Faith as the Way to Knowledge
1
Faith as the Way
to Knowledge
nyone who attends to the discussions, debates, and controversies among Christians in this last decade of the second
millennium is familiar with the issue I wish to address in this
short essay. The words "liberal" and "fundamentalist" are used
today not so much to identify oneself as to label the enemy.
From one side comes the accusation that the mind of the fundamentalist is closed, shuttered against the possibility of doubt
and therefore against the recognition of hitherto unrecognized
truth. From the other side comes the charge that liberals are so
open to new ideas that they have no firm commitments at all,
that every affirmation of faith must be held only tentatively, and
that every dogma must, as a matter of principle, be challenged.
There are terms of moral opprobrium that each side employs to
attack the other: the fundamentalist is arrogant, blinkered, and
culturally illiterate; the liberal is flabby, timid, and carried along
by every new fashion of thought. From the point of view of the
fundamentalist, doubt is sin; from the point of view of the liberal,
the capacity for doubt is a measure of intellectual integrity and
honesty.
In addition to ascribing these accusations, labels, and genuine differences over doubt to both sides in this quarrel, it is also right to ascribe moral virtues to them: Liberalism at its best is marked by an open mind which is humble and ready to learn. Fundamentalism at its best is marked by a moral courage which holds fast to the truth even when it is assailed by counterclaims from without. In the currently prevailing atmosphere of relativism, where one does not speak of "what is true" but rather of what is "meaningful for me"; where one does not speak of right and wrong but of values; it is right and proper that there should be protest, and it is natural that this should lead to demands for absolute standards and certain truth. When everything in religion seems to be reduced to subjective experience, it is natural that there should be a demand for the affirmation of objective truth. Yet how can this affirmation be made without falling into the opposite error of arrogance, obscurantism, and fundamentalism? How can we develop, in respect of religious belief, minds which are not only open to fresh insights but also equipped with the critical faculty that can distinguish sense from nonsense and reality from illusion? What kind of confidence is proper for those who witness to the truth of the gospel?
How is this quarrel to be settled or at least converted into a constructive dialogue? One way is to look at its deep roots in the intellectual history of Europe. In order to understand the debate, we must remind ourselves of the two streams of history that have flowed into the life of Europe during the past two millennia. Briefly stated, they are the stream flowing from the philosophy of classical antiquity with its fountainhead in the histories of Greece and Rome, and the stream that comes from the history of Israel mediated through the Bible and the living memory of this history in the life of the Christian church.
We think of Europe as a distinct cultural entity, and indeed it is. If we look at a global map, however, it is obvious that Europe is only the western end of Asia. For uncounted millennia, Europe was the cul-de-sac into which wave after wave of migrants from Asia moved, each driving its predecessor farther into the western peninsulas and islands where the ocean blocked any further movement west. If, as I have done, one takes a slow journey from southern India to western Europe, picking up the traces of Alexander's deep penetration into Asia and crossing the battlefield where the Persian Empire met, and sometimes defeated, the armies of Greece and Rome; one is vividly reminded that, until the rise of Arab power drove a thick wedge between Europe and Asia, the two were but parts of one living space. What has made Europe a distinct cultural and spiritual entity is the fact that, for a thousand years, the barbarian tribes who had found their home there were schooled in both the biblical story and the learning of classical antiquity, the legacy of Greece and Rome. These tribes, or at least their intellectual leaders, were taught to think in Greek and Latin, but the story that shaped their thinking was the Bible. Therefore, from the beginning of what we now call "Europe," there was a tension between historical and philosophical streams, one flowing from Greece and Rome and the other from Israel.
The Greeks, of course, knew about gods and about what were supposed to be divine revelations. The great thinkers who shaped the classical worldview of Greece and Rome did not regard these as the way by which one might come to know the ultimate nature of things. Divine revelation and knowledge of the gods were proper, perhaps, for an immature stage of human development, but reliable truth would ultimately be reached by other means. For Greek rationality, whether in its Platonic or its Aristotelian forms, the biblical story could not be the place where ultimate truth was to be found. The Jews, whose synagogues were in every major city, were a people apart. One could admire their high moral standards and perhaps their noble monotheism, but their religion was outside the main currents of philosophical investigation.
