From N. F. Gier, God, Reason, and the Evangelicals
(University Press of America, 1987), chapter two.
Copyright held by author 

The man of faith ventures forth sometimes against all logic and reason
out of fidelity to the inward call that comes to him from God.

--Donald Bloesch

By faith you are sure of all those things of which you have a firm conviction,
but which conviction is not the outcome of observation or demonstration.

--Abraham Kuyper

They who labor to raise up a firm faith in Scripture by arguing are acting absurdly.

--John Calvin

We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to
the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

--Paul (2 Cor. 10:5)

Enlightened reason, taken captive by faith,
receives life from faith, for it is slain and given life again.

--Martin Luther

True reason--i.e., reason determined by God's word--
is nothing else but faith: he receiving of the divine Word.

--Emil Brunner

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

--John 20:29

Faith is a form of mental certitude about absent realities
that is greater than opinion but less than knowledge.

--Aquinas

For the pursuit of the religious way a man needs
to seek certain goals with certain weak beliefs.

--Richard Swinburne

    The proper relation between faith and reason is without doubt one of the thorniest problems in the interface between philosophy and theology. The alternatives on this question range from the radical fideism of Tertullian and Kierkegaard through the mediating position of thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas (where reason is a helpmate to faith) to modern philosophical theologies where reason and speculation dominate. The medieval theologians called philosophical theology "natural" because it draws its data from nature ("general" revelation) and uses only our natural capacity for reason and imaginative speculation. Natural theology makes no appeal to "special" revelation, neither in the form of scripture nor other media besides nature itself. "Nature" is meant to include not only the external world but the vast realm of internal "nature," that which is common to human experience in general.

    Like all human methods, however, natural theology is limited. A good philosophical theologian will readily declare that there are some propositions about God which directly contradict reason (e.g., the Incarnation) or go beyond reason (e.g., a detailed account of God's attributes). Natural theologians may reject these kinds of propositions outright; or they may move to a revealed theology and accept them as articles of faith. Mortimer Adler phrases the limitations of natural theology aptly: "As compared to the thickness of sacred theology, natural theology is very, very thin."¹ Reason cannot possibly comprehend the depth and breadth of religious experience; it cannot claim to be the kernel of human experience either. Reason and speculative imagination should still be the main guides for philosophy, but religious faith must be the response of the whole person, not some abstraction handed down from Greek metaphysics.

    The term "fideism" is usually taken to mean that faith and reason exclude each other, and this is the meaning I wish to ascribe to radical fideists like Tertullian and Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, insofar as the Bible clearly establishes faith in God as superior to human understanding, and insofar as orthodox Christianity has generally accepted this doctrine, then I contend, against all forms of Christian rationalism, that "fideism" is the only term that properly describes the Christian religion. The radical fideist makes the mistake of totally divorcing faith from reason--exhorting us to make leaps in the dark and celebrating the absurdity of Christian doctrines--but Christian tradition has always affirmed the absolute primacy of faith and ultimately rejected the self-sufficient reason of natural theology. While radical fideists say "Believe, even against your understanding," the mainstream Christian fideists believe in order that they may understand (credo ut intelligam). Ultimately all Christians must confess, as Robert E. Cushman describes Augustine's position, that Christ is the first principium of knowledge and that "it is fides which alone apprehends the eternal within the historical...."² The difficulties that such a partisan Christian epistemology causes for philosophical theology are raised later in this chapter.

BIBLICAL FAITH

    That Augustine's position is thoroughly biblical can be shown by an analysis of Hebrews 11, one of the most eloquent and insightful writings on religious faith ever written: "Now faith (pistis) is the assurance (hypostasis) of things hoped for, the conviction (elenchon) of things not seen." The author's use of the Greek pistis is intimately connected with the Old Testament term for faith 'emunah.³ The etymology of this term suggests firmness and certainty, especially through a related word 'aman, which means to "confirm," "support," or "uphold." 'Emunah is also a cognate of 'emet, the Hebrew word sometimes translated as "truth" but which is usually rendered as "faithfulness." Evangelical Roger Nicole argues that 'emet is definitely used in the sense of "conformity to fact" so that biblical faith is a cognitive "belief that" as well as a trusting "believe in."⁴ I am much less certain, however, that these two are as equally balanced as Nicole and other evangelicals imply. Nevertheless, later in this chapter I shall side with the evangelicals against those who contend that religious faith has no cognitive dimension.

    The Revised Standard translation does not really express the full meaning of hypostasis, which in creeds of the early church was used to describe the very nature of God. This is why the Anchor Bible uses the awkward but more correct translation of "groundwork." Furthermore, the word elenchos comes from legal cross-examination ("basis for testing"), which gives a more epistemological tone to the passage. Indeed, Plato uses this term to describe the Socratic dialectic. The Anchor Bible translation is then in full: "Now faith is the groundwork of things hoped for, the basis for testing things not seen." The examples in Hebrews 11 illustrate the meaning of this fideistic motto. Although he could not verify or predict events as yet unseen (v. 7), Noah had the groundwork of faith so that he could hope and be assured of the best. Similarly, Abraham "went out, not knowing where he was to go" (v. 8). For the nonbeliever this appears to be blind, unjustified action, but for the believer standing on the firm "groundwork" of faith it is definitely not. It was most absurd that Sarah should conceive and then unreasonable (even outrageous) that God should then require Abraham to sacrifice the product of this miraculous conception. Nevertheless, both of them found complete "support" ('aman) in their faith.

    Interestingly enough, the epistemological dimension of biblical faith appears in the author's assumption that Abraham considered God able to raise men even from the dead (v. 19). This is perhaps one way for Christians to answer radical fideists like Tertullian and Kierkegaard, who wish to remove the cognitive dimension completely. For them faith and knowledge have nothing to do with each another. Nevertheless, human cognition is not ultimately decisive in biblical faith, for the Old Testament figures "died in faith, not having received what was promised" (v. 13). Therefore, Carl Henry ignores the message of Hebrews 11 when he contends that "the Christian religion champions rationality... and it promotes...the demand for verification and tests for truth."⁵ There is not even the balance between "belief that" and "belief in" that people normally require for justified belief.

    Donald Bloesch is correct in saying that the faith of Hebrews 11 "is not a rational but an existential certainty," but he goes too far in supporting Barth's claim that "faith is not...a standing, but a being suspended and hanging without ground under our feet."⁶ This obvious use of Kierkegaard goes against the clear meaning of 'emunah as "firm ground." But as we shall see, there is a qualitative difference between the God-given ground of faith and the rational grounds given by ordinary induction. Evangelical L. L. Morris observes that the author of Hebrews "is particularly interested in the opposition of faith to sight....and he emphasizes the point that men who had nothing in the way of outward evidence to support them nevertheless retained a firm hold on the promises of God."⁷

    Biblical faith can be summed up as: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight....For the Lord gives wisdom, from his mouth come knowledge and understanding" (Prov. 3:5; 2:6). Even here in Proverbs, Wisdom literature which scholars say is supposed to be more humanistic, the subordination of human cognition is clear and emphatic. The certainty of biblical faith has nothing to do with scientific knowledge or any other form of human cognition; rather, saving knowledge comes from God as a divine gift. Additional key passages for this point are found in Paul: "...think with sober judgement, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him" (Ro. 12:30); "for by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your doing, it is the gift of God" (Ephes. 2:8). These passages give further support for my interpretation of Hebrews 11: the meaning of elenchos must be seen in the context of complete trust in God; it does not have any independent ground in human cognition as does the Socratic elenchos.

