective truths that are repeatable everywhere in the known universe. The use of those truths becomes a question for religion or philosophy only when we must answer the question of motive - what is driving our particular use of a specific technology? Yet here we again look to reason to define terms and stipulate guidelines, but still we recognize our need for something else to draw out our intentions. Can the question of intentions be best answered by an analysis spirituality can most easily facilitate, or do even here we have to bow before the role reason must play? If God is a God of order, then He is honored by the use of the faculty He gave us that separates us from the animals - the ability to use our basic cognition. He has nothing to fear from reason unless He is in fact the God of fundamentalists - a God that does things only because He can and because He chooses to, not because it is the right thing to do. But is this the God we see reflected in the world around us? Is this the God of science? At some point the God of the Bible - an at times capricious Deity who does things that can only be explained reasonably as His arbitrary right, not a right for a reason (again here we see our underlying need to reason an answer as to why He would do these things), will have to be reconciled with a God of what the universe tells us - a God of underlying order. At a very basic level, even the most Emergent of Christian thinkers is struggling (as have honest but orthodox theologians of centuries past) with how the God of the Old Testament can be balanced against the revealed God of the universe. I have no problem acknowledging my temporal, finite, created existence so let no one accuse me of attempting to put myself higher than God - I am under no illusions about my role in the cosmos. But if the primary evidence of God He has left to the vast majority of human kind who did not hear “His Word” was the order of the universe, then are we not to assume that even here Christianity suggests reason comes before faith, and if so, we may rightfully (and perhaps necessarily) question those things within the Bible that come to us as immoral, antiquated, or simply wrong?

Calvin had the courage to put in writing his belief that “all truth is God’s truth.” This is as bold a statement today as it was when he wrote it. But are we prepared to follow that through to the end? What do we fear? We fear the loss of certainty about our own mortality, a certainty Holy Scriptures argues for. Can we not use reason to find a tenable position that encourages healthy spirituality but also recognizes religious faith as being secondary to revealed truth? Reason must also, in this philosophical standoff, understand that it can not speak for everything, and that it must allow the unique salvific process that changes lives in intangible ways to be seen as real and as something to encourage. What is the great hope of the world? It is, to me, a healthy balance between the spheres of influence offered for and argued by religion and reason. Both have much to contribute, but reason must be allowed to light the path for if it does not, the world has no hope outside of blind dogma.

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• April 25, 2005

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