23 June 2009

Aquinas for Adventists: A Primer on Faith and Reason

By Zane Yi

I’m going to make a suggestion that will probably sound a bit strange to many reading this
—Adventists (former and present, along with their friends) living in the 21st century. In
light of the challenges of secularism, post-modernism, evolution, etc. (the list goes on and
on) to our community, I believe revisiting, or perhaps visiting for the first time, the thought
of Thomas Aquinas would prove to be instructive and beneficial. I believe Aquinas models,
as well provides, a helpful framework to help us deal with the many thorny questions that
arise from trying to understand the relationship between faith and reason.

The medieval ages are a mystery to many people—especially Protestants. We talk a lot
about the early church, and then skip a thousand or so years to the Reformation. What lies
between is discounted as a period of spiritual and intellectual darkness. This is an erroneous
assumption and we pass over much wisdom in making it.

The pressing intellectual issue of Aquinas’ time was what to do with the writings of
Aristotle, which had been discovered by the Latin West through contact with the Muslims
in Spain. At this point, theology and philosophy in the West was largely Augustinian (a
blend of Platonism, Stoicism, and the Bible). Intellectuals and Christian theologians did not
know what to do with the Aristotelian framework, which was more empirical, and seemed
to be more comprehensive and have much more explanatory power in explaining the
physical world, as well as how to live life, i.e. ethics, all without referencing God.
Furthermore, some of Aristotle’s claims (the earth is eternal, virtue is attained though habit
and not given to us, etc.) seemed to be in direct contradiction to Christian faith as it was
understood.

What should the church do with this “pagan” wisdom?

There were three basic reactions to the study and teaching Aristotle. One group thought that
Aristotle was completely wrong about everything. There were even sermons preached on
the errors and evils of Aristotle! His writings were at one point formally condemned by the
church and forbidden to be taught at the main Christian university in the west—the
University of Paris.

Another group, later know as “the radical Aristotelians”, wholeheartedly accepted

everything Aristotle said, including suppositions that were in clear contradiction with the
claims of Christian theology, as higher and better truth(s).

Yet another group advocated a position later called “the doctrine of double truth”.
According to its proponents, there are some things that are true because they can be
“demonstrated”, i.e. Aristotelian logic and observation, and other things that are true
because they are in the Bible, and that there is no problem with this. (Think of Stephen Jay
Gould’s NOMA.)

Let’s call these reactions ones of rejection, reception, or relativism. The fascinating fact
about Aquinas was his refusal to follow any one of these intuitive positions. He carved out
a distinctive fourth approach.

I won’t get into the specifics of how he does this here. (His body of work is immense and
he has something to say about almost anything!) Very generally speaking, however,
Aquinas became a careful reader of and commentator on Aristotle. He affirmed much of
what Aristotle said, showing the greatest respect, and interpreting him in ways that brought
as much harmony as possible between Aristotle’s position and that of Christian faith.
Where the difference is irreconcilable, sometimes Aquinas respectfully departs from
Aristotle, acknowledging his limitations and shortcomings. At other times, however, he
defends Aristotle, and argues against a certain interpretation of Scripture or ecclesiastical
authority.

Although unappreciated in his time (his writings were initially condemned by the church as
being too Aristotelian), Aquinas’ writings have withstood the test of time and have gone on
to shape the church that followed him.

What allowed Aquinas to respond this way to Aristotle? The reason goes beyond
personality and philosophical chutzpah; it is theological--it is his belief that God is the
creator of all things.

The following excerpt(s), from his book Summa Contra Gentiles (Book I, Chapter 7),
illuminates his assumptions (the emphases are mine):

Now, although the truth of the Christian faith which we have discussed surpasses the
capacity of the reason, nevertheless that truth that the human reason is naturally endowed
to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.
[T]he knowledge of the principles that are known to us naturally has been implanted in us
by God, for God is the Author of our nature. These principles, therefore, are contained
by the divine Wisdom [i.e., the Bible]. Hence, whatever is opposed to them is opposed to
divine Wisdom, and, therefore, cannot come from God. That which we hold by faith as
divinely revealed, therefore, cannot be contrary to our natural knowledge.

[W]hatever arguments are brought forward against the doctrines of faith are conclusions
incorrectly derived from the first and self-evident principles imbedded in nature. Such
conclusions do not have the force of demonstration; they are arguments that are either
probable or sophistical. And so, there exists the possibility to answer them.