Christianity presented itself to the classical world as a development of this Jewish faith, but - unlike Judaism - it reached out in vigorous propaganda among all sectors of the people. Its scriptures were also offered in Greek, but more significantly, commentary and interpretation were available in Greek, not the Aramaic of the emerging rabbinic tradition. If the message of the gospel was to capture the cultural leadership of the classical world, there would have to be a diligent intellectual effort to relate the biblical story to the world of classical thought, a world whose medium was the Greek language, the language the church used in its own preaching. But how could the biblical message be communicated with the world of classical thought without being absorbed into and neutralized by that world of thought? At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted - and let us remember that the original meaning of "fact" is the Latin factum, "something done." God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. According to Athanasius, it provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview except one of which it was the basis, but at the same time it could only be communicated to the world of classical thought by using the language of classical thought.
Already in the New Testament we can see the beginning of the struggle to bridge this communication gap, to communicate Christianity's new and revolutionary fact in ways that could be grasped in the thought forms of classical culture and yet to prevent the biblical message from being absorbed and neutralized by them. The writer of the Fourth Gospel begins by introducing the word logos, a word familiar to readers in the world of the eastern Mediterranean, whether Greek or Hebrew. For the former, it referred to the ultimate impersonal entity which was at the heart of all coherence in the cosmos. An Indian analogy would he the word dharma. For the latter, it referred to the word of the living, personal Lord by which he had created the cosmos and continues to sustain it. Here contact is made with the reader. It is a familiar word, and we know roughly what it means. Immediately, however, the writer uses words which surely threaten to break off all contact: "The Word became flesh." The logos is identified with a man named Jesus whose story the writer is about to tell.
The reader now has two possibilities. He can shut the book. The writer is apparently talking nonsense. There is no way within the thought-world of either a Greek or a Jew in which the logos could be identified with a particular human being, certainly not with a human being who reportedly had been executed as a criminal. As long as the accepted patterns of Greek and Jewish thought continue in place, this writing makes no possible sense.
The other possibility is to read on, to listen to those who tell the story, and perhaps (indeed above all) to witness the cruel death of those who would rather face the lions in the circus than disavow this belief. If that course is pursued, then the very meaning of the word logos and the whole edifice of thought of which it is the keystone have to be taken down and rebuilt on this new foundation, this new arche. The language of Scripture, the evangelist announces, will be either the cornerstone or the stone of stumbling; it cannot be merely one of the building blocks in the whole structure of thought. There is, in other words, an intellectual analogy to those words of Jesus which were so scandalous to their first hearers: "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days" (John 2:19).
The implications of this radically new starting point for thought needed time to be grasped, especially when the edifice was as large and strong as that of classical thought. It involved a struggle which continued for several centuries. Some, like Tertullian, saw no possibility of accommodation between the two: "What has Jerusalem in common with Athens?" he asked, assuming the answer "Nothing." Others, like Origen of Alexandria, a scholar and profound student both of the Bible and of classical thought, sought to find the greatest possible common ground. Crucial to this struggle was the battle that Athanasius fought against the most powerful forces in the church to safeguard affirmation of the Incarnation as not simply a likeness of God but the very being of God himself. If that had not been secured, Christianity would have gradually disappeared, absorbed into the general mix of pagan religiosity in which we are free to construct our own images of God. In Chesterton's apt phrase, "Christianity would have gone to pot."
This new starting point, the new arc he, required a radically new way of thinking about God. To begin with, if the logos had become part of history in this man Jesus, then two dualisms which were fundamental to classical thought were no longer tenable. One was the dualism between the "sensible" and the "intelligible," or - as we might say - between the material and the mental or spiritual. The other was the dualism between being and becoming. Obviously these two dualisms are closely related. So long as they form part of one's mental framework, it is simply impossible to believe that the God who is, in Tillich's phrase, "Being in Itself," should actually be part of terrestrial history - ,,crucified under Pontius Pilate." Yet this is precisely what the Fourth Gospel seeks, above all, to emphasize in point after point, that in this precisely dated historical happening for which various witnesses are available, the eternal being of God was actually present. Either one rejects this as absurd, or one's whole understanding of what the word "God" refers to has to be reconsidered. The starting point for this reconsideration could not be found in any supposedly immutable principles of thought; it had to be found in the actual story the apostolic witnesses had told from the beginning.
