Reason and the Reasons of Faith

by Reinhard Hütter (Editor), Paul J. Griffiths (Editor)

Faith and reason are presently in crisis. This judgment, albeit controversial, constitutes the foundations of this project. The central danger of this crisis does not so much consist in the denial as in the banalization of God, whether as a fundamentally irrational claim of faith or at best as a purely regulative idea of reason. However, offering an account of the hope that is in us, and hence of the faith that gives rise to hope, requires on the part of Christian theology a rigorous intellectual effort, in short, the unfettered use of reason for the sake of faith in the God who is always greater than anything that can be thought. The point of such rigorous intellectual effort is not to offer a theological legitimization of reason as such, but rather to put reason to work theologically so that it comes genuinely to itself in realizing that God is and remains greater than anything that can be thought. Moreover, recognizing the limits and weaknesses of reason is possible only from a vantage point that deepens, broadens, and at the same time questions reason's horizon. Such a deepening, broadening, and questioning, however, always and only occurs reasonably, that is, through reason's own action. <br/><br/>The program of the present volume is to inquire into the reasons of faith in order to offer theological resources to constructively address the double crisis of faith in reason and reason in faith. We inquire, first, into the theological constitution of reason; second, into reason as one specific faculty of human being; third, into the significance of the philosophical shifts of modernity for theology; and fourth, into the importance of philosophy for theological inquiry.<br/><br/>Contributors: Alan J. Torrance; Bruce D. Marshall; Colin Gunton and Robert Jenson; Lois Malcolm; Mark McIntosh; Paul J. Griffiths; Reinhard Hütter; Ernstpeter Maurer; Carver T. Yu; Janet Martin Soskice; David Bentley Hart; Martin Bieler; Romanus Cessario; Charles Taylor>

Genres: Theology

384 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

Reviews

[Gregory Sadler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume of fourteen essays derive from meetings at the Center of Theological Inquiry motivated originally as responses to Fides et Ratio. The contributions range over philosophical and theological figures and texts too numerous to list or discuss in entirety, and as a whole form a work valuable and challenging not only because of its scope and erudition but also because of the complexity and opacity of the issues and realities illuminated. All the contributions engage a constellation of issues oriented around the problem of faith’s and reason’s mutual relationships, adopting four identifiable points of departure.

First, the contributors agree that both “[f]aith and reason are presently in crisis." Second, while the essays discuss and employ a range of philosophical figures, texts, and movements, they deliberately and unapologetically approach reason theologically, “explicitly assuming and deploying the truth of the doctrinal content of the Christian faith." Third, reason is treated not “monolithically”, or in abstraction, but rather as “a genus with many species," opening room for productive interaction between reason and faith. Fourth, reason is understood as “a property given by God and possessed by us in virtue of our status as creatures of and participants in God."

Given these shared starting points, the central question is precisely what reason’s and faith’s relations to each other are or should be. This involves several more specific questions: What is reason’s nature, and is it compatible with Christian faith? How is reason enabled to more fully understand its own nature and its relationship with faith? Can reason be properly understood, cultivated, and employed given modern, secular philosophical assumptions about reason? Does Christian faith add to, renew, perfect reason? And, if so, how determinately does this happen?

The first five essays evaluate specific putatively rational viewpoints and discuss how Christian faith contributes to reason. Alan Torrance argues that divine revelation’s particularity scandalizes varieties of modern thought confining themselves and their objects to the sphere of immanence, “effectively evacuat[ing] the divine self-communication of its content." Torrance argues against subordinating revelation to human rationality’s putatively universal structures, arguing that “criteria for the recognition and appropriation of the self-communication of God as Truth cannot be extrinsic to that event of self-communication." An ambiguity mars the article: his position seems to go beyond correctly noting that human encounter with the divine cannot be subordinated to a reason setting itself up as entirely autonomous and judge of all possible reality, to suggesting that each and every encounter with divine self-revelation finds its criteria solely or perhaps primarily in that particular encounter.