    Faith as a divine act is a doctrine found in the whole spectrum of the Christian tradition: in Augustine, among the medievals, the Reformers of course, and contemporary Catholics and Protestants. One particularly good medieval example is Gilbert of Poitier (1085-1154), who restricts Augustinian illumination theory to just one crucial event, viz., the granting of faith. For Gilbert the knowledge of God received in this act is a cognition performed exclusively by the Holy Spirit.⁸ For Calvin "faith...is both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit."⁹

    Barth held that it was by grace that we have faith and by faith our intellects come alive.¹⁰ Following the Reformers and Barth, Donald Bloesch strongly emphasizes the absence of human preparation and achievement. Within the classical Protestant tripartite definition of faith as knowledge (notitia), voluntary assent (assensus), and trust (fiducia), Bloesch warns against the tendency, most pronounced among the evangelical rationalists, to make fiducia contingent upon a preconversion gathering of facts and opinions. Bloesch maintains that all three elements should be integral to the same saving event; and even notitia, following the Pauline tradition summarized above, is God-given and not humanly attained.¹¹ Bloesch is therefore completely at odds with Carl Henry, who in contrast to Christian tradition, holds that "the new birth is not prerequisite to a knowledge of the truth of God."¹²

    In addition to Bloesch, I also find evangelicals J. I. Packer and Paul Helm in agreement with the foregoing presentation of biblical faith. Packer makes it clear that faith in God is qualitatively different from the faith that one has that her dog will obey or that her car will start on a cold morning. Packer shows that religious faith is not on a continuum with other inductive beliefs, primarily because faith cannot be based on even the highest probability but must rest on absolute certitude. This is so because the object of religious faith is an infinite being, not a created thing; and God validates that faith, not human understanding.

    Packer correctly emphasizes that there is of course a cognitive dimension to faith, but he rightly attributes this to the work of the Holy Spirit and not to human effort. As Packer states: "It is fundamental to the nature of faith to take God's word for things; acceptance of the authority of God is the biblical analysis of faith on its intellectual side."¹³ In other words, fiduciary "believe in" takes on the highest importance in Christian faith.

    Paul Helm agrees with Packer: basic articles of faith cannot be demonstrated and the main reasons for believing that the Bible is the Word of God are religious, not philosophical or scientific. Helm accepts the term "fideism," but attempts to establish, as I have done, a position between radical fideism and "externalism," the term he uses for the inductive form of evangelical rationalism. In contrast to the latter's attempt to prove the Bible true by outside evidence, I believe that Helm is completely faithful to Hebrews 11: he exhorts Christians to test (elenchos) what the Bible says on the ground (hypostasis) of complete trust in God. Helm rejects the rational certainty of externalism and supports Bloesch's existential certainty. In contrast to E. J. Carnell's view that "saving faith germinates only after the mind is first convinced of the sufficiency of the evidences,"¹⁴ Helm rightly claims that "God is proved by hearing and obeying Him and finding that He is as good as His Word."¹⁵

RELIGIOUS FAITH AS UNIQUE

    I have attempted to give an interpretation of biblical faith, and I have praised those evangelicals who I believe have been true to the biblical witness. In this section I wish to assess this idea of faith using the tools of the philosophy of religion. My principal objection to the biblical view of faith is the idea of its divine imputation. Such a view causes severe problems for human autonomy and responsibility and appears to be yet another example of God as absolute controlling power. Using the principle of contextualization mentioned in the Prologue, I freely "bracket" this concept of God as an unacceptable cultural intrusion, and I propose full human participation in all acts of religious faith.

    Wilfred Cantwell Smith suggests that the major liability of the view that faith is a divine gift is that, during a time of a crisis of faith like ours, it would be easy to argue that faith's "absence is simply God's failure to bestow it."¹⁶ A more acceptable view of faith would place the major responsibility of its inception on us rather than on God: viz., we must actively seek faith and prepare the conditions of its presence. Even though we have seen that some evangelicals embrace the principle of contextualization, I am certain that they are not ready to give up God's absolute sovereignty, the basic axiom of evangelical theology.

    In defense of the doctrine of faith as a divine gift, one might use the analogy of receiving a one million dollar gift from Chase Manhattan Bank. The point is that the lucky recipient still has to go to the bank and ask for the money. I believe that this analogy is faulty, like so many others which attempt to bridge the gap between God and finite beings. Unlike the assumption in the bank example, where we believe that one freely decides to pick up the money under one's own power, the Christian tradition assumes something quite different. Stressing the sovereignty of God, Augustine maintained that God empowers those who turn to him as well as those who turn away from him.¹⁷ One of the most pervasive biblical themes is that human beings cannot escape God's sovereign control. No bank or other human institution can force us to do anything against our will; but the biblical God allegedly can and does. According to the Bible, God controlled the wills of at least the Pharaoh, Judas, and Jesus.

    In his book Faith and Knowledge John Hick emphasizes the voluntary element in faith and insists that it must be seen as a genuine human achievement. He defines faith as "an uncompelled mode of 'experiencing as'--experiencing the world as a place in which we have at all times to do with the transcendent God."¹⁸ He rejects the traditional Christian idea of faith as a divine gift, especially in its neoorthodox formulation. Hick uses the word fides to indicate the necessary cognitive element, and fiducia to represent the crucial trust dimension in Christian faith. He then correctly observes that "it is significant that in the Bible faith appears frequently as fiducia and hardly at all as fides."¹⁹

    I believe that Hick goes too far, however, in his attempt to protect the freedom of faith. In contrast to the gnosticism of the evangelical rationalists, Hick's agnosticism is unnecessary and excessive. (See Chapter 1:2 for this use of the term "gnosticism.") Hick contends that arguments and proofs play no role in comprehensive world-views: people simply step into the hermeneutical circle of a specific way of experiencing the world. There are, for Hick, no conclusive arguments that can be given for the superiority of one world-view over the other. Therefore, the cognitive aspect of faith is reduced to an interpretation (not a "justified belief" in traditional terminology), and fiducia is trust and loyalty to the transcendent as interpreted. Hick's contention that any traditional natural theology would compromise the freedom of faith and force us to believe certain theistic propositions is mistaken, and I shall say more on this point later in this section.

