Faith and Reason

Three Views

Steve Wilkens

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830880232
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Life confronts us with an endless stream of questions. Some are trivial. But some draw us into the deepest dimensions of human inquiry, a place where our decisions have profound implications for life and faith. Is there a God, and if so, how can I know anything about who or what God is? Is the quest for truth an elusive dream? How should I live and what should I value? What happens at the end of my biological existence?These questions lead people of every creed and belief to consider important existential concepts. But many people wrestle with the relationship between faith and reason as they dig into the roots of this theological and philosophical pursuit. Does a shared interest in a common set of questions indicate that philosophy and theology are close kin and allies, or are they competitors vying for our souls, each requiring a loyalty that excludes the other?In this Spectrum Multiview volume Steve Wilkens edits a debate between three different understandings of the relationship between faith and reason, between theology and philosophy. The first viewpoint, Faith and Philosophy in Tension, proposes faith and reason as hostile, exclusive opposites, each dangerous to the integrity of the other. The second, Faith Seeking Understanding, suggests that faithful Christians are called to make full use of their rational faculties to aid in the understanding and interpretation of what they believe by faith. In the third stance, Thomistic Synthesis, natural reason acts as a handmaiden to theology by actively pointing people toward salvation and deeper knowledge of spiritual truths.Bringing together multiple views on the relationship between faith, philosophy and reason, this introduction to a timeless quandary will help you navigate, with rigor and joy, one of the most significant discussions of the Christian community.Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

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Faith and Philosophy in Tension

Carl A. Raschke

The Greek-Jew Question

Christian faith and philosophy for the most part have been in tension for most of the last two thousand years. Ever since early Christianity spread beyond Roman Judea during the first century, the tension between faith and philosophy has remained largely unresolved. But in order to contextualize this tension, we must first understand some of the major historical factors that gave rise to it in the first place. Faith and philosophy do not exist in a vacuum. While we are often in the habit nowadays of viewing this longstanding and familiar tension as something that has always had the same meaning and importance, both the language of the debates and the controversies have changed radically over the years. For example, until the eighteenth century the challenge to faith from “philosophy” came for the most part from the pagan Greek tradition. From the modern era onward, it emanated from the natural sciences and the efforts of philosophers to adopt the standards of truth-testing to which they believed scientists themselves adhered. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new challenge came from the social and linguistic sciences, particularly anthropology, which fostered the assumption, often shared by philosophers, that expressions of faith are culturally, morally and conceptually relevant only to their own times. How did these tensions arise? How did they evolve?

If we are to understand the tension more fully, both historically and in the contemporary setting, we must fully recognize, as every student of civilization has learned in textbooks for a century, that virtually every form of what we might broadly call the “Western perspective” reflects this stress. The tension ultimately is derived from the confluence of two ancient cognitive and intellectual watercourses, what we call the Hebraic and the Greco-Roman. This confluence dates back to the fourth century B.C., more than three hundred years before the time of Jesus. It was the direct consequence of the conquest of the Middle East by the armies of Alexander the Great. In order to hold their vast new empire together, Alexander’s immediate successors embarked on a campaign of forced cultural assimilation of their new subject peoples. The policy, which required that Greek be spoken everywhere as the official language of diplomacy, commerce, and education and that religious practice conform as much as possible to certain general norms, was known as “Hellenization.”

Ancient Judaism, generally left alone by previous conquerors, was pressured into submission as well. While the Jews of this period tended either to accommodate or remain indifferent to Hellenization in the cultural and educational spheres, they fiercely resisted it when it came to standards of worship. The reason was obvious. Greek religion was centered on the veneration and elaboration of visible images of God, or the gods. In contrast, the First Commandment of the Decalogue given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai absolutely prohibited having representations, or “images,” of the deity. “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:3).1 What the Greeks and other peoples of the Mediterranean considered piety, the Jews regarded as idolatry. The Maccabean Revolt of 167 B.C. was a successful military and political movement in ancient Judea to stem the tide of Hellenization.