Bruce Marshal’s article examines whether knowing the Trinity is necessary for knowing the world rightly, and negotiates between two extreme positions, the first holding skepticism, nihilism, or pantheism the only alternatives to thought based in knowledge of the Trinity, the second that knowledge of the Trinity has no bearing on the possibility of knowledge of the world. “[T]he world can’t teach us about the Trinity, and so can’t teach us the deepest truths about itself," implying neither Trinitarian faith, nor skepticism, nihilism or pantheism can be necessarily concluded from any worldly reasoning, leaving these options thus far open. The Trinity does not by itself establish other truths, but “is entirely central to a Christian system of belief in its totality, including whatever orders of cognition we think such a system of belief rightly contains."

Colin Gunton and Robert Jenson’s contribution, “The Logos Ensarkos and Reason,” argues “the Word” should be grasped less as Hellenistic “Logos, cosmologically intermediate between eternity and time,” and more as “Israel’s hearing of Torah." As a corollary, Word understood as Wisdom must not be understood as pure reason separated from practical reason, since “Hebrew Wisdom is not truth abstracted from life but truth as and in life," a possibly misleading expression, since Wisdom literature does include observations and exhortations abstracted from life, but should not be read and understood in abstraction from life, i.e. in the separation characteristic of sundering theoretical and practical reason. The authors outline two “characteristics of reality to which reason must attend in order to be reason, if Jesus is the Logos”: “availability,” meaning that the reality is concretely given prior to any abstract separation, and “relationality," meaning that knowledge is always through community.

Lois Macolm’s “The Wisdom of the Cross” and Mark McIntosh’s “Faith, Reason, and the Mind of Christ” describe Christian transformations of reason through the prism of 1st Corinthians. Malcolm’s reading stresses shifting from “an egoist or factional viewpoint” to a pneumatic, “corporate rationality," seeking the common good, integrating the different gifts of the Christian community’s members, and having readers “transform their minds. . convert their imaginations, [and] shift their perspective,” allowing them to see “things from the standpoint of the abundance, or plentitude . . . inherent in the ‘mind of Christ’." McIntosh’s essay employs the desert hermits and elders to illuminate Paul, who is “not so much attacking human criteria of discernment” as setting out “God’s rescuing action in Christ . . . as a criterion provided by the loving action of God," opposed to factions, invidious comparison, and their fundamental assumptions. McIntosh presents the desert fathers’ diagnoses and analyses of “this mentality. . . a toxic seepage between envy, anger, fearfulness about the frustration or loss of one’s own desires, and . . . a need to best others," remedied by shift to transformative participation in the mind of Christ, allowing transformation and extension of the Christian reasoner and community.

The second part, composed of three essays each employing a different Christian thinker, discuss reason’s errancies, pitfalls, proper place, and perfection. Paul Griffiths interprets Augustine; Reinhard Hütter reads Thomas Aquinas; Ernstpeter Maurer discusses Martin Luther. Locating himself among “moderate pessimists about reason," Griffiths discerns two main causes of valid arguments with true premises remaining unpersuasive: “inadequate catechesis” and “volitional depravity." The first involves a lack of appropriate information and of “mastery of a technical vocabulary and training in reading and interpreting,” not grasped immediately by “‘unaided reason’. . . reason without benefit of catechesis” (150). The second reflects the Augustinian priority of will over reason. Error in reasoning remains possible, since the will directs thinking and attention. Good reasoning thus demands adequate catechesis and a properly formed and turned will.

Hütter argues the late modern crisis of metaphysics demands a “metaphysics of creation,” holding “the world is created by. . . God”, “the human being is created in the image of God”, and “the human being is called to a communion of vision and love with the God who is love." Investigation of implications of “[f]ides and ratio [being] highly complex force fields that constantly overlap and presuppose each other, although not in strictly reciprocal ways," indicates reason anticipates fulfillment in and teleological ordering towards truth, and that faith includes rational exploration of received truth, particularly in context of human beings’ concrete existence, centrally involving the will. Hütter’s main thesis is: “[o]nly within the horizon of faith, reason now being informed by a renewed will that is beginning to be redirected toward communion with God as its highest good”, can it adequately investigate the human will with which it is inextricably bound up; he argues that Aquinas’ thought supplies this perspective.

