Wittgenstein's analysis of the workings of
everyday languages shows (1) that words are like ropes woven from many strands
and (2) that, as a result, the meaning of a word is determined by its use in a
form of life designed to realize a distinctive purpose. The use of "faith" in the Christian
tradition illustrates both insights.
Here, I an concerned only with a limited cluster of concepts, belief,
trust and faithfulness.
Thus, in the Jewish Scriptures, the Exodus-
and Covenant themes centered the meaning of "faith" in trust and
faithfulness. The story in which Yahweh
called Abram, son of Terah, to leave his identity and security in his tribe to
set forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh is a typical
example. Yahweh's words did not convey a
developed belief-system or moral discourse.
Rather, they invited Abraham to trust that God would be faithful and
called for a corresponding faithfulness on the part of Abraham.
Early authors in the Christian tradition
referred to Abraham as "our father in faith." But an obsessive concern with a distinction
between orthodoxy and heresy soon shifted the emphasis from trust to belief,
and that distinction, in turn, generated references to belief in the one true
Church. In the same vein, as the
tradition evolved, the virtual identification of "faith" with
"belief" was solidified by distinctions between faith and reason, reason
and revelation, beliefs and knowledge.
Presumably, reason conferred knowledge and truth. If so, what truth-value did beliefs have?
At the dawn of the Modern Era, the emphasis
on true beliefs provided the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic
and Lutheran polemicists. In this
debate, Protestants who accepted some version of Luther's doctrine of
justification by faith alone had to embrace three beliefs, (1), that an
original sin had severed the natural relationship between God and humans and
(2) that Jesus' death on the Cross made reparation for that sinfulness, and (3)
that these beliefs could be found in the Scriptures. (Luther's doctrine implied that true
believers entered a restored relationship in which they were "totus simul justus et peccator"
("at once totally sinful and totally justified").
Centuries later, to recover connotations of
trust, Kierkegaard encoded his thought in a formula, "the leap of faith,"
and supplemented the formula with an argument designed to show that the leap in
question is absurd from any human point of view. In his works, then, the distinction between
belief and knowledge is transformed into a polar opposition.
In this context, I must question the thesis
argued by Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address. I quote:
"At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the
concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable
dilemma. Is the conviction that acting
unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always
intrinsically true? I believe that here
we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the
word and the biblical understanding of faith in God." (He continues with his offensive reading of
Scotus: "In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we
find trends in theology that would sunder this synthesis between the Greek
spirit and the Christian spirit . . . "
But anyone who understands that Scotus was searching for a philosophical
framework capable of supporting an incarnational theology must judge that the
Pope's ignorance of the history of philosophy reveals his determination to
endow Aquinas's synthesis of faith and reason with a timeless authority.)
My critique of the Pope's references to
both "reason" and "faith" can be simply put. Implicitly, the Pope embraces the strand in
the philosophical tradition which assumes (1) that a literary construct,
"reason", provides a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and
god-like perspective and (2) has the power to compel assent to truths found in
Scripture and consent to the moral judgments which reason uncovers in the
natural order of creation. Quite
obviously, since the notion of reason understands the detachment as an
interrogatory stance, a stance which endows reason with the power to impose
closure on endless questioning, it must be situated in an all-encompassing
metaphor of power and judgment. Clearly,
the influence of that metaphor is apparent in the Pope's insistence that God
acts reasonably. (Note well: Every judgment is an exercise of power.)
Since I read the Scriptures through a code
derived from a metaphor of intimacy rather than a metaphor of power and
judgment, I understand the call for faith as a call for trust and faithfulness. And since reason is a useful tool but a harsh
master, I regard the Pope's supposition that a synthesis between faith and
reason was divinely ordained as pernicious.
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