It took many generations to hammer out a new understanding of God, and it is not surprising that there were often fierce disagreements along the way. After all, what can be more important for human life than to know who God is? The result of these generations of struggle was, as we know, the gradual clarification of a new way of understanding God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who, in their eternal mutuality of love, constitute what we mean by the word "God."
In his brilliant study Christianity and Classical Culture, Charles Norris Cochrane shows how this new paradigm overcame the dualisms that were paralyzing the classical world. It provided the starting point for a whole new chapter in human thought and action, a new beginning which was destined to shape what we now call Europe. Ultimate reality was no longer unknowable: it was available to us in the person of Jesus Christ, who was made known to us in the New Testament and the preaching of the church. By faithfulness to this reality, we would be led by the work of the divine Spirit to full knowledge of the Father, a knowledge partial here in via but promised in its fullness at the end.
Of special significance for the subsequent development of Europe is the work done during the latter part of the fourth century by Christian theologians in discussion with the science of their day. Christopher Kaiser, in his book Creation and the History of Science, has shown how the Cappadocian theologians developed four fundamental principles that were to shape the development of science through the centuries and up to the present day. The important point to note here is that these principles were formulated on the basis of belief in the divine revelation given in Scripture and supremely in the work of Christ. In brief, these principles were as follows:
1. Because the cosmos is the creation of a rational God who has also made us in his image, it follows that the cosmos is in principle comprehensible by the human mind. It is a coherent cosmos, not a chaos of random events. Therefore, (in contrast to important strands in Indian thought) there are no ultimate self-contradictions. It is not to be understood in terms of a yin-yang duality as in Far Eastern thought. It has an ultimate coherence, a coherence of which the central secret is made known in the Incarnation.
2. Because the cosmos is a creation by God as a free act of his will and not an emanation of God (as in some elements in Indian thought), the cosmos has a relative autonomy. Not everything that happens is the direct will of God. It follows, then, that the way to knowledge of the cosmos is not opening the mind to ultimate reality through mystical contemplation. To discover how the cosmos works, we must investigate the empirical facts by careful observation.
3. Because Scripture says that God created the heavens and the earth, it follows that the "heavenly bodies" are not (as Aristotle said) made of a substance different from the elements that comprise the earth, but are, on the contrary, of the same substance. (It is one of the many ironies in the history of the later conflicts between science and religion that when Galileo, as a result of his use of a telescope, decided that the moon was made of the same substance as the earth, he was condemned by the church because the church had meanwhile co-opted Aristotelian philosophy into its doctrine.)
4. Because of the work of Christ in the incarnation, we may use material means for the advancement of human salvation. The implication of this was that the church did not have to follow the Hebrew tradition of rejecting Greek medicine; instead, it could use Greek medicine in the development of the healing ministry which was to be such an important part of its work in succeeding centuries.
These four principles, which were to provide the foundation for the subsequent development of science in Europe (a science which was destined to outstrip the far more brilliant thinking of India, China, and the Arab world), were based on faith in the biblical revelation. They were part of the whole reconstitution of thought necessitated by the new fact, the action of God, the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ.
The work of the theologians of the first four centuries laid the foundation for a new way of understanding the world. As we shall be reminded many times, it did not mean the end of the tension between the classical and the biblical ways of understanding. It did ensure, however, that for nearly a thousand years it was the biblical story which was to have the greater part in shaping the thought of Europe. A crucial figure as far as Western Europe is concerned is Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Augustine was a brilliant product of the classical world. He was a master of the finest classical thought, although sadly he apparently never learned Greek, and, for various reasons, the Eastern Orthodox churches never venerated him as the West has done. He was professor of rhetoric in the imperial university and a supreme master in that field, as anyone who reads him today will acknowledge. But when, through the influence of Ambrose and through the circumstances of his own moral and intellectual struggles, he was brought to faith in Christ, he became an apprentice in the tradition which had its center in the biblical story. He took the biblical story as the starting point for a way of understanding which required a radical reconstruction of his former ways of thought. In his famous slogan credo ut intclligam (I believe in order to know), he defined a way of knowing that begins with the faithful acceptance of the given fact that God revealed himself in Christ.