    In his stress on the voluntariness of faith, Hick rejects all theories which claim that religious faith is a necessary mode of existence or that it can be subsumed under a general idea of trust based on sufficient inductive evidence. I have already noted Packer's arguments in this regard and I quote him once more for emphasis: "The Bible does not acknowledge as 'faith' any religious attitude of mind or heart based on other beliefs...²⁰ Nevertheless, many commentators are fond of arguing that a person's faith in God is no different than a scientist's faith in the uniformity of nature. To the "faith" of science Cantwell Smith adds the basic faith of the philosopher (the love of wisdom) and even the faith that the secular humanist has in reason, truth, and personal dignity. As Smith states: "Faith, intellectually, is assent to truth, whatever it be."²¹

    Such comparisons destroy the unique character of religious faith: the unconditioned nature of the subject's response and the unsurpassed nature of its object. Only the ideologues of science would claim that the laws of nature have the same status, either ontologically, epistemologically or psychologically, as articles of faith. As Hick states: "Religious faith is absolute and implicit belief; the articles of a creed are not merely provisional assumptions. The scientist...does not believe 'religiously,' i.e., absolutely and implicitly, that the universe will continue to exhibit the same 'laws' as yesterday and today."²² Perhaps some humanists' "faith" in human dignity and freedom approaches religious faith, but if it does then this most certainly would be a form of idolatry.

    It is common to find evangelical apologists using this idea of a generic faith common to all people. For example, Carl Henry contends that "faith is an inherent aspect of all human endeavor," and he quotes with favor from W. J. Neidhardt, who defines faith as "that illumination by which true rationality begins."²³ According to Neidhardt, faith supplies the "keystone" ideas for scientific theories, and he refers to a number of famous scientists who have used what Max Planck called "imaginative vision and faith." But surely there is a difference between establishing knowledge about nature and receiving saving knowledge about God. Unlike Hick, I believe philosophical theology can offer justified beliefs that God exists and has certain attributes, but these cognitive beliefs are not the all-important fiducia of traditional Christian faith. Neidhardt's notion of scientific faith consisting of keystone ideas is misleading: these are ideas about nature not trust in nature.

    Although Henry once affirms the traditional idea of "personal faith as a divine gift of the Holy Spirit," this is completely incompatible with his use of Neidhardt's theory, which makes the acquisition of faith anthropocentric rather than theocentric. (This essential distinction is confused when Henry implies that scientific faith is simply an extension of biblical faith. Such a view, of course, undermines the integrity of science.) Henry reaffirms his evangelical rationalism by insisting that as opposed to "blind faith," Christian faith, like scientific faith, must have "adequate evidential supports, empirical or nonempirical."²⁴ By their comparison of scientific and theological knowledge (Henry, incidentally, defends the traditional view of theology as science, i.e., knowledge), evangelical rationalists risk the reduction of fides to scientia. Traditional Christian theology has always resisted such a reduction: faith is a theological not an intellectual virtue.

FAITH AND "WEAK" BELIEF

    Evangelicals are correct in insisting that faith consists of both cognitive and fiduciary elements, and many are wise enough to avoid the rationalist trap by fully subordinating the former to the latter. The task of the rest of this section is to establish the proper interpretation of the cognitive side of faith. A clearer understanding of "belief that" is much more important for us today, primarily because of the rise of religious skepticism. For the biblical writers there was no doubt that God existed and that God had acted in history. Now that these claims are under attack, religious believers, especially those living within a scientific world-view, are tempted to prove their faith by extrabiblical means. Hick's observation that cognitive fides has logical priority, but that fiducia comes first temporally is correct. People of faith, as Cantwell Smith has so brilliantly demonstrated, have rarely ever thought in explicit logical terms, so the virtual absence of cognitive fides in religious literature is not surprising. This silence, however, does not mean that faith has no epistemological dimension at all.

    The greatest challenge to the idea of cognitive faith since Barth is the work of Cantwell Smith, who documents this silence in great detail, with amazing erudition, and with real enthusiasm. In his book The Meaning and End of Religion, Smith showed that traditional faiths did not have any conception of "religion" as moderns use the term. Now in Faith and Belief and a companion volume Belief and History Smith has proposed an even more startling thesis: "Faith is not belief, and with the partial exception of a brief aberrant moment in recent church history, no serious and careful religious thinker has ever held it was."²⁵

    For Smith, like Hick, faith is a direct encounter with the transcendent, while religious belief is the intellect's attempt to understand the transcendent in human terms. We have seen that the Bible emphatically dissuades us from doing the latter. Therefore, Smith contends that the word credo has been wrongly translated as "belief," and that this mistranslation has had tragic consequences for the life of faith. Since the word belief has now become so intellectualized and contains connotations of uncertainty, Smith maintains that it is now completely alien to the traditional idea of faith. He warns that insistence on specific religious beliefs may well lead to the demise of faith altogether.

    One can illustrate what Smith means by using the recent English debate on the Incarnation as an example. (For more on this topic see Chapter Three.) Christian liberals who wish to redefine the meaning of the Incarnation are essentially saying that the orthodox belief that Jesus Christ was literally God has proved to be a stumbling block for many who would otherwise not reject the Christian faith. (The issues of biblical inerrancy and "scientific" creationism could also be used as examples.) Instead of faith being that human quality of love, trust, and loyalty to God, faith has now become something one receives by holding proper doctrines, so "believing is the price that one must pay in order to have faith...."²⁶ Cantwell Smith's provocative proposal could not be more opposite to Henry's claim that Christianity is the only religion which has a "transcendental cognitive revelation as a basic axiom."²⁷ Although Cantwell Smith's book is an intellectual tour de force, there are basic problems with his thesis. In what follows I will try to steer a middle course between Smith and the evangelical rationalists.

    In Faith and Belief Smith covers Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic faith as well as the Christian tradition. He begins his presentation of Christian faith with an analysis of the lectures on baptism by St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Smith argues that in Cyril's view this rite was not seen as a passage from nonbelief to belief. Rather, the credo of both the rites and the creeds literally meant "I set my heart," or more in our vernacular, "I pledge allegiance." Smith maintains that pistis in the New Testament and fides in church tradition had no propositional reference. Smith correctly observes that no one has ever believed in a proposition; rather, "a person believes (or rejects) what a proposition means...to him or her."²⁸ This is where Hick's concept of faith as interpretation and the whole "new hermeneutic" enterprise have their starting point. Smith joins the new hermeneutic when he proposes that the term "understanding" replace the word "belief." I am certain, however, that one can find "belief that" in Verstehen as well.

    I believe that it is possible to grant Smith most of his points (including the hermeneutical ones), reap the full advantages of his view (more on this later), and still retain the idea of cognitive fides. As far as I can tell, Smith is right to conclude that the text of St. Cyril's lectures on baptism does not contain exhortations to explicit belief. But there are hidden beliefs in every line, e.g., a belief that a triune God exists and that God can literally transform baptized human beings. The shocking effect of Smith's thesis is mitigated considerably when we find that Smith agrees with my simple point. After daring his readers to translate the credo of Bach's B Minor Mass as "I believe" (Smith's "I do" is obviously more appropriate), Smith nonetheless concedes that "belief is presupposed. One believes what one's culture takes for granted...."²⁹

    Although earlier he had stated categorically that the creeds had nothing to do with beliefs, Smith nevertheless formulates a basic credo as: "Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty."³⁰ If anything, this phraseology appears to give precedence to "belief that" rather than "believe in." Therefore, Smith must concede that faith and belief are inseparable, a doctrine incidentally that he praises in contemporary Catholic theology. Finally, he admits that it would be "patently absurd to conclude that believing has historically had nothing to do with faith."³¹

     In addition to the preceding concessions, Smith's innovative reading of Thomas Aquinas has come under the close scrutiny of Fredrich J. Crossan. Faith and Belief is filled with some revealing etymologies, and one of the most important, at least for Smith's thesis, is the roots of assensio. This word is crucial for our topic because, ever since Augustine, the Latin verb credere has been defined as "to think with assent." Smith shows that the etymology of assensio takes us back to sentio, sensus, and the realm of feeling.³² Both credo (from cordis=heart) and assensio have taken on intellectual meanings which they did not originally have; so Smith proposes that we translate credo as "I give my heart" and assensio as "I applaud or recognize."