Now, I should be clear, as I’m sure I will be misunderstood by some as advocating a

wholesale adoption of Thomism; I’m not. I believe Aquinas’ thought in our day--whether it
be about God, human beings, the physical world, or ethics--needs to be engaged in the same
way he engaged Aristotle in his own, respectfully and critically.

But, more specifically, on the points above, and as a Protestant who, in some ways, has
taken the “postmodern” turn, I find myself surprisingly in agreement with Aquinas. Much
of what he says seems implicit to me from the Biblical ideas(s) that there is one creator of
everything and, hence, one ultimate source of truth, and that humans are created by God
and in his/her image.

One common theological criticism of Aquinas, and Thomism in general, is his seeming
lack of concern for the cognitive damages of sin. (Aquinas seems to think that the negative
effects of sin on humans are primarily volitional.) Protestants, following Calvin, want to
attribute total depravity to human beings. I think there’s something to the point that sin
impacts more than the direction and strength of our wills, but would argue that, if total
depravity cannot mean the annihilation of God’s image in humans; this is clearly false. In
fact, for Calvin, the “total” in total depravity did not refer to the loss of all ability, as
commonly and mistakenly thought, but to the diminishing impact of sin on every capacity.

In other words, after the Fall, reason still works.

In our day, we, as the believers in every age have, face the challenge of living out and
communicating our faith in a wider, “unbelieving” culture. Sure, the precise issues up for
debate are different; however, replace every instance of “Aristotle” above with “Darwin” or
“post-modernism” or "Muslims" or even “fundamentalism” and you’ll see how closely
Aquinas’ situation parallels our own. It is tempting to take the easy way(s) out--it’s easy to
reject any new and foreign idea as patently false. Likewise, it’s easy to uncritically accept
any new intellectual trend as God’s truth. Lastly, there is always the alluring path of
relativism—everybody is right! The more fruitful (and, I should add, difficult and time
consuming) via media is the one that Aquinas models for us--one of critical engagement
and rapprochement. In other words, trying our best to truly understand the ideas we
encounter, we ought to bring them into open-minded dialogue with the sacred truths and
experience with which we have been entrusted. We should do this with the faith that, as
Arthur Holmes puts it, “All truth is God’s truth.”
_______
Zane Yi studies and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in New York.

http://www.spectrummagazine.org/blog/2009/06/23/aquinas_adventists_primer_faith_and_
reason

Augustine for Adventists: More Thoughts on Faith and

Reason
By Zane Yi

One of my favorite prayers is one penned by St. Augustine:

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were
within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I
plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with
you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have
been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you
shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in
breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You
touched me, and I burned for your peace."

My goal in this post is to look at Augustine’s biography, and the story behind this prayer,
more than his actual philosophical and theological thought, with the hope of finding more
resources to address the question of the relationship between faith and reason.

Augustine was born into a family of mixed religious convictions. His mother was a devout
Christian, but his father was a pagan. Early on, Augustine was unimpressed by Christianity
and the Bible. Aesthetically, he found the prose of the Bible to be awkward and clumsy.
(He preferred the much more elegant prose of the Latin classics and went on to study and
teach rhetoric.) Morally, he found himself struggling with his physical drives. Before his
eventual conversion to Christianity, he had a mistress and had a child out of wedlock. (One
of his famous prayers is his cry to God: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”)
Intellectually, the main problem that befuddled him was what today we might call “the
problem of evil.” He could not reconcile the idea that a benevolent God had created
everything with the reality of pain and suffering in the world.

Trying to satisfactorily untangle this conundrum led Augustine to reject the Christianity of
his mother, and on an intellectual journey, which I will now oversimplify to make my point.

His reading of the author Cicero, through his study of rhetoric, gave him some familiarity
with Stoic philosophy, which emphasized self-mastery, and this provided him with some
resources to explain and deal with his sensual desires.

However, Augustine needed more; he wanted an explanation about reality and this led him
to Manichaeism. He spent nine years as a hearer of Manichean teachings. Simply put, the
Manicheans taught that here was a perpetual struggle between two eternal, equal, and
opposing forces—light and darkness. Our souls, comprised of light particles, had become
entrapped in the darkness of the world. Through ascetic practices one could overcome the
powers of darkness, and eventually, join the greater Light.