Foreign domination of Judea lasted up until the early twentieth century. A century after the Maccabeans overthrew their Hellenic overlords, the Romans marched in and established an even more brutal regime. Unlike the Greeks, however, Roman policy was not designed to suppress or alter Judaic practices, only to prevent political sedition and rebellion. Nevertheless, in A.D. 66 the Jews revolted once more, mainly for political and economic reasons, and were ruthlessly suppressed. A second revolt decades later led to the virtual extermination of Jewish habitation in Palestine, and the fledgling early Christian movement quickly lost most of its Hebraic characteristics. The wide majority of Christians in the first century identified themselves as Jews, who distinguished themselves from their counterparts mainly by recognizing Jesus of Nazareth as the long-expected Messiah, much like Messianic Judaism today. The upshot of these developments was that Christianity itself became increasingly Hellenized, while the framework for the interpretation of predominantly Hebraic Scripture became the accepted schools of Greek philosophy, specifically Platonism. This process started during the second century with the writings of the so-called Apologists, who sought to convince the Roman authorities of their day that Christianity was not some weird, Asian personality cult, but a respectable type of practical philosophy that conformed to Roman sensibilities and values.

Such historical considerations mainly serve to provide a setting for the debate. Ways of resolving the issue have varied immensely, and the answer seems no clearer today than it did two thousand years ago. The famous question of the late twentieth-century postmodern French philosopher Jacques Derrida—“Are we Jews? Are we Greeks”2—echoes the famous comment of the late second-century theologian Tertullian: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”3 Tertullian’s remark, and to a lesser extent Derrida’s, are often cited to buttress the view that philosophy should play no role in the defense of faith. But the context of the remark in Tertullian’s treatise On the Prescription of Heretics shows that Tertullian was mainly arguing against the use of philosophy as a substitute for faith, a common strategy of the schismatics of his own day.

The sentence after Derrida’s statement underscores the same point. “Are we . . . first Jews or first Greeks?”4 Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Tertullian did not reject philosophical approaches per se. He himself was not only a highly educated Roman but also one steeped in the Platonism, Stoicism and Epicureanism of his own age. The work in which his comment appears was aimed specifically at the influential writings of the Gnostics, especially the second-century teacher and church leader Valentinus. According to his critics, Valentinus had urged his adherents, both subtly and not so subtly, to regard the Platonic teachings of his time as superior to the simple testament given in the Gospels and to despise the unlettered and simple-hearted, whom Jesus, for instance, had commended in the Sermon on the Mount. Furthermore, Valentinus had supposedly sought to convince people that the method of dialectical disputation—the trotting out of contrary forms of reasoning and articulated positions with the intent of exposing the logical inconsistencies in each that was first employed by Socrates and common among all schools of Greek philosophy—was superior to belief in the saving power of the risen Christ. In other words, Tertullian was not reviling philosophy so much as its misapplication in the hands of the learned who had lost all sense of what it means to be a Christ-follower first and an intellectual second. Tertullian was merely embroidering on the sentiment espoused broadly by the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: “And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1-2).

Paul’s Critique of Philosophy

Paul’s sustained argument in 1 Corinthians serves as a paradigm of what for our purposes may be considered the standard example of faith against philosophy, or what should preferably be construed as faith and philosophy in dialectical tension with each other. Because we call ourselves Christian thinkers with a core conviction that our ultimate authority rests on Scripture, we must take Paul very seriously. Most studies and commentaries on 1 Corinthians stress that Paul is confronting with strong rhetoric of his own, frequently citing or deploying the actual slogans of factions in the church at Corinth, the tendency to confuse submission to Christ with Hellenistic “wisdom” (sophia). In the Jewish context of Paul’s day “wisdom” meant a kind of special knowledge associated with the study of Torah and, for Gentiles, the sort of esoteric understanding reserved primarily for philosophers. Paul was convinced this misidentification of faith with Hellenistic wisdom fomented a certain arrogance and elitism, distorting the very self-effacement and humility that Jesus had demonstrated in going to the cross that marked the central way of salvation for Christians. Most commentaries on 1 Corinthians tend to emphasize the essential tension between faith and philosophy as comparable to the familiar dialectic between an esoteric knowledge that “puffs up,” as Paul puts it in chapter 13, and the agapē love shown by the simple-hearted person. It is love that “builds up” the Christian community. Thus Paul’s appeal to faith over philosophy is connected essentially with preserving peace within the church.5

At the same time, a close reading of Paul’s own extended discussion reveals that more is actually at stake. At the outset Paul makes clear that the issue is not primarily an ethical one. It is about the very character of Christian salvation, which turns out to be as much “historical” as personal. “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature,” Paul writes, “but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:6-8). In other words, the achievement of personal “wisdom” as the means of salvation is from God’s perspective completely misguided and useless. The crucifixion is an event that is a once-and-for-all game changer in the story of salvation.

