Faith and Safety: Balancing Faith and Reason?

This is a question about the nature of faith. It asks whether a consideration of health and safety has implications for Christians’ models of faith and reason.

1. Health and Safety

The modern world is conscious of the importance of “health and safety.” Most countries have laws designed to protect the health and safety of workers. Details may vary between nations, but they generally revolve around a common principle. All things being equal, people will try to avoid undermining the health or safety of those around them.

A focus upon health and safety can be viewed as a type of commitment to Jesus’ injunction to “love your neighbor” (Mark 12:31). Whatever else it might mean to love your neighbor, it presupposes wanting your neighbor to be safe and healthy.

Christians sometimes face situations of persecution and martyrdom. But even those contexts are governed by Jesus’ injunction of “loving your enemy” (Matthew 5:44).

So, Christians are committed to loving those around them, and that commitment implies responsibilities towards the health and safety of others.

This raises a question: Are some models of faith more conducive to health and safety than others?

To address this question, it is helpful to begin by clarifying some ideas about “reason.”

2. Models of Reason

When people talk about reason, they may be referring to one or more of the following:

1. Evidence
2. Argument processes
3. Principles.

The first two types of reason occur in the Bible. Arguably, St. Paul cites the Resurrection as evidence justifying Christian claims, and he also gives an argument that Christians will be raised because Jesus was raised (1 Corinthians 15:12–15).

The third type of reason is more controversial. It includes the “self-evident” principles which people take for granted. This could be logical principles such as the law of non-contradiction. Or it might be claims such as statements of Human Rights.

The Bible does not explicitly address these kinds of “principles.” So Christians and non-Christians argue about some of them. Some people insist that the Law of Excluded Middle is self-evident, others deny it. Some cultures have supported slavery, some haven’t. Some people claim that abortion is a human right, others disagree.

The contestable nature of “principles” means that societies are prone to argue about their principles, especially when they have ethical or political implications for others.

The concept of “reason” is more complex than this simple summary (see “Space Angels: Arguing a Point”). However, an important point emerges. Reason and rationality are not simple, or obvious, ideas. So claims about them can be controversial and controvertible.

This has implications when it comes to concepts of “faith.”

3. The Activity of Faith

The activity of Christian faith can be described with three models. Faith is:

1. an intellectual attitude to a claim (i.e., a belief that something is true)
2. a spiritual attitude to a person (e.g., trusting, etc.)
3. an emotional attitude to an encounter (e.g., feelings of awe, etc.).

The Bible illustrates these models. When St. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, he is expressing belief in a claim (Matthew 16:16). When Peter panics, while walking on water, Jesus rebukes him for not trusting enough (Matthew 14:31). When Peter sees Jesus transfigured, he is awed into falling prostrate (Matthew 17:1–8).

These models of faith are conceptually distinct, but they are interrelated in practice. For example, trusting someone presupposes beliefs about that person, e.g., that the person is trustworthy. And a salvific faith must involve more than just believing, otherwise demons would be saved (see James 2:19).

Many of the historical disputes between Christians have involved oversimplifying attempts to reduce faith into a single model. But the Bible shows that Christian faith isn’t a simplistic “either, or.”

4. The Content of Faith

The differing models of faith as an activity (Section 3), lead to at least three differing models of the content of faith. Faith contains:

1. beliefs (e.g., doctrines and creeds)
2. actions (e.g., a “formed faith” containing “good works”)
3. feelings (e.g., love, awe).

All three types of content can be found in Christian thinkers. Ecumenical councils promulgate creeds and doctrines. St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) insisted that faith must be “formed” by charity in order to become a living, salvific faith (Summa Theologiae 2-2, Q.4). Faith, as an “affective” response to God, can be seen in aspects of Carmelite Spirituality, such as the writings of St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582), or the poetry of St. John of the Cross (d. 1591).

Following the sixteenth-century Reformation, and especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment, people began to advance ideas about reason which directly challenged aspects of Christian faith. Some of those claims were issues of historicity and “evidence,” but others were rational “principles” about what was reasonable.

These challenges led to three distinct models of how “faith and reason” should be related to each other:

1. Fideism
2. Rationalism
3. Harmonizing faith and reason.

5. Fideism

Fideism is the view that faith has a priority over reason. As there are different models of faith, so there are different ways of expressing fideism. It can be the view that people should just believe, and that reasons for belief are irrelevant. Or it can be the view that faith is (just) an emotional response, so rationality is a distraction.

Historically, fideism often arose in pious contexts where emotive aspects of religion were stressed. But it could also be a religious version of Romanticism’s quest to find authenticity in human feelings.

Whatever its origins and characteristics, fideism also proved to be a convenient way of ignoring reason’s challenges to religion. If reason is an irrelevance or distraction, then religious believers can insist that their faith content is right, regardless of what science or history might say about it.

Fideism can seem an initially attractive way of protecting religious certainties from the claims of reason. But it leads to dangers. When evidence and argument become irrelevant to belief, then people lose an important filter for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate beliefs. Spiritually abusive cults can tell fideistic followers to just believe. They can insist that followers should not look for reasons or evidence for their beliefs, as doing so is a sin against their fideistic model of faith.

