On faith and reason—again

A little over a year ago, Pope Benedict XVi delivered his now-famous lecture, “Faith, Reason and the University. Memories and Reflections,” at the University of Regensburg. In that unprecedented papal academic lecture, the Holy Father argued the need for “reason and faith [to] come together in a new way,” given the growing split between the two.

Pope Benedict is concerned that forms of non-rational and even irrational faith, on the one hand, are proliferating in some parts of the world, while forms of faithless reason are prevailing in others. Both pose real dangers to humanity. This week’s editorial will address some dangers of non-rational approaches to faith. A later editorial will address the perils of rationalism divorced from faith.

As an example of faith deprived of the leaven of reason, the pope instanced the militaristic strain of Islam. This instance garnered headlines around the world and provoked riots and bloodshed in the Middle East, inadvertently proving the pope’s point. He might well have instanced Christian fundamentalism as well, for it too contains the seeds of irrationality and hence of violence.

This week’s “Faith Alive” section (pages 8-9) discusses fundamentalism as a world-wide phenomenon found in various religions, especially those with sacred texts. In all its forms, fundamentalism regards its sacred texts not just as divinely inspired but virtually as divinely dictated, with little or no “input” from its human authors. It follows, then, that these texts are to be taken “literally,” without the interference of the human activity of interpretation. “The text says what it says,” declares the fundamentalist. But here’s the problem: interpretation is necessary if the reader is to extract any meaning from the text.

The Catholic tradition has pondered these matters for nearly two millenia. As a religion based on belief in the Incarnation of the Word of God, the divine logos (word, reason, logic) in the man Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity in fact proclaims the “marriage of the divine and the human” in him. Hence the classic Catholic tradition has always had room for human reason, for example, philosophy, in formulating its theology, which is an attempt to understand faith. Fides quearens intellectum, wrote Saint Anselm—”faith is seeking understanding.” And so, often with difficulty, the Catholic tradition has sought to understand the sacred texts of our faith, especially the Old and New Testament using the tools of reason in its analysis of the details of the sacred texts in its interpretation of their meaning. The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), codified the Church’s developing understanding of the Scriptures by affirming that the inspired human writers of Scripture were “true authors,” along with the Holy Spirit, who brought to their task their human gifts, understanding and talents. Through their human words, the eternal Word of God is expressed. To “decode” that Word, the human words must be analyzed, translated and interpreted by human beings so that human beings of different times and places may understand them and, ultimately, the divine Word that they incarnate.

Such a task is daunting and requires enormous scholarship on the part of many. It also frightens the fundamentalist, whose movement (in the sense of Protestant fundamentalism properly so-called) began in 19th Century America, as a reaction to the uncertainties seemingly posed by the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which was just then beginning to prevail.
In its extreme form, fundamentalism can lead to everything from snake-handling to a rejection of science and technology. It can lead and has led to the condemnation of those who think differently and, as Edward P. Hahnenberg points out (see page 8), “What all fundamentalisms share is a negative view of the world and the claim to have direct access to God.”

At its basis, Catholic Christianity rejects both the utterly negative view of the world and the claim of direct access to God. Although our world is fallen, it is not so negative that God has given up on it. Indeed, Jesus tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (John 3:16). It is that world that the incarnate Word of God has redeemed by coming into it as a man, “like us in all things but sin,” taking on our human nature, suffering even death for our sins and rising for our justification.

Nor does the Catholic tradition teach that believers have immediate or “direct access” to God in that fundamentalist sense. Rather, it takes seriously the mediation between God and man effected in the God-man, Jesus Christ. It understands that God’s grace is mediated through him, and comes to us indirectly, as it were, through sacraments and sacramentals, which are actions of Christ through his Church, his Mystical Body. And it has come to understand that the Word of God is addressed to us in the human words of Scripture that we must try to understand, using our God-given tools of reason, analysis and interpretation, reading these texts carefully, in their proper historical contexts and in conformity with the lived tradition and living Magisterium of the Church.

While such is the general trajectory of the development of Catholic teaching on Scripture, Pope Benedict noted at Regensburg that there have been counter tendencies since the late Middle Ages that would “sunder” the synthesis “between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit,” for example the nominalism of John Duns Scotus that cast doubt on the human mind’s ability to understand God’s Word.

Such tendencies are not entirely absent among Catholics. There can be, as Hahnenberg points out, Catholic forms of fundamentalism, in which certain elements of the tradition, certain Magisterial documents of the past, or even reports of private revelations are taken out of context and read without the careful analysis and interpretation that they too require.
Such tendencies evince the kind of dichotomy or split between faith and reason that the logic of the Incarnation excludes.
A year ago Pope Benedict called for reason and faith to “come together in a new way.” The Catholic tradition offers a way and a context for such a coming together—provided that the Catholic people can avoid the twin temptations of fundamentalistic faith and rationalistic secularism.

—DKC