    Crossan cannot reject Smith's etymology of assensio (it is in the Oxford Latin Dictionary), but he does show that Aquinas had his own personal etymology which gave it an unequivocal intellectual meaning.³³ Confirming what we have already concluded above, Aquinas makes it very clear that there is an unqualified assent to what is spoken by God as opposed to the conditional assent of ordinary belief. In addition to this crucial correction, Crossan also shows that Smith is wrong to attribute a universal fides humana to Aquinas, who believed, along with the Christian tradition discussed previously, that saving faith was possible only through Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Smith's dramatic attempt to bring the most intellectual of all Christian theologians into his camp (i.e., a world theology of faith in which beliefs are subordinate) has failed.

    Among contemporary philosophers of religion Richard Swinburne is one of the strongest proponents of natural theology and cognitive faith. In The Coherence of Theism and The Existence of God Swinburne brilliantly defends philosophical theology, and in the final volume in this impressive trilogy, Faith and Reason, he builds a strong case for the necessity of "belief that" in addition to "belief in." The contrast between Smith and Swinburne is striking. Smith is the historian who waxes eloquent about how grand faith used to be and does not conceal his nostalgia for the nonintellectual faith of the past. Swinburne, on the other hand, is the careful analytic philosopher, who does not particularly care how in fact history was; rather, he is much more interested in what is cogent for modern believers to hold.

    Obviously, Swinburne is more realistic: for better or worse (Smith might be right that it is the latter), contemporary human beings use the word "belief" in an intellectual way foreign to premodern peoples. But there is no way that we can actually teach ourselves to use the ancient meanings of words. Furthermore, we have seen that Smith softens the impact of his provocative thesis by conceding that beliefs do have a role in faith after all. (These implicit beliefs are, incidentally, more than the "insight and response" with which Smith characterizes the intellectual dimension of faith in his concluding chapter 7-iii. These terms belong to the affective side of faith rather than the cognitive.) Finally, Swinburne contends that Smith's claim that belief always implies uncertainty is obviously false. For example, my belief that I am now composing these lines is not open to much doubt.

    Swinburne is convinced that all previous attempts to eliminate an epistemology of faith have failed. Smith is entirely correct when he says that no one has ever believed in a proposition, but belief that the proposition is true is part and parcel of its meaning for us. Using Smith's own etymology of "to believe," one could say that a person does not hold something "dear" without any beliefs about that something. Furthermore, one would assume that the person concerned would claim that he had true beliefs about what he held dear. For example, when I tell people that I love my daughter, I assume and they hold that the proposition "my daughter is a real person" is true. Swinburne agrees with many evangelicals that belief, trust, and even hope must have propositional content. For example, in response to Hick's claim that his experiencing the world as God's creation is nonpropositional, one could simply translate this into the proposition "Hick believes that God created the world." As Swinburne states: "Is not to experience X as Y in this kind of case simply to experience X and in so doing automatically and naturally to believe that X is Y? The 'nonpropositional' aspect of Hick's view of faith is simply a matter of the way in which he has expressed it."³⁴

    Swinburne is not persuaded by Hick (or Aquinas for that matter) when they warn us that a cognitive faith will coerce religious belief. For Swinburne the freedom and responsibility of belief are not found in its initial stages, which Swinburne argues persuasively are essentially passive and involuntary, but in what we actually do with our beliefs. With regard to religious beliefs the responsibility is great: faith is meritorious only when it is formed by love and followed by good works. Recall that those first alleged to have recognized Jesus as God were the demons, but they obviously did not love God nor do his will. In support of Swinburne's crucial point, one could hardly describe their belief as voluntary. The demons were not forced to hold Jesus "dear," even though their belief that he was God was unavoidable. In this connection I repeat the epigraph from John Wesley from the Preface: "Neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinions. A man may be orthodox in every point...He may be almost as orthodox as the Devil...and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart."³⁵

    Swinburne's heavy emphasis on cognitive fides does not in the least displace fiducia. Indeed, he freely admits that the Bible and traditional Christianity have always stressed the latter while the former has been the concern of philosophers and theologians. He does point to a few passages that require explicit beliefs, such as "for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Heb. 11:6). But Swinburne concedes that "the faith of many other heroes of the Old Testament ...is a matter of their doing actions in hope rather than belief."³⁶ Abraham's faith, for example, included the hope that God would provide a way out of the acute dilemma of Isaac's sacrifice. He knew "that God was able to raise men even from the dead" (Heb. 11:19), but he did not know that God would do that on this occasion. Abraham could only hope that Isaac would be saved--he could not actually believe it--and such hope is at the heart of biblical faith.

    One could say that Abraham's beliefs were weak but his faith was strong. This is in fact how Swinburne characterizes religious faith: "For the pursuit of the religious way a man needs to seek certain goals with certain weak beliefs."³⁷ For Swinburne all that is needed for the cognitive foundation of Christian faith is a "weak" belief that Christianity is probably true and other religions are false. For the church to insist on "strong" belief, that each of the items of the creed is more probable than its negation, is for Swinburne an unreasonable demand. "...It is as though you are telling a man who needs a fortune and wishes to buy a lottery ticket in the hope of getting it, that he is only allowed to buy the ticket if he believes that the odds are in favor of the ticket winning."³⁸ As no human being could ever have such certainty about the cognitive content of Christianity, it would be totally unfair to require it. Swinburne claims, and Smith has done the research to demonstrate, that a "weak" belief that Christianity was true--that it was generally superior to the competing religions of the Hellenistic Age--was all that the early church would have required. It has been only since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that religious believers, under the pressure of competition from a scientific world-view, have been tempted to require "strong" belief for the Christian faith.

    It would seem that some of the evangelical rationalists, with their demands for biblical inerrancy and "scientific" creationism, go beyond Swinburne's strong belief to some sort of superbelief. While Swinburne's strong belief requires that each of the items of the creed be true, some evangelicals require that the Bible be true in all matters pertaining to history, geography, and cosmology. Again we see the appropriateness of the term "gnosticism." Swinburne's idea of weak religious belief represents an attractive middle way between agnosticism on the one hand and the superbelief of Christian gnosticism on the other. Swinburne has defined strong belief in terms of creedal truths, but some of these--like the Trinity and Incarnation--cannot even be formulated as coherent propositions. (See my discussion in Chapter Three.) Therefore, I will argue that Swinburne is wrong in suggesting that church leaders ought to hold strong creedal beliefs. The only legitimate strong beliefs, if Swinburne is correct in his defense of philosophical theology, will be found in the area of the existence of God, the divine attributes, and other questions in the philosophy of religion.

