Concept

Lesson 2.1, Faith and Reason

Intro

The common story today goes: faith and reason are opposites. You believe because the evidence ran out. The more you know, the less you need to trust. Smart people use reason; religious people use faith.

That story is recent, and it is wrong. The historic Christian tradition has always held that faith and reason work together. Reason carries the mind a long way toward God; faith trusts what God Himself has revealed, where reason alone cannot go. They answer different parts of the same question.

The New Testament word for faith is pistis. It does not mean "believing without evidence." It means trust grounded in evidence; the same word Greek speakers used for a contract, for keeping one's word, for the reliability of a friend. The redefinition of faith as "belief without evidence" comes from modern atheist writers (Mark Twain, Richard Dawkins) and has nothing to do with how the Bible or two thousand years of Christian thinkers used the word.

The lesson rules out two opposite mistakes. Fideism says faith stands against reason; the fideist tries to protect faith by retreating from evidence and argument. The result is a Christianity that cannot defend itself. Rationalism says reason can fully explain God; the rationalist treats faith as just a label for what proof has already produced. The result is a thin deism, not living Christian faith.

The historic view is neither. Augustine said credo ut intelligam, "I believe so that I may understand." Anselm said fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding." Aquinas distinguished the praeambula fidei, the truths reason can reach (God exists, God is one), from the articula fidei, the truths only revelation can deliver (the Trinity, the Incarnation). Both are real. Both matter. Neither replaces the other.

The apologist who accepts the modern opposite-story before the conversation even starts has already lost half the ground.

In full

A common story today says that faith and reason are opposites. On this view, you believe because the evidence ran out. The more you know, the less you need to trust. That story is recent. It is also wrong. The historic Christian tradition has always held that faith and reason work together. Reason can carry the mind a long way toward God. Faith trusts what God Himself has told us, where reason alone cannot go. They answer different parts of the same question. They are not rivals.

This lesson lays out the older view. We will look at Aquinas's praeambula fidei and Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum. We will also rule out two opposite mistakes. The fideist treats reason as a threat to faith. He has misunderstood faith. The rationalist treats reason as a replacement for faith. He has misunderstood reason. And the apologist who accepts the modern opposite-story before the conversation even starts has already lost half the ground.

Required reading

Faith and Reason, the codex's master page on how the two fit together. Augustine's credo ut intelligam, Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum, Aquinas's two-tier praeambula fidei / articula fidei, and modern work in Reformed Epistemology all sit on this page. Read this first. Everything else in the lesson builds on it.
Faith, what the New Testament word pistis actually means. Read this for the word study. Biblical pistis is trust grounded in evidence. It is not believing without evidence. The atheist version of "faith" is a redefinition. The Christian use of the word came first by two thousand years.
Faith is Belief Without Evidence Objection, the response to the modern redefinition. Read this for the shape of the conversation. It shows how to answer when someone says, "faith is belief without evidence."

The two errors faith-and-reason rules out

The historic Christian view rules out both of the mistakes below. Most modern Christians lean toward one without noticing the other is also off-limits.

Fideism says faith stands against reason, or above it in a way that makes evidence and argument pointless. The fideist accepts the modern opposite-story. He tries to keep faith safe by retreating from reason. The result is a Christianity that cannot defend itself and cannot meet the unbeliever on shared ground. The historic tradition has rejected this from the start.
Rationalism is the mirror error. It says reason can fully explain God. On this view, faith is just a label for what reason has already proven, and no real trust is needed beyond what proof forces. The rationalist accepts a different piece of the modern story: that knowledge is only what proof produces. He ends up with a thin deism, not living Christian faith.

The historic view is neither. Faith trusts what God has revealed because God has said it. Reason can prepare the ground for that trust, but cannot replace it. Reason clears space, builds approaches, and answers objections. But reason by itself cannot produce the personal trust in the living God that Scripture calls pistis.

The two great formulas

Two Latin phrases carry most of the historic tradition. Memorize them.

Anselm, fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding." The believer does not start from neutral reason and argue her way into faith. She starts from faith, given by God, and then seeks the understanding that makes the faith make sense. Anselm's Proslogion is the famous example. He prays first, then argues. The argument is not what caused his faith. The argument is faith looking for understanding.
Aquinas, praeambula fidei, "preambles to faith." Aquinas split religious truth into two tiers. The praeambula, truths like God exists, God is one, God is simple, God is the cause of all things, can be reached by natural reason alone. (His Five Ways do this work.) The articula fidei, truths like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection, cannot be reached by reason alone. These must be revealed. Trusting them is an act of faith. Both reason and faith do real work. They just work on different objects in different ways.