Clearly, much of the mental furniture that Augustine had acquired through his long apprenticeship in the classical world of thought remains in his Christian writings. But there is a radically new starting point. The dominant element in his classical background is Platonic. For Plato, the ultimate realities were ideas, which are more or less fully realized in the various entities which are the objects of our experience. It is by grasping these eternal ideas and participating in them that the soul attains its true being and its salvation. These ideas constitute a hierarchy of which the Idea of the Good is the apex. The other major strand of classical thought, that strand which originates in Plato's great disciple Aristotle, is more concerned with the causal relations among things in the world of becoming. As we shall see, this Aristotelian tradition was to play a major role in the development of Europe at a later stage.
What is obvious and important at this stage is that the acceptance of the biblical tradition as a starting point for thought constituted a radical break with the classical tradition, whether in its Platonic or Aristotelian form. To put it crudely, in the latter form we begin by asking questions, and we formulate these questions on the basis of our experience of the world. In this enterprise we are in control of operations. We decide which questions to ask, and these decisions necessarily condition the nature of the answers. This is the procedure with which we are familiar in the work of the natural sciences. The things we desire to understand are not active players in the game of learning; they are inert and must submit to our questioning. The resulting "knowledge" is our achievement and our possession.
But there is another kind of knowing which, in many languages, is designated by a different word. It is the kind of knowing that we seek in our relations with other people. In this kind of knowing we are not in full control. We may ask questions, but we must also answer the questions put by the other. We can only come to know others in the measure in which they are willing to share. The resulting knowledge is not simply our own achievement; it is also the gift of others. And even in the mutual relations of ordinary human beings, it is never complete. There are always further depths of knowledge that only long friendship and mutual trust can reach, if indeed they can be reached at all.
There is a radical break between these two kinds of knowing: the knowing often associated with the natural sciences and the knowing involved in personal relations. We experience this radical break, for example, when someone about whom we have been talking unexpectedly comes into the room. We can discuss an absent person in a manner that leaves us in full control of the discussion. But if the person comes into the room, we must either break off the discussion or change into a different mode of talking.
This is a proper analogy of the break involved in the move from the classical to the Christian way of understanding the world. If, so to say, the Idea of the Good has actually entered the room and spoken, we have to stop our former discussion and listen. Instead of asking all the questions, we must answer the questions put by the Other. Of course it is possible to dismiss the interruption. The one who has entered the room may be an impostor, and we can treat this possible imposter with skepticism, declining to accept the claimed identity. That is always a possibility. But if we recognize the intruder as the one we were talking about, then one kind of talk has to stop and another has to begin.
Is there, then, a total discontinuity between the classical and the Christian ways of understanding? Was Tertullian right? The answer is both "yes" and "no." There is indeed the discontinuity of which I have spoken. But there is also a continuity in the sense that by listening to the intruder we shall find in the end that we have found better answers to our questions than before, when apart from the intruder we formulated our own questions. This might be dismissed as a rash and unprovable assertion. At this point in my essay, I would only defend it by referring again to the story of Western science. Science has developed in Europe in a way that has far outstripped the work of ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Indian science because it was willing to take as its starting point affirmations rooted in. the biblical revelation of God as creator and redeemer. Questioning can go on forever and lead nowhere. There are always fresh questions which can be asked. Asking questions can become an all-consuming passion which can never be satisfied, for which any claim to know the truth is a kind of treason against the intellect. A recent writer has wittily suggested that there is a parallel between this certain kind of academic tradition and the tradition of fox-hunting. The whole point is the chase; if the fox is actually caught, the fun is all over, and we have to look for another fox. Surely, the asking of questions is a vital part of our encounter with reality. But reality finally encounters us when we have to answer the question put to us by the incarnate logos: "Who do you say that I am?" Similarly, one hopes that one day the hunter is confronted with the cruel reality of hounding a fox to death.
