Faith and Reason

St. Thomas Aquinas

Faith and reason; theology and philosophy: thesis. We know what God - which for us means "our concept of God" or what it make sense to say about God (our idols?) - ... we know what God (the Christian concept) revealed by faith and trust. We do not know it, directly, though reason. The story related about Jesus and the woman condemned to be stoned for adultery speaks to the purest part of my heart, the most sacred part of my soul. ‘This comes directly from God’ my heart tells me, and my intellect follows. I trust the source that relates this story and believe in the man that the story is about. My reason judges thoughts about God. God – the sacred, the divine – is beyond me or any man, woman, or even child. If I am to understand anything about God’s reality or will, God must reveal it to me. I could never reach God with my intellect alone. If there is any telepathy with God, it is not through the head but the heart.

      But given faith, I can come to understand many aspects of God through the use of my intellect. If somebody tells me God willed the terrorists to fly into the World Trade Buildings, approved of the Holocaust as a punishment to Jews, “meant” for me to betray my wife, or for the church to burn heretics in the Middle Ages then I know they are wrong because such things contradict the goodness of God as revealed to me through Christ as portrayed in the Gospels.

      If someone responds that I am mistaken because whatever God might will is simply “good”, such that if God wills that I hate homosexuals or adulterers or Jews or Germans (and so on), hating them would be “good”, then I remain certain that God could never possibly will such things. If someone then points to other passages in the Bible that seem to support God approving of something that we think evil, then I say that passage must be understood in the light of stories from the gospels like the one that revealed God to me (for Jews it would be something in the Torah; for Muslims, something in the Koran).

       If a theologian tries to convince me of the “divine command theory” of God – whatever God wills is good – and points out that I am guilt of imposing my sentimental human concept of goodness on God, then I say I find Aquinas’ solution true and the “divine command theory” false: God’s will is goodness itself, as revealed through Jesus and understood by my heart and soul, because God created both. 

      I offer this as a picture – condensed to be sure – of how faith and reason belong to the same family, faith being the loving parent of reason. But without reason, the family would be incomplete. This is my understanding of Augustine’s well-known principle: “I believe so that I may understand.” I believe in God’s goodness so that I may understand the world.

      The most fundamental divide in religion for me is this: between those who believe all the answers are clearly expressed in Scripture in the form of divine commands, and “ours is not to question why, but to do or die”; and those who (like me) believe that God also communicates through reality (Nature, the Creation) itself, through what is Good, True, and Beautiful. A kind of faith – not blind, fanatical faith but trusting your heart when it is inspired by love – is necessary to believe such an interpretation of Being more real than other possible interpretations (e.g. the materialism is a Carl Sagan, the nihilism of a Woody Allen).  Scripture – interpreted not as clear and distinct commands but as something we also need our intellects to grasp – can also reveal realities beyond our ability to grasp with our unaided intellects, but we need our minds and hearts to understand it and strive to conform our lives to it. 

      The mind cooperates with faith and love. To me this is the main difference between most forms of Protestantism and Catholicism as understood in the tradition of Aquinas: the former rejects the use of the intellect as hopelessly corrupted by sin (egotism, passion), whereas the latter, while acknowledging the influence of sin (ego) darkening the intellect, holds that the intellect can also be driven by a love of Truth and must participate in grace by seeking the Truth always.

The Bible. It is so far from being transparent that 1000 different people could read it in a thousand different ways. Churches and indeed individual pastors try to impose some unity of interpretation. For Catholics there is a tradition of interpretation that serves as a guide.  But to say: it is clear, my interpretation is God's interpretation; all other interpretations are from the devil. So don't think,  just live your lives according to my (i.e. God's) interpretation - that is the danger of Protestantism. 

   To me, the center of the Bible are the direct teachings of Jesus - the sermons, the parables,  the stories. The Sermon on the Mound,  the Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son,  the story of the Adulteress. This is not because that is or should be obvious to any reader. That is because my mind informed by my heart can only make sense of much of the Bible - almost all of the Old Testament, and much of the New - by understanding it in light of this center. So far, I am also in the tradition. 

    In some moods, only those passages for me are Scripture. The Bible would cause less confusion and strife, I think, if it consisted of about 10 to 20 pages of Jesus' own words.  I think even that critical scholarship can be an aide here. There I am out of the tradition, out on a limb, I guess, though not alone there. Tolstoy also believed something like this. 

  In terms of understanding things literally, I think a handful of passages do make that demand on us: for example

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44).

Literally, that means not demonizing or dehumanizing people considered to be enemies. (Can any current political regime do without demonizing some enemy?) But what does it mean to love your enemies? What does it mean to love a Trump? There not just your heart but your intellect must struggle to understand. And not only understand the words of Jesus, but reality - what an enemy is, who Trump is, etc. You can't separate faith and reason in real life.  

It's just a thought.