This explanation initially made a lot of sense to Augustine. It explained, perhaps in an

inelegant way, the source of evil in the world; it also helped him make sense of his moral
struggles. Eventually, however, Augustine became dissatisfied with this explanation. He
recalls a disappointing meeting with a leader of the Manicheans, whose simplistic and
unclear answers left him with questions about the ultimate origin of everything.

Augustine left Manicheanism behind and, for a short time, became a skeptic.

Then he met Ambrose, the Christian leader of Milan, who interestingly, introduced
Augustine to writings of some Neo-Platonists. The Neo-Platonists had an explanation of
evil that Augustine found very compelling. Simply put, evil was understood to be a
privation of the good. In other words, evil does not exist on its own, as an independent
entity apart from the good, but is parasitic on goodness. Evil is a lack of goodness.

This way of thinking about evil opened Augustine to theism and the God of Christian
Scripture, the God, who in the beginning, creates everything ex nihilo and declared it good.
I won’t recount his conversion to Christianity here (which had mainly to do with his moral
struggles and his discovery of a spiritual power beyond his personal efforts), but eventually
Augustine became an influential Christian leader and author, and beyond the confines of
Christendom, has done much to shape Western culture.

This, critics will say, was a negative development for the church. Augustine gets a bad rap
in many contemporary circles for introducing “errors” into Christian thought. One of them,
with which, many of us are familiar; he’s the guy who brought Platonism, with its
erroneous dualistic anthropology, into Christian theology.
The other, more charitable way to read him, however, is seeing him as doing the same thing
Aquinas was doing in his own day (see my previous post) - making Christianity intelligible
to the reigning intellectual framework of his day. (Many people in his day found neo-
Platonism to be a very convincing way of explaining reality and the self.)

Augustine’s thought, in a vivid way, reveals the double-edged blade of the theological
endeavor. On the one hand, one of the positive things good theology does is making the
truths of Christian Scripture relevant and comprehensible to contemporary culture. The
downside to this is that culture changes and once the reigning intellectual framework of a
respective culture shifts, the theology that has been developed to address it becomes
outdated.

Ultimately, however, I believe Augustine’s biography shows us something valuable about

the relationship between faith and reason. It’s common to pit faith against reason. Reason,
philosophy, science, etc. is seen as getting in the way of faith and leading away from
devotion to God. Augustine story demonstrates the opposite. First, we learn that reasoning
can prepare the way for faith. Ambrose used the ideas of neo-Platonism to answer
Augustine’s very valid intellectual questions. Secondly, however, Augustine’s story shows
us how reasoned inquiry can eventually lead us to God, the source of all truth, and the
journeys each of us undergo can serve to eventually deepen our understanding of and
service to God, who transcends, and is the source of, the created order.
__________
Zane studies and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in New York. (He is not a
secret member of the Jesuit order.)

http://www.spectrummagazine.org/blog/2009/06/26/augustine_adventists_more_thoughts_f
aith_and_reason

Anselm for Adventists: Faith Seeking Understanding

By Zane Yi
In this post, I want to turn to look at the thought of yet another medieval figure—St.
Anselm. Previously I have argued that Aquinas shows us a way to think of faith and reason
in harmony (with faith completing the aspirations of reason). Augustine’s biography shows
us a way that reason can lead to faith. Anselm, I propose, provides us with inspiration to
think about the role reason can play in the life of the believer, or in his own words, the
importance of “faith seeking understanding.”

In his Proslogion, Anselm attempts to prove God’s existence with an ontological argument,
and then goes on to provide arguments for God’s attributes—God’s omniscience, God’s
omnipresence, God’s eternity, etc. I’m not interested in focusing on his claims and
arguments here. (Numerous philosophers, as early as Aquinas, have found Anselm’s
ontological argument unconvincing. Others find his arguments regarding God’s nature,
along with the claims of natural theology, in general, highly speculative.) Rather, I want to
focus on a prayer that introduces this work. Anselm writes:

“I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my

understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart
believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order
to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I should not understand.”

Anselm is not a skeptic demanding proof in order to believe in God. The Enlightenment
thinkers would later make the impossible demand of doubting everything and suspending
judgment on all matters until sufficient evidence and reasons had been attained. (Already
Anselm, in the medieval ages, seems aware of the post-Enlightenment insight that every
position, religious or non-religious, ultimately involves a leap of faith.) He already believes
that God exists, that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and eternal; and yet, he longs to
understand in a deeper way these truths about the God he loves; he seeks to reason about
the affirmations of his faith.