    Swinburne's thesis stands in stark contrast to C. S. Lewis' idea that, compared to the weak beliefs of science, Christianity requires "assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute."³⁹ Lewis' formulation would be almost acceptable if he, like so many other evangelicals, had not confused belief with faith. According to the analysis above, fiducia requires absolute psychological certainty, but cognitive fides involves assent only to the proposition that a religion is most likely true. Trust beyond the evidence is sometimes appropriate, but belief beyond what one takes for the evidence is always irrational.

    A basic problem in Christian theology has been the tendency to subsume religious claims under the strong logic of necessity rather than the weaker logic of contingency. This distinction is particularly crucial for religions like Christianity which make particular, historical claims. A claim that I heard from an evangelical acquaintance--"If Jesus Christ is God, like the scriptures say that he is, then everything follows deductively from that premise"--is a beautiful example of this mistake. E. J. Carnell's deductive epistemology appears to be partially based on his axiom that "the more a value increases, the more our concern should respect the report of reason."⁴⁰ Carnell seems to have forgotten Aristotle's advice about methodology in axiological studies: viz., we should not demand more precision than the subject matter allows. I would judge that religious claims based on historical events have even less cognitive basis than ahistorical moral imperatives. Our creaturely fate seems to be that about those things of highest value we must be content with the least knowledge.

    The context of Carnell's discussion is a critique of Kierkegaard which culminates with a parable about man faced with a choice of two roads--one leading to life (Christianity) and the other leading to death (unbelief). He ridicules Kierkegaard's position by imputing these words to the man at the road's fork: "My understanding tells me that if I go to the right I will find life; but in passionate faith I shall act against the understanding...."⁴¹ I think that all of us would agree with Carnell that such a man is "unbalanced," but I do not think that he has been at all fair to Kierkegaard. The latter's point is that it is impossible for the understanding to determine which way is the correct road.

    Augustine tells another parable about two roads: Two travellers, one a skeptic who insists on clear understanding and strong beliefs, ask a farmer which road to take to their destination. The skeptic refuses to take the farmer's advice because the latter could not possibly give Carnell's "report of reason." His colleague, however, trusts the farmer and the story ends with him at his goal "refreshing himself" and the skeptic standing in frustration at the fork. I submit that it is Augustine's story, not Carnell's, that is the true Christian parable. The skeptic insisted on strong belief but lost the prize; his partner had faith and won it. Many Christians miss the implicit rebuke of the doubting Thomas, who like Augustine's skeptic wanted strong belief. Recall what Jesus said: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe [better: have fiducia]" (Jn. 20:29). Smith's claim that virtually all of the renderings of 'emunah and pistis as "believe" are significant mistranslations is well supported by this verse.

    Swinburne threatens to undermine a perfectly good thesis by suggesting that church leaders might want to cultivate strong beliefs. He states that "you often need deeper conviction to sell a product than to use it. So there may be a pragmatic case for a church to demand rather stronger belief from its officers."⁴³ I believe that this is unwise advice. Surprisingly, the otherwise precise Swinburne is not entirely correct in his choice of words. The word "conviction" could be much better read as trust, not strong belief. One could assent to all the articles of the creed and at the same time, as is the case for so many believers, fail to have any deep conviction about them.

    Are we to believe that the great missionary efforts of history were carried out by evangelists who actually believed that each item of the Christian creed was more probable than its negation? To the contrary, I would submit that it was fiducia more than cognitive fides which inspired most genuine missionary efforts. Furthermore, I interpret the message of many great religious teachers--Gautama Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Nagarjuna, and Jesus--as promoting a gospel of weak belief. Both the Buddhists and the Taoists used their own forms of dialectic to extinguish the speculative desires of their disciples; and Jesus used dialectic ("the first shall be last..."), parables, and other nondiscursive speech to preach the coming Kingdom of God. Evangelical Jack Rogers correctly observes that Jesus' disciples "continually wanted certain knowledge. Jesus instead called them...to trustful obedience."⁴⁴ The wise priest has always been the one who teaches trust and strength of purpose and warns of the dangers of strong belief.

    There is one final problem that I have with Swinburne's presentation: I do not find his arguments for the probability of Christian truth persuasive. In his two previous books Swinburne presented the most rigorous defense of philosophical theology in recent times. We must assume that he holds that the existence of God and a complement of divine attributes can be held as strong beliefs. But even sound philosophical arguments for the existence of God give us very little religious content. The cosmological and teleological arguments, if sound, would support a God who is revealed in nature only. In addition, the Christian has to contend with the faith claims by the devotees of Krishna or Buddha. The deciding difference among these competing religions is not scientific, historical, or logical--but fideistic. Christians may have a justified belief in their claims to the existence and some attributes of God, but almost everything else they claim about God--that God is a trinity, chooses one people for his favors, sends a divine son to save--all of these are articles of faith. These, I contend, cannot even be held as weak beliefs.

    Swinburne would probably concede most of these points. His careful attempts to argue for Christian superiority, in the weak sense that Christianity is true and its competitors are probably false, do not fail because of a lack of philosophical acumen; rather, they suffer from an inadequate knowledge of the non-Christian religions. Both Hick and Cobb, who have this knowledge, propose that Christian uniqueness is found in Christian love. I am now convinced that Cobb is correct in his judgment that Christian agape is preferable to Buddhist compassion. But I am still impressed with the love of Krishna, which can be interpreted as preserving the individual self that Cobb requires and, as a bonus, assuming a form of process panentheism as well. In any case, even if Christian love were superior, this would not necessarily mean that the general Christian revelation claim was true. I prefer to join Cantwell Smith in his call for a world theology, a fides humana in which commitment to a nonsectarian God would be paramount and the specific belief systems of special revelation would be subordinate. (I also join Smith in his own personal preference for a theistic humanism.) Competing fundamentalisms of strong belief can only serve to perpetuate schism, disunity, and tragically, war.

    General acceptance of Swinburne's notion of weak belief would mitigate the tendency, especially in the Western religions, toward evangelical rationalism. If, in the dialogue of the world religions, the focus is on reconciling beliefs, then there will be precious little progress towards ecumenical unity. (In this way Smith's proposal avoids the syncretism of other world theology proposals.) If, on the other hand, the focus is on faith as trust and loyalty to the transcendent power found in all these traditions, then we are indeed on the road to a world theology. As the Anabaptists have said for a long time, Christians must preach orthopraxis not orthodoxy.⁴⁵ In this regard there is already a common agenda: the love of neighbor, fighting oppression and discrimination, and promoting social and economic justice. Most of us can affirm Swinburne's assertion that it is strength of purpose and what we do with our beliefs that really count. It is Bloesch's existential certainty, not rational certainty, that is the essence of faith.