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor 1:21-24)

Just as in Romans Paul challenges the conventional Pharisaic narrative of what it means to be faithful in matters of righteousness before God, so in 1 Corinthians he calls to account the alternative Hellenistic version that puts such a premium on “theoretical,” or philosophical, sophistication when it comes to working out one’s destiny. But Paul is not offering in this situation a “third way” of personal salvation, a new and improved edition of standard spiritual self-help manuals for either Jews or Gentiles. On the contrary, he is presenting a radically new framework for grasping God’s general plan for his own chosen people, “those whom God has called” (1 Cor 1:24). The bone of contention here has very little to do with spiritual formation and almost everything to do with how God is using Gentiles, as well as Jews, to accomplish his ultimate purpose for all things.

A clue to this new framework can be found in Paul’s employment of the term skandalon, or “stumbling block.” The term is common in the Septuagint, the Hellenistic translation of the Old Testament into Greek, as well as in the Gospels and in other New Testament literature. As William Barclay points out, the word generally has two sets of connotations. It can mean either an obstacle to trip someone up in their forward journey, or it can imply a lure or trap designed to entice someone to destruction.6 The first meaning is obviously what Paul intended in this instance. Crucifixion was a horrible form of torture devised by the Romans to convey to all onlookers the might of Roman rule by totally obliterating the dignity and identity of anyone who might dare oppose it. Conventional messianic expectations focused on a Jewish emancipator who was mightier than the Romans themselves. Hence, the crucifixion becomes a stumbling block to the extent that it would be readily and even indignantly dismissed by those whose concept of collective salvation for those who are “called” conforms to the commonsensical or conventional notion.

Acknowledging a crucified messiah as the one true messiah whose “power” is greater than any military general or political genius requires a complete inversion of our understanding of what terms generally signify. It amounts, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would put it 1,900 years later, to taking a “leap” of faith. Traditional messianic anticipations of “he who is to come” centered on waiting for certain familiar historical “signs” indicating a vaguely defined, yet intuitively cognizable moment of salvation in which those who were wont to regard themselves as chosen could easily recognize. The death of the messiah on the cross was clearly counterintuitive. Yet this absurd event, according to Paul, represented the “power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). The event cannot be apprehended “rationally,” if by such a common philosophical word we mean a sort of proportionality (ratio) among the possible semantic extensions that are acceptable within the grammar of the term “messiah.” Yet it is a kind of counterwisdom that does not exceed, but defies, all such “rationality,” and in the process lays the groundwork for what we may consider an “alternative rationality” within the Western philosophical tradition, more congenial to Christian faith, that will emerge in the twentieth century.

Paul’s “deconstruction” of the language of wisdom in 1 Corinthians is critical, because it establishes at many levels the terms of the debate that would dominate the coming Christian era. Returning to the text of
1 Corinthians, we should turn our attention to Paul’s opening salvo against a certain type of “apologist” who apparently was well positioned at Corinth. “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence [sophia logou], lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power,” Paul explains. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:17-18). An early apologist for the Christian faith against pagan attacks would have naturally drawn on the common identification within Hellenistic Judaism of reason (logos) with wisdom (sophia). The identification had gone mainstream at least a century earlier with the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a respected Jewish philosopher and man of letters. The Greek words Paul invokes in this citation are telling, because they serve to relativize the importance of philosophical argument in discussions of faith, which was a sine qua non for all the Hellenizers.

Paul rattles off a string of synonyms to enforce his point about precisely whom he is describing—“the one who is wise” (sophos), “the scribe” (grammateus), “the debater” (syzētētēs) (esv). The sophos, or wise man, was a familiar object of emulation in the Hellenistic world. Since the Corinthians claimed to have wisdom, it is fair to assume that they were associating their view of what it means to live the Christian life with this well-recognized archetype. The Stoics viewed wisdom as a kind of emotionless detachment, leading to moral rectitude and psychological balance, which was easily filled out in the Jewish mind as a learned person who arrived at similar results through the study of Torah. The wise man enjoyed an almost godlike status in the views of ancient peoples. In other words, Stoicism was often approved by the contemporaries and immediate descendants of Paul as a largely intellectual version of Christianity. But in adding other synonyms Paul clearly intends that the reader will be led to cut his idea of the wise man down to size. The terms “scribe” and “debater” (in the Greek context we might even substitute “clerk” and “lawyer”) give the word sophos more the sense of “sophist,” the fourth-century-B.C. masters of rhetoric who had claimed they could convince anyone of anything thr...