Throughout my career as a pastor and teacher, I have had two very different challenges defending the Christian faith.
For the first 30 years since I was ordained in 1980, my challenge was to defend Christian orthodoxy from an Enlightenment worldview in which human reason is the only pathway to truth.
Sometimes the challengers were honest seekers, sometimes arrogant intellectual skeptics, sometimes dedicated Christians, but the question was always the same: how does the Christian faith make sense? Could I prove that divine revelation existed, that Jesus was physically resurrected, that a good God oversaw a world with so much suffering?
When I became a missionary teaching theology at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology in Addis Ababa, my challenge changed.
Now I was immersed in a society that had never experienced all the centuries when reason became king over human life for Western societies. Now emotion, loyalty and unbending trust in tradition were king over human life. Now my challenge became: why think about the Christian faith at all and not just believe whatever my traditions or an authority figure tells me to believe?
My surrounding worldview had moved 180 degrees, from an “I’ll only believe what my human reason can accept” Western worldview to a diametrically opposed, “I’ll always distrust reason as a foundation for belief” Ethiopian worldview.
Ironically, American post-modernism is now moving toward a wholesale rejection of reason, with a “post truth” de-emphasis on factual evidence, rationality and science in favor of personality cult leadership.
What is Genuine Faith?
So how do we find our way to genuine faith, through reason or emotion?
The Reformation Heidelberg Catechism (1563) answers the question “What is true faith?” with these important words:
It is not only a certain knowledge by which I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in his Word, but also a wholehearted trust which the Holy Spirit creates in me through the gospel, that, not only to others, but to me also God has given the forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation, out of sheer grace solely for the sake of Christ’s saving work. (emphasis added)
In short, true faith is BOTH certain knowledge (ideas about God/reason) and wholehearted trust (heart attitude toward God/feelings).
Neither the “what” (knowledge) nor the “how” (trust) of true faith takes precedence over the other.
In fact, St. Augustine was adamant that faith is more like a knowing, trusting friendship. Genuine friends neither simply know facts about someone, on one hand, nor blindly trust them on the other.
Faith Requires Reason
Reason is a marvelous tool in knowing God. Os Guinness reminds us: “Christianity is second to none in the place it gives to reason, but it is also second to none in keeping reason in its place.”
Like sexuality, reason is a gift; it can generate much destruction when it spins out of control but much joy when taking its rightful (but limited) place in God’s ordered universe.
This “baptized” use of reason allows us to approach spiritual issues with what Anselm of Canterbury calls faith seeking understanding.
In the 11th century, Anselm realized that we will never have all our questions answered. In fact, Anselm suggests just the opposite:
“For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that unless I believe, I shall not understand” (emphasis added).
Reason, however, can easily take center stage when we assume that reason’s knowledge is complete, that reason has everything figured out.
This is the story of God’s people throughout the Old Testament. Again and again they assumed they had Yahweh figured out, a god in their pocket, a divine talisman always ready to protect them no matter what. Time after time, their sloppy overconfidence caused them to miss God’s direction or warning, often with severe consequences.
Yahweh asserted that human reason or knowledge can never control Him. “My ways are higher than your ways, as are my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8).
God’s mystery prevents us from becoming overconfident in the “what” of faith—namely, that knowledge about God is all we need.
Assuming we have God figured out is death to maturing faith. Faith needs to keep what is known and unknown about God in creative tension. Little left to discover about God breeds staleness and boredom. We take God for granted.
Faith Also Requires Trust
Throughout my ministry I led “seeker” small groups in our home and later the Alpha Course where people could express their doubts in a safe, nonjudgmental environment. These groups usually attracted people with varying degrees of intellectual skepticism or hostility. Interestingly, their questions often centered around paradox: How can a loving God allow evil in the world? Is Jesus Christ both Divine and human? How can a good God allow people to go to hell?
By wrestling with such questions, genuine seekers eventually realize that their reason has limits. By the very nature of being God, God is greater than human comprehension. By definition, there is much about God and God’s ways we will never understand. The creature cannot judge the Creator.
Faith as trust develops as we realize no system of meaning forged in human minds will ultimately hold.
For those who have tacitly trusted something other than Jesus Christ as their “anchor of meaning” (for example: their innate spirituality, good moral life, biblical knowledge, or nicely pigeonholed doctrinal system), rattling these systems exercises “faith muscles” with opportunities to learn to trust in Jesus alone.
How do reason and trust interact in a life of faith?
How might faith’s twin poles of reason (knowledge) and trust (feelings) stay in creative tension? One answer is a renaissance of spiritual imagination.
Imagination, it might be argued, bridges the gap between the left-brain’s need for propositional truth (faith as knowledge) and the right-brain’s desire for personal experience (faith as trust). Imagination is neither objective nor subjective. It includes both thought and personality.
Faith, after all, is an exercise of the imagination. It is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).
The Christian faith never promises certainty!
Reason demonstrates that our hopes and convictions are rational and reasonable. But reason will never prove them beyond the shadow of doubt, no matter how hard it tries. And so, we trust. The Christian faith trusts that its hopes are real and its convictions are true.
“Faith seeking understanding” invites us to imagine reason and trust as dance partners.
Often trust is the leading partner, with reason struggling to keep up as they swirl around the dance floor together.
Other times reason takes the lead, steering trust away from tripping over potted plants (logical fallacies) or blundering off the dance floor entirely in blind exuberance (joining a cult).
If trust and reason are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers swirling together, each placing a foot where the other’s has been just a second before, the nuances of the dance can be beautiful to behold (even if, occasionally, toes do get stepped on)!
It’s by growing into this divine choreography that we advance toward mature faith and are better equipped to live faithfully as disciples of Jesus.
QUESTION: What roles have reason and trust played in your journey of faith? Which one has been the “leading” partner at important junctures in your journey?