TAKING REASON CAPTIVE

      In the previous section I have been concerned to protect faith from the encroachment of religious beliefs. I have argued, taking leads from Hick, Smith, and Swinburne, that the cognitive element must be reined in so as to preserve faith's crucial fiduciary dimension. At the same time reason must be shielded from an authoritarian, uncritical trust. Traditional attempts to establish the autonomy of faith in theology and absolute reason in philosophy have always been failures, primarily because autonomy in an interdependent world is an illusionary goal. It is a false dichotomy to assume that faith can give no ground to reason and vice versa, but to find the right relation between the two is not an easy task. Any theory that results in either exploiting the other must be rejected. This last section is devoted to staking out the legitimate claims of reason vis-a-vis religious faith. Reason cannot be autonomous, but it has an integrity that must be protected.

     Evangelical rationalists write much about what they call the "unity of truth." This means that when one uses the word "truth," its meaning is univocal; i.e., truth is the same in science, philosophy, and theology. B. B. Warfield's view on the unity of truth has been expressed as follows: "Christians should not postulate two different kinds of knowing..., one for knowing of truths of faith and the other for the knowing of the truths of history."⁴⁶ One can see that such an axiom is essential if one is to claim that Christian faith is rational and that it can be demonstrated as true. But there are many evangelicals who recognize that such an assumption simply cannot be a Christian one. Cornelius Van Til is especially forceful on this point. By taking scripture as one's point of view, one has, according to Van Til, taken on a particular world-view that profoundly affects one's perception of the world. This means that from the standpoint of faith all facts are "Christian facts." Furthermore, this means that there is no common epistemological ground between Christians and non-Christians. Even our shared image of God, says Van Til, is a "point of conflict."⁴⁷

    Although evangelical rationalists argue vigorously against Van Til and his allies, their own words belie their allegiance to the unity of truth. After claiming that God's revelation is fully intelligible to philosophers, Henry admits that a biblical "way of knowing is...sharply contrasted with philosophical reasoning: it is not antireason, but rather is a profound Logos-revelation or intelligible Word-revelation."⁴⁸ Henry has dissolved the unity of truth obliquely, as Van Til did openly, by establishing a Christian reason independent from "secular" reason. Later on Henry is even more explicit about his break with a truth that all can share. He explains that the difference between Christian truth and other truth is that the former is "divinely authorized, infallibly certain, and biblically attested; whereas all other claims for truth are subject to correction and at most are but probable."⁴⁹ Not only is there no unity of truth here, but there is intellectual arrogance and question-begging as well.

    Henry criticizes secular "gnosticism" and rationalism for making reason into an idol because "then the content of truth is soon conformed to the prejudices of some influential thinker or school of scholars."⁵⁰ Henry seems to ignore the obvious possibility that a theologian working out of a special revelation could distort the truth just as much or more. In my judgment Henry has done the latter in his claim to an infallible divine revelation. Reason can and has been taken captive by innumerable ideologues and ideologies.

    Although he assures us that evangelical theology is a "humble" science, Henry claims nevertheless that it is the perfect science: "The theology of revelation has no reason for hesitancy in characterizing itself as science; it is neither vulnerable to perpetual revision as is merely empirical inquiry, nor is it consigned to ongoing contravention as is philosophical theorizing."⁵¹ Henry's close associate Gordon H. Clark appears to be the inspiration for such strong claims: "First, rationality, which is indispensable to all exchange of ideas, requires a unification of the sciences. Second, since modern scientism cannot supply its own norms, theology should redefine science and rule as queen."⁵² Clark adds that evangelical theologians will do this armed with the "great truth in the law of contradiction." The operative word here is "redefine," for the specifics of Christian revelation will be the guidelines for this partisan "unification" of science.

    Harold O. J. Brown of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, who otherwise joins evangelical rationalism with praise for both Francis Schaeffer and Henry, essentially sides with Van Til on the unity of truth. Brown acknowledges that dialogue with unbelievers is only a partial possibility, primarily because reception of the gospel requires a change of heart brought about by the Holy Spirit. Setting a tone quite different from Henry and Clark, Brown warns against the dangers of a Christian superscience:

The evangelical who is concerned to show the intellectual respectability of scriptural teachings sets himself a worthy goal; but unless he remembers that he can never fully secure the approval of unbelievers for his doctrine apart from their spiritual conversion, there may come a time when he is tempted to compromise the Bible's proclamation in order to secure greater agreement from the participants in the dialogue.⁵³

As I have already shown in the previous chapter, the evangelical rationalists have indeed compromised the biblical message by heavy importation of extrabiblical speculation. Brown's theological contributions are usually disappointing, but he has definitely joined mainstream Christianity with these perceptive comments.

     It was insights like Brown's which tempted Luther to exclude reason from Christian theology altogether. We are familiar with his vitriolic outbursts against philosophy and reason in which he called reason the devil's "whore" and denounced Aristotle as if he were reason's pimp. Even when he was not indulging in rhetorical excesses, Luther made it clear that Christian revelation rules like an authoritarian master over reason. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1517, one finds the following theses: "Therefore, in articles of faith one must have recourse to another dialectic and philosophy, which is called the Word of God and faith....In articles of faith, the disposition of faith is to be exercized, not the philosophical intellect."⁵⁴ In a conversation with his students, Luther once said that "prior to faith and knowledge of God, reason is darkness, but in believers it is an excellent instrument.... Enlightened reason, taken captive by faith, receives life from faith, for it is slain and given life again.... A resurrected reason does not fight against faith but promotes it."⁵⁵ Such pronouncements establish an impenetrable wall between the truth of faith and wisdom of the world; and of course this is what both Paul and Luther wanted. But this does not unify truth, it rends it asunder. It opens the door to theological irrationalism.

    I believe that Luther has expressed accurately the essence of biblical theology--recall Paul's equally forceful "we destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5)--but no self-respecting philosophical theologian can possibly accept such a methodology. I believe that evangelicals are correct in insisting on the unity of truth, but this cannot be attained without preserving the integrity of reason as a critical tool. If truth is unitary, then critical reason cannot be a slave to any presuppositions, even though it cannot say it does not have any. Reason must remain constantly vigilant, checking carefully all claims, including the claims of faith. If reason is taken "captive by faith," then reason completely loses its ability to recognize truth and unify it. If reason is enslaved by faith, then faith controls and dictates the results of reasoning. Reason would truly be a whore if she were open to such liberties. She could be forced to utter nonsense at the command of faith. Any statement could be "true," by direct or indirect inference from one's articles of faith. Critical thinking as we know it would come to an end.

    In the theological anthropology I sketch in Chapter Nine, I propose a process view of human nature in which the various elements--reason, conscience, emotion, and sociability--are related in a dynamic and functional way. This means that Boethius' concept of a person as a rational substance and the classical Greek idea that reason is an end in itself must be rejected. A process view of human nature assumes that human capacities developed as means to certain physical, social, and cultural ends. Reason is best seen as a functional adaptation out of the more basic human capacities of conscious awareness and the need to relate to nature, other humans, and the transcendent dimensions of the cosmos.