This kind of spiritual abuse occurred in the earliest days of Christianity. Gnostic cults like the Borborites led followers into sexual excesses. Abusive versions of fideism continue in the modern world. In their most extreme forms they lead to the death and destruction seen in cases like the Jonestown Massacre, or Millenarian Catholic Apocalypticism.

Fideism can seem to be an advantageous model of faith, especially in a world of rational challenges to faith. But it is an extremely dangerous model, as it lacks the rational safeguards which protect religious believers against spiritual abuse.

6. Rationalism

Rationalism is the view that reason has a priority over faith. This can seem an attractive form of religion, as it uses reason to avoid the dangers inherent within fideism and its fanatical expressions.

For example, Protestants and Catholics managed to kill between 4 and 8 million people in the faith-driven disputes of the Thirty Years’ War (1648). Understandably, if faith seemed to be driving those wars, then an appeal to “reason” as an alternative to the violence was bound to seem a preferential approach to religion.

But reason is not a simple idea (see Section 2). It includes a concept of “principles” which are deemed to be self-evident, or unchallengeable. This can lead to a kind of rationalistic extremism, in which people insist that their own particular views about rationality are “right.”

For example, materialism is an unchallengeable principle for some rationalists. Some rationalists claim that communism is a self-evidently superior form of government. Others insist upon specific “woke” cultural assertions as rationally obvious, and then they persecute others who disagree with them.

Rationalism avoids some of the dangers of fideism. But it generates its own dangers, as it can become an alternative form of opinionated extremism.

7. Harmonizing Faith and Reason

This is the view that faith and reason are both equally important, and that they should be held together in a harmony. There are two models of how this can be done:

1. Exclusively harmonious
2. Inclusively harmonious.

The first model is the view that faith and reason have their own exclusive zones of interest, and so they do not overlap. They are “non-overlapping magisteria.” Einstein is often quoted as an advocate of this type of view, as he reputedly said: “Science tells us how, religion tells us why.”

This model cannot work for religions like Christianity. Christian faith involves beliefs about historical events, like the birth and death of Jesus. Those events are also investigated by rational sciences, like history and archaeology. So, faith and reason cannot be separated into exclusive and autonomous zones of interest.

If there is to be a harmony of faith and reason, then it must be an “inclusive” harmony. This “inclusivity” arises because faith and reason deal with the same, overlapping matters; but they cannot contradict each other. (See Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998),17.) This is the model of Vatican I and Vatican II.

8. Vatican I and Vatican II

Vatican I (1870) stated, “There can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since God is responsible for both” (Dei Filius, 4.5). This was echoed by Vatican II (1965), which added that science (reason) has its own proper methodological autonomy which faith must respect (Gaudium et Spes, 36) .

This model balances the extremes of fideism and rationalism by saying that both have got something to learn from the other. The extremism of fideism must be blunted by the evidence of rationality. The cultural imperialism of rationality’s principles must be tempered by the insights of the content of faith, i.e., Revelation.

Embracing this harmony of faith and reason has implications for Christians. It means that they cannot propose interpretations of the content of faith, without ensuring that they are harmonious with reason, otherwise they fall into fideism.

This was the error at the heart of the Galileo Affair (1633). Scientists claimed that they had evidence that the earth rotated around the sun. Theologians dismissed their evidence, claiming that Scripture and Tradition taught the opposite (i.e., Geocentricism). But, insisting upon an interpretation of faith which rejects the evidence of reason, destroys the harmony of faith and reason. It collapses into a version of fideism, creating a contradiction between faith and reason.

As with all balances between extremes, it can be hard for people to maintain the balance between fideism and rationalism. This difficulty is particularly evident in some of the religious disputes of the twentieth century. Fideistic tendencies have driven traditionalists to dismiss the insights of reason, while rationalistic tendencies have driven modernists to reject the insights of faith. Both approaches err, to the extent that they lose the harmony of faith and reason. (See “Modernism: Did Vatican II save the Church from Disaster?”)

9. Faith and Safety

There are various models of “faith.” There are differing models of “reason.” And there are a variety of ways of combining the models.

Historically, Christians have argued about which is the “right” model for faith and reason. They have interpreted Scripture in different ways, often privileging one of the models, and then insisting that it is the one true model. Differences of opinion have tended to come down to differences of interpretation of specific texts about faith.

Perhaps there is a different way of approaching the issues, one which takes as its point of departure a commitment to a basic health and safety.

Fideism is a risky model of faith and reason because it abandons the safeguards of rationality, and exposes people needlessly to the risks of spiritual abuse. Rationalism is a risky model because it abandons the safeguards of faith, and exposes people avoidably to the risks of a blinkered cultural imperialism.

If Christians love their neighbor, why would they impose the needless and avoidable risks of fideism or rationalism upon others, when there is the harmonizing model of faith and reason which seeks to mitigate those risks?