Both formulas reject the modern split. Anselm's faith is seeking; it is intelligent, restless, working. Aquinas's reason is preparing; it does real work, but it does not cover everything there is to know. Neither thinker treats faith as the opposite of reason or reason as the rival of faith.

A note on Tertullian's "credo quia absurdum"

The line most often quoted against the historic view is Tertullian's supposed credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd." The line is almost always misquoted and almost always misunderstood.

What Tertullian actually wrote (De Carne Christi 5) was credibile est, quia ineptum est, "it is credible because it is unfitting." He was talking about the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God. His argument is not that Christians believe absurd things just to believe absurd things. It is an evidential argument. The early Christian movement would never have invented a crucified Messiah. The claim was too embarrassing. It did not fit Jewish hopes for a Messiah. It did not fit Greek or Roman ideas of dignity. The very unfittingness of the claim is itself evidence that the Christians did not invent it. They were reporting what they saw.

So the line that modern atheists wave around as a Christian admission of irrationality is, in context, an argument from embarrassment. Historians still use this kind of argument today. Tertullian was reasoning, not giving up on reason. When the line comes up in conversation, the apologist's job is to put it back in context.

Key takeaways

Faith and reason are not opposites. The modern story that pits them against each other is recent and politically motivated. The historic Christian tradition has always held them as ordered partners.
Reason has real work to do. This is preparatory work, what Aquinas called praeambula fidei. Natural theology can establish that God exists and many of His attributes. Module 3 covers this ground.
Faith has real work to do. The contents of revelation, Trinity, Incarnation, atonement, resurrection, cannot be reached by reason alone. They need God's testimony. Trusting that testimony is pistis.
Both fideism and rationalism are out of bounds. Fideism accepts the modern split by running from reason. Rationalism accepts it by shrinking faith down to proof. Neither is the historic view.
The modern redefinition of "faith" is a redefinition. Biblical pistis is trust grounded in evidence. If the apologist accepts the modern definition before the conversation starts, half the argument is already lost.

Worked example, Hebrews 11

Hebrews 11 is sometimes called Scripture's "faith chapter." Modern readers often assume it is therefore Scripture's credulous chapter, full of examples of people believing without evidence. Read the chapter carefully and the opposite is true. Every example in Hebrews 11 is an example of trust based on evidence already given.

Abraham obeys the call to leave Ur (Heb 11:8). But God has already spoken to him. His faith is trust in a Person whose track record he has already begun to see.
Noah builds the ark (Heb 11:7), being warned by God. His faith is trust in a warning he has received, not credulity in its absence.
Moses refuses Pharaoh's house (Heb 11:24-27), considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. His faith is a reasoned weighing of values, not a blind leap.

The chapter's definition (Heb 11:1), "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen", is not a definition of belief-without-evidence. It is a definition of trust in what has been promised. The track record of the promiser is the evidence. The assurance is the believer's reasoned response to that track record. This is Christian pistis. It is not credulity.

Reflection questions

Where in your own life have you treated faith and reason as opposites? When you have doubted, did you assume the doubt was reason's voice against faith? Or did you let reason do its proper preparatory work within faith?
Can you state both praeambula fidei and fides quaerens intellectum in your own words? Can you explain what each rules in and rules out?
When someone opens with "faith is belief without evidence," what is your first move? (Hint: the first move is not to argue. The first move is to ask what they mean by "faith." The conversation almost always shows that they are using one English word for two different things.)
Is your trust in the Christian faith more like Anselm's or more like the rationalist's? That is, did you reason your way in from scratch? Or did you start with given faith and then seek the understanding that makes it make sense? Either path is biblically respectable. The question is which one matches your actual life.

Practice exercise

Draft a one-paragraph response, five to eight sentences, to the line "faith is belief without evidence." Your paragraph should: (1) ask for the speaker's working definition of "faith"; (2) distinguish the modern atheist redefinition from biblical pistis; (3) cite Hebrews 11 as the evidential chapter, not the credulous one; (4) make the praeambula fidei / articula fidei distinction clear; (5) close with an invitation to keep talking. Practice the paragraph out loud until you can deliver it without notes in under ninety seconds. Then run it past a serious Christian peer for feedback.

Next lesson

→ Continue to Lesson 2.2, The Six Structural Commitments of Christianity.