    It has long been evident that reason has been used to reach certain ideological ends, so it is incumbent upon us to use it in a responsible way. Therefore, reason can be used for human ends as long as those ends do not subvert reason as the necessary means. Furthermore, using an analogy from Hick,⁵⁶ we must view the steps of an argument as links in a chain, not as steps in a ladder which can be thrown away like Wittgenstein's famous one, or the expendable rafts used to cross the Buddhists' river of samsara. Reason must maintain its integrity and remain a constant companion.

    In my judgment the evangelical rationalists have failed to meet the criteria above. Evangelical John Jefferson Davis recognizes reason as a means to an end, but this goal is obviously an ideological one. According to Davis, Christians must use reason, "the kingdom extending tool," to declare "spiritual warfare against human philosophies and ideologies that deny the truth of the gospel...."⁵⁷ (With the Religious Right this warfare becomes a dangerous political move to pass laws which enforce partisan views of biblical morality and creation science.) Davis handicaps the secular army in this war by stating "that unregenerate reason has no right to judge the truth of the gospel,"⁵⁸ while "spirit-guided" reason can attack at will. For Davis the issue is not between faith and reason, but between a "faithful" and a "faithless" reason. The latter may not criticize articles of faith because "divine revelation has an inner coherence and rationality that must be understood on their own terms."⁵⁹

    Before his untimely death, E. J. Carnell recognized some of the problems with his rationalist methodology and began speaking out against the excesses of fundamentalism, especially the doctrine of detailed inerrancy. In the area of faith and reason, he had previously spoken of "ontological" truth (whatever is real is true) and "propositional" truth ("whenever judgments conceptually house the real"). He felt obliged to add truth as "personal rectitude" as a necessary third level.⁶⁰ Carnell is entirely correct in his argument and he expresses it in unusually elegant language. Carnell seems to imply that only Christianity has been successful in establishing truth as personal rectitude. Carnell is obviously wrong in his claim that classical philosophy did not offer "a method which answers the question 'How is a knowledge of the imperative essence possible?'"⁶¹ Plato made famous the motto that "knowledge is virtue," and it is clear that many of the church fathers, including Augustine, made use of the Platonic tradition.

    Many classical humanists rejected Plato's axiom that goodness and truth were necessarily related, but they definitely believed that they should be cultivated together. Furthermore, many of them, unlike Plato, had the theistic beliefs which Carnell requires. Ultimately, Carnell tells us, truth at the third level means that "to know is to be morally responsible for knowing." This is of course precisely the conclusion that I drew from my process anthropology in the Prologue. I simply now ask readers to decide whether evangelical rationalists like Henry and Davis have really met Carnell's standard. Truth as personal rectitude cannot be a truth that makes reason a slave, and it cannot be one which declares spiritual warfare against people of opposing beliefs.

    It is widely assumed that there are three historical positions with regard to the issue of reason and faith. First, there is the credo quia absurdum of Tertullian, then the credo ut intelligam of Augustine, and finally the intelligo ut credam of Aquinas. Although it is true that Aquinas had one of the most positive views of philosophy in the history of Christian theology, I believe that this classification of him is incorrect. Like the general Christian tradition surveyed above, Aquinas believed that theological knowledge, being direct from God and thus incapable of error, was superior to philosophical knowledge, a mere product of human intelligence. In On the Truth of the Catholic Faith he states: "If in what the philosophers have said we come upon something that is contrary to faith, this does not belong to philosophy but is rather an abuse of philosophy arising from a defect in reason."⁶³ Aquinas believes that reason will never contradict faith, but his axiom, as is shown in the last quotation, has a fideistic base: reason will never contradict faith because reason is judged by faith.

    Any beginning logic student should be able to see the fallacy in this argument. As Rem Edwards phrases it: "If true philosophy is understood to mean 'philosophy that never contradicts revelation,' then St. Thomas is telling us nothing more substantive than that 'a philosophy that never contradicts revelation is a philosophy that never contradicts revelation.'"⁶⁴ In the final analysis Aquinas is no more satisfying than Tertullian, Luther, or the evangelicals. Like them Aquinas is proposing a reason totally "taken captive by faith," a reason not worth having at all.

    I will now try to weave together and summarize the important points of this chapter. Faith as a divine gift and the doctrine that faith totally dominates reason are part and parcel of the doctrine of God as controlling power. Those who are interested in righting the balance between God and human beings must resurrect a fides humana along the lines that Cantwell Smith has suggested. Faith is not a natural part of the human self so that it becomes a necessary mode of existence; but neither is it the supranatural addition that we have seen in the Christian tradition.⁶⁵ Rather, faith is that distinctive, freely chosen, human quality of trust and loyalty in the transcendent power in our lives. Even though we must recognize some form of divine initiative (like Whitehead's "initial aims"), we are ultimately responsible for confirming the faith relationship to God, just as we are in any other relationship of trust. This means that some form of Pelagianism is inevitable. Both Smith and Swinburne strive to make this clear.  

    The logic of faith as a divine gift was obscured until Luther realized that it meant that we are justified by grace alone not by human works. The rejection of the intrinsic value of human achievement is again the result of a God who is seen as sovereign over his creation and who is responsible for all value via creatio ex nihilo. By contrast Smith's fides humana is a virtue, whereas believing and understanding are not; and according to classical humanism and Roman Catholicism, virtues ought to be rewarded. The demons were certainly not praised for their belief that Jesus was God, but those Christians who have faith in Jesus will gain eternal blessedness. As we have seen, Swinburne gives the necessary philosophical analysis of why this must be so. As our initial beliefs are essentially passive and involuntary, moral responsibility begins with the conscientious working out of those beliefs in faith.

    There is a final implication of the following view of faith, one which Smith stresses in the context of his world theology. We must recognize the fides humana in all people of faith, instead of concentrating on what might strike us as their odd beliefs. We must recognize that these people share a faith stance with us and that they may find our beliefs just as strange. John Cobb, however, challenges us to go beyond mere tolerance of the diversity of beliefs; rather, we must actively enter into other traditions (as Cobb has brilliantly done with Buddhism) and let them transform our own always limited self-understanding. (For Cobb this also means working outside the institution of the church.) This means that we cannot just take "God's word for it" (Packer), but we have to use our own critical reason and creative imagination. I believe there are three essential attitudes for those who are aware of world religions and philosophies and who want to live with self-respect and intellectual integrity: trust and loyalty to one's own world-view (which will never be completely transcended), an open, critical stance to that view, and finally a willingness to be changed by the wisdom of other great traditions. True religious faith is complete openness to the truth not a defensive attachment to the idols of specific belief.⁶⁷

Endnotes

1. Mortimer Adler, How to Speak about God (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 154.

2. Robert E. Cushman, "Faith and Reason," pp. 300, 306. Even a liberation theologian like Jose M. Bonino preserves Augustine's axiom that Christian faith is a "specific form of apprehension, a specific epistemological principle" (Toward a Christian Political Ethics, p. 43).