That’s what strikes me about his prayer: “[I]n no wise do I compare my understanding with
[your sublimity]; but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart
believes and loves.” Anselm understands that God and God’s truth transcends his
understanding; yet he longs to render understandable what he can.

Compare this with the attitude of Tertullian, an early church father, who is known for his
rhetorical question, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem or the Academy with the
Church?” (The implied answer is “nothing.”) Pair this question with another saying
attributed to him--“I believe because it is absurd!”--and you have an understanding of faith
all too common today. Many Christians seem to have followed Tertullian’s purported
example. Their faith is one that is hermetically sealed against the irritating dust of doubt.
There are no questions--“The Bible says it; I believe it.”

Others, however, find this approach unsatisfactory. Many of us were born into faith. We
grew up listening to Uncle Arthur (or Dan) and Aunt Sue, attending Sabbath School,
singing hymns, sitting through sermons, and eating vegetarian potlucks. Yet, the questions
that arise about our beliefs are not the ones that are lodged at us from the outside; they rise
from within as we live life. We seek to understand our beliefs and to reconcile them with
our thoughts and experiences; the prospect of living a compartmentalized, cognitively split
life seems unbearable. We seek integration and to make sense to ourselves.

This, I believe, comes from our God-given inquisitive natures.

However, all too often, we treat this aspect of ourselves as detrimental to the life of faith.
Often, this desire to make sense of things, and the questions that arise from trying to satiate
it, is pronounced sinful. This is understandable. Questions make us feel uncomfortable.
Asking and answering them may cause us to hold the beliefs we initially held in a different
way. This process may even cause us to revise or abandon certain beliefs. Therefore, we
want to shut people up who ask them in church. We ignore questions, dismiss them, and
stuff them when they arise.

There is a growing concern in our community about the apparent hemorrhaging of young
adults from our ranks. This is a complicated issue that other faith communities are facing as
well. One factor to consider, I believe, however, is the overly simplistic, might I say
“unAnselmic,” view of God and faith often found in our community: our “god” and our
faith is too small for our serious questions.

Having grown up in a tradition where “reasoning” about faith entailed pasting together a
hodgepodge of proof texts to support a stance pertaining to eschatology or day of worship
has left many young adults with an overly simplistic, and ironically unscriptural,
understanding of faith--think of Job, of the father of the demon-possessed son, or Thomas.
Such an understanding of faith leaves us woefully unequipped to live out our faith in the
“real” world, where people's questions have to do with basic, and but complicated,
questions--questions like “Does God exist?” or “Why the Bible?” or “What makes Jesus
different/special?” These are difficult, unnerving questions that lie at the heart of our
Christian identity. But when we cannot give a satisfactory account to ourselves for our own
beliefs, our ability to confidently live out the mandates of our faith is undermined.
We should seek, as a community, to provide answers, or at least resources--rational and
non-rational--to deal with serious questions with complicated answers (or, possibly,
undetermined ones), not just to provide certitude for our simple ones.

This is not to say that our reasoning abilities are unlimited, that there are satisfactory
answers to every question we have, or that perfect integration is possible between the life of
faith and of reason. It’s wrestling with the questions, however, that shows us, in a clearer
way, the blurry boundary line of where knowledge ends and revelation begins. (Personally,
I have found this line both thinner, and, paradoxically, wider, than most people think.) It
also clarifies the content of that revelation.

And are there instances where our questions are a form of willful rebellion, a form of
intellectual God-evasion? Sure. But not always. Avoiding and dismissing serious questions
is just as, if not more, detrimental. It diminishes our understanding of our own faith (which,
by the way, is not the same thing as epistemic certainty) and of the power of God (who
does not depend on our cognitive prowess to save us). Ultimately, seeking to protect our
faith by avoiding difficult questions leaves us with a faith that is irrelevant and powerless
for our lives.

Anselm’s understanding of God and faith, in contrast, allowed him to blend a life of
passionate devotion to God, with serious intellectual inquiry. We have much to learn from
Anselm.
__________
Zane Yi studies and teaches philosophy at Fordham University, where he is a graduate
student seeking understanding.

http://www.spectrummagazine.org/blog/2009/07/02/anselm_adventists_faith_seeking_unde
rstanding accesado el viernes 03 de Julio de 2009 a las 9:50 pm.