Faith and Reason

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to enlighten and explore faith and reason. The word faith has its ultimate origin in the Indo-European root beidh, meaning to trust or to set one's heart on. It is cognate with the Latin foedus, "covenant," from which the term federal is derived. The Hebrew words 'emunah, the Greek pisteuein, and the Latin parallel term credere share many of the same meanings. Theologians and church councils did not hesitate to use Greek philosophical concepts in the explication of the faith—the logos (word, reason, cause) of Stoicism and Neoplatonism, the general notion of being (ousia) or of person (hypostatis). Augustine does not even distinguish philosophy from theology in his Christian Neoplatonic explication of the great themes of the Christian faith.

Catholic teaching strives to avoid two pitfalls in the relation between faith and reason: an excessive rationalism that dismisses faith as superstition, and an excessive fideism that denies all power to natural reason to know God and God's attributes without the help of divine revelation. The faith-reason relation can be stated also as the relation between philosophy and theology, or faith and knowledge, or reason and revelation. In the New Testament, especially the Gospel of John, there was no conflict between faith and knowledge. Many early Christian theologians like Justin Martyr were converts who had studied secular philosophy; their apologetic treatises were aimed not to contrast faith and knowledge but, on the contrary, to demonstrate that the Christian faith was the true philosophy.

Faith, Reason and Rationalism

In the early Church faith entailed trust in the saving work of God as well as an ethical commitment to live one's life in accord with that faith. The supreme act of faith was the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, there was no separation of "faith" and "works," no placing one against, above, or prior to the other (James 2:17). Paul's famous distinction between faith and "works of the law" was meant to be understood narrowly: new Gentile believers did not have to follow the rites of circumcision or the kosher food laws in order to be followers of Christ. Paul was not formulating a general opposition between faith and works or ethical conduct. A broader distinction between faith and works is relevant to the issues of the Protestant Reformation but does not accord with first-century Christian experience (Wippel, 89).

Beginning in the second century orthodox theologians began to develop a "rule of faith" (regula fidei) to counter what they took to be the "false" knowledge of the Gnostics. The rule pointed to three articles, or benchmarks, that later evolved into the three fundamental articles of the creed covering 1) creation, 2) redemption, and 3) sanctification. All subsequent theologians agreed with Clement of Alexandria that faith is "a grace (charis) of God" (Stromata 1.7.38.4), yet they began articulating that faith using the language and concepts of Hellenistic philosophy (logos, or "word/reason," homoousios, or "same being," ousia, or "being/essence," etc.) (Wippel, 93). Thus, reason came into relation with faith. Reason could fortify ...