Maurer argues “self-clarification of reason is the point of Luther’s dialectical assessment of ratio," whose central problematic is human reason’s inability and attempt to define and ground itself on its own, to achieve “ultimate self-constitution," to “determine itself and overcome its own internal complexity," requiring lapses into reductionism, abstraction, and impoverishment of metaphorical language. Luther wants to preserve and recognizes the necessity of metaphor, particularly “the more we approach humanity and personality.” Reason’s redemption then involves abandonment of pridefulness and acceptance of passivity, givenness, and limitations, understood through the Law-Gospel distinction.

Part three includes three essays. Carver Yu’s “Covenant Rationality and the Healing of Reason” notes modern reason attempts to make itself entirely autonomous by abolishing any transcendence other than itself and working “toward self-grounding as well as rationalization of self-created laws," a project doomed to failure, culminating in epistemological despair. Modern reason aims thereby at remaining within, bringing everything within, or denying the reality of anything other than its realm of immanence. What is needed is discerning what knowledge (including understanding and wisdom) is. In its higher forms, knowledge is not simply propositional, but relational, participational, having a “covenantal character (i.e., its charitable nature)” with realities reason engages. Christian faith allows narcisistic reason’s healing, and becoming “a capability endowed in human persons for the making of covenant."

Janet Soskice’s “Naming God” and David Hart’s “The Offering of Names” explore the distinction between divine names and divine attributes, and the shift from understanding God through the former in pre-modernity to the modern reliance on the latter. Using Aquinas and Locke, Soskice notes modern thought’s natural theology dissociates independent reason from scripture and tradition, employing reason to derive qualities then applied to God. Patristic and medieval theology appropriated earlier natural theology, transforming it in the light of faith, particularly in creation ex nihilo, discovering inexhaustible and metaphorically divine names. Hart critically adapts Heidegger’s analysis of nihilism, the history of metaphysics, and forgetfulness, focusing on “the forgetfulness of the difference between naming God and describing his attributes." Hart shows Heidegger’s fundamental misunderstanding of Christian philosophy, which “possess[es] resources for understanding and overcoming the ‘nihilistic terminus’ of modernity." Christianity interrupted metaphysics in unprecedented ways, and “Christian thought. . . far from constituting just another episode in the genealogy of nihilism, was. . . so profound a disruption of many of the most basic premises of philosophy, and so audacious a rescue of many of philosophy’s truths,” allowing “genuine reflection upon the difference between being and beings" through Christian metaphysics, the analogia entis, “the liaison between the biblical doctrine of creation and the metaphysics of creation."

Martin Bieler’s “The Theological Importance of a Philosophy of Being” and Romanus Cessario’s, O.P. “Duplex Ordo Cognitionis” comprise the fourth part, discussing Fides et Ratio’s emphasis on philosophy’s importance for adequate theology. Bieler argues that the document “moves along the lines of Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics when it outlines future tasks of philosophical investigation,” stressing “the importance of a philosophy of being,” and conceiving of it “in the way Aquinas does by referring to the ‘act of being’." He argues: “It is not possible to have a ‘pure’ theology, which uses philosophy only as a quarry for its terms and tries to make in the end all philosophical knowledge of God superfluous. Theology is accompanied by philosophy all the way down." Bieler’s interpretation discerns the will’s centrality “in grasping the revealed truth of God," leading not to faith as arbitrariness, but following and responding to love, cultivated by God, both discursively and through connaturality.

Cessario begins by rightly criticizing philosophical pedagogy’s present poor condition, arguing a need for “authentic philosophy in the Catholic tradition” as a “constitutive element of all theological formation." He also rightly notes “fideism or indifference to philosophical education does integral harm to the theological project." Correct in upholding the value of “doctrinal propositional truth," Cessario’s essay unfortunately singles out Maurice Blondel for superficial criticisms explicitly and long ago addressed by his writings. This raises an oversight of the fourth part: it was recently pointed out by Bishop Peter Henrici how Fides et Ratio legitimately reads as a fundamentally Blondelian document.

Charles Taylor provides a postscript, “Engaging the Citadel of Secular Reason,” arguing that “distinctions such as faith and reason, or reason and revelation, need to be historically situated." Some rival perspectives can show their rational superiority over others, and “acquiring or deepening faith” can play varied roles. In more congenial circumstances, reason and faith cooperate, in less, faith and the believing, practicing Christian find themselves beyond the limits of a particular shape of reason. A “rehabilitation of reason”, and “new understandings of reason” are thus needed.