Augustine lived, thought, and wrote while the classical world was crumbling around him and Rome, the eternal city, was being sacked by the barbarians. In one of the greatest writings of humankind, his Confessions, he tells the story of how he sought and did not find, but was found by the one he sought. From then on there was a new starting point for his questing and questioning. The story of God's mighty acts in the creation and redemption of the world through the Word made flesh in the actual history of Jesus Christ, not a belief in the Idea of Good, would henceforth be the foundation for all the great intellectual and spiritual striving which filled the remaining years of his life.
And it was this same biblical story that was to shape the life of Europe for the ensuing period of nearly a thousand years. What we now call Europe was, during Augustine's life, a medley of barbarian tribes and petty kingdoms, all making their claims to sovereignty in the midst of the dead and dying remnants of the old Roman imperial order. There was no coherent political structure or common intellectual and spiritual coherence.
Still, it was the Christian church that alone could offer the foundation for a new order. In doing so, it certainly had the advantage that it carried with it much of the prestige of the former empire. That Roman civilization had been an affair of cities: the tribes who had taken over Europe were not city dwellers. The church had developed in its Mediterranean heartland primarily in the cities. In addition, it now found a new and powerful means of penetration into a rural society. The monastic movement had arisen in the East as a protest against the growing worldliness of the urban Christianity that flourished after Constantine. St. Benedict was the greatest of those in the West who took over, but profoundly modified, this Eastern monastic tradition in order to create a growing network of monastic communities which would eventually cover the whole of Western Europe. The Benedictine rule, with its balanced combination of prayer, manual work, and study, was firmly based on the Bible. At the center of the life of each community was the continual reading of the Bible, both in study and in the worship of the community. The biblical story came to be the one story that shaped the understanding of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. In the constant remembering of the great events of creation and salvation through the liturgical year, in the popular drama of the streets, and in the pictures that surrounded the congregation as they gathered for worship, it was this story that was their mental framework, the story that defined human life and its meaning and destiny. It was this story that shaped those barbarian tribes into the cultural and spiritual entity that made Europe something other than simply a peninsula of Asia. And because Europe later developed that way of thinking and organizing life which is now known throughout the world as "modernity," we cannot understand modernity without understanding this part of our history.
I have spoken of the radical character of the switch from the classical worldview to that which was based on the biblical story Needless to say, there is no way of demonstrating that the one is superior to the other. There is a fundamental difference between a worldview which sees ultimate reality as in some sense personal, therefore to be known only in the way that we can have knowledge of another person, and the worldview which sees ultimate reality as impersonal - as (for example) does the Indian tradition. There is no principle more fundamental than either of these views and by which one could, therefore, adjudicate between them. Personal knowledge is impossible without risk; it cannot begin without an act of trust, and trust can be betrayed. We are here facing a fundamental decision in which we have to risk everything we have. There are no insurance policies available.
It may be helpful, however, to spell out two ways in which these radically different ways of understanding diverge:
1. If the place where we look for ultimate truth is in a story and if (as is the case) we are still in the middle of the story, then it follows that we walk by faith and not by sight. If ultimate truth is sought in an idea, a formula, or a set of timeless laws or principles, then we do not have to recognize the possibility that something totally unexpected may happen. Insofar as our knowledge is accurate, we shall be able to predict the future. Future and past are governed by the same laws, the same principles, and the same realities. But if we find ultimate truth in. a story that has not yet been finished, we do not have that kind of certainty The certainty we have rests on the faithfulness of the one whose story it is. We walk by faith.
2. The two worldviews differ in respect to the roles of seeing and hearing. In the classical view, the true knowledge is vision, theoria. It is the vision of eternal truth. One therefore makes a distinction between theoria and praxis. One must first grasp the vision and then, in a second step, find ways of embodying it in action. Readers of the Bible will have noticed that these terms are totally absent. Because ultimate reality is personal, God's address to us is a word conveying his purpose and promise, a word which may be heard or ignored, obeyed or disobeyed. Faith comes by hearing, and unbelief is disobedience. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Only the obedient believe, and those who believe are obedient" (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 69). As we shall see, the replacement of this biblical distinction between faith and unbelief with the classical distinction between theory and practice has had momentous results.