3. In his Two Types of Faith Martin Buber uses the Greek pistis to indicate a cognitive faith while reserving the Hebrew 'emunah for noncognitive trust. Such a distinction has no etymological or exegetical basis, because one can discover an epistemological element in 'emunah as well as the meaning of trust for pistis. Indeed, evangelical Roger Nicole has shown that while the Hebrew 'emet meant both truthful and faithful, the LXX and the New Testament rendered 'emet as the cognitive aletheia, and the idea of faithfulness was borne primarily by the family of words surrounding pistos ("The Biblical Concept of Truth," p. 292).

4. Nicole, op. cit.

5. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, p. 225.

6. Quoted in Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, vol. 1, pp. 239, 226.

7. Morris, The New Bible Dictionary (1st ed.), p. 413.

8. See Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century, pp. 116ff. Roger Nicole shows that there is an intimate connection between grace and truth in many biblical passages (op. cit., pp. 292-93). For contemporary Catholic theologians on faith as a divine gift see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief, pp. 93-94.

9. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles. Library of Christian Classics, vols 20 and 21. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960. bk. 3. ch. 2, sec. 7.

10. See Bernard Ramm, After Fundamentalism, p. 59.

11. Bloesch, vol. 1, p. 237.     

12. Henry, vol. 1, p. 229.

13. Packer J. I. Fundamentalism and the Word of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), p. 117.

14. E. J. Carnell, The Case for Biblical Christianity, p. 49.

15. Helm, Paul. "Faith, Evidence, and the Scriptures." Scriptures and Truth, eds. Carson and Woodbridge, pp. 304, 310-11. Evangelical A. A. Hodge expresses the 19th Century form of "externalism" when he claims that "reason establishes the fact that God speaks" (quoted in John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, p. 30). Evangelical Jack Rogers also criticizes B. B. Warfield for placing rational certainty before the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit (Confessions of an Evangelical, p. 100).

16. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief, p. 140.

17. "From God also is the very power to be hurtful," chap. 32 of Nature of Good, Against the Manicheans in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, p. 358. "And since no one can will unless urged on and called,...it follows that God produces in us even the willing itself" (Eighty-three Different Questions, ques. 68, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70, p. 164).

18. Hick, op. cit., p. 151.

19.  Ibid., p. 3.    

20.  Packer, op. cit., p. 116.

21. Cantwell Smith, op. cit., p. 168; cf. p. 134. A number of other prominent theologians have committed themselves to a generic idea of faith. Both Karl Rahner and John Cobb believe that faith is present in all human beings insofar as they commit themselves to life, conscience, and a world-view. I must add, however, that both Cobb and Smith give a more specific theistic definition of faith that is almost identical to Hick's. See Rahner, Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 2, p. 310; Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, pp. 88, 91; and Smith, p. 103.

22. Hick, op. cit., p. 55.

23. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 169.

24. Ibid.

25. Smith, op. cit., p. 127.

26. Ibid., p. 95. 27. Henry, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 217.

28. Smith, op. cit., p. 146.

29. Ibid., p. 104. 30. Ibid., p. 118

31. Ibid., p. 128. 32. Ibid., p. 283.

33. Frederick J. Crossan, "Fides and Credere: W. C. Smith on Aquinas," Journal of Religion 65 (1985) pp. 399-412. p. 408.

34. Swinburne, Richard. Faith and Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 124.

35. Quoted in D. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, p. 129.

36. Swinburne, op. cit., p. 121. 37.  Ibid., p. 198.

38. Ibid., p. 164.

39. C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays, p. 16, quoted in John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, p. 96.

40. Carnell, op. cit., p. 51.

41. Ibid.

42. Excerpted in Medieval Philosophy, pp. 37-38.

43. Swinburne, op. cit., p. 164.

44. Rogers, Confessions of an Evangelical, p. 77.

45. See C. Norman Kraus, Anabaptism and Evangelicalism. Kraus points out that "Anabaptist confessions of faith are not viewed as universal orthodox...statements of the gospel. They are rather statements of the working consensus of the group, and they are open to revision by ongoing consensus" (p. 180).

46. Frederic R. Howe, Challenge and Response, p. 62.

47. Quoted in Norman A. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, p. 57.

48. Henry, vol. 1, p. 196 49. Ibid., p. 228.

50. Ibid., p. 226. 51. Ibid., p. 212.

52. Quoted in ibid., p. 212. Evangelical Harold Lindsell is just as emphatic as Clark: "The Bible must sit in judgment on science....Metaphysics belongs to those who start with Scripture" (Christianity Today, June 17, 1977).

53. Harold Brown O. J., "The Conservative Option" Tensions in Contemporary Theology, ed., Grundy and Johnson, p. 330. Having praised Brown, I must also point out that he equivocates considerably. He defends the unity of truth in one passage (pp. 336-37) and then goes on to support a position similar to Henry's using Schaeffer's hierarchical idea of Christian truth as "true truth" (p. 342).

54. Luther's Works, vol. 38, pp. 239, 242.

55. Ibid., vol. 54, p. 183.

56. Hick, op. cit., p. 22.

57. J. J. Davis, The Foundations of Evangelical Theology, p. 117.

58. Ibid., 133.

59. Ibid. Davis really hedges on the rationality of basic doctrines: they "transcend the powers of natural reason but do not contradict it" (ibid.).

60. Carnell, op. cit., pp. 59-61.

61. Ibid., p. 61. 62. Ibid., p. 64.

63. Quoted in Rem B. Edwards, Reason and Religion, p. 77.

64. Edwards, Rem B. Reason and Religion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1972. p. 77. Evangelical Gordon Clark has the same problem. For example, when Averroes came to heretical conclusions about individual immortality, this should have been a warning to him, says Clark, "that he had made an error in his argumentation" (Religion, Reason, and Revelation, p. 31). Here again we have faith leading reason by the nose. In his discussion of Aquinas on this point Ronald Nash seems to agree: "God's Word is true and what God teaches will always be consistent with whatever truth humans discover" (The Word of God..., p. 111).

65. Smith, op. cit., pp. 93, 129-30, 140. Smith, however, starts speaking of faith as a gift, because he realizes that "the ability even to start to live, to decide to live,...comes to man from outside oneself" (p. 94). Certainly we have to grant Smith's point insofar as God is the ground of our being. But this does not mean that faith, as a deliberately chosen attitude to God, comes automatically. Therefore, I find Smith's phrase "one's giving of oneself to transcendence is itself a 'gift' from transcendence" (ibid.) not only obscure but an unnecessary and dangerous concession for his fides humana.

66. I am indebted to Cobb for this pluralistic vision. See his Beyond Dialogue and Christ in a Pluralistic Age (especially Chapter 13 on Christ and Buddha). Initially, I was unhappy with his discussion of faith and reason in the latter book (pp. 87-94), especially Cobb's citation of Brunner which I have used as an epigraph along with others who want to take reason captive. In private correspondence Cobb assures me that he believes in critical reason as "relatively independent of one's convictions and even of one's trust," but he still challenges us to synthesize the two: "True reason occurs as our thought is creatively transformed. Faith is trust in creative transformation." I do not identify creative transformation as Cobb's Logos-Christ, but I do support this general thesis.