Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Since I started graduate school in 1997 I’ve appreciated the thoughtfulness that University of Chicago scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain has brought to bear on seemingly countless topics of faith and culture.  In my most recent wanderings through an as yet unread book on faith and learning in my personal library (although I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn’t read it as soon as it hit the store shelves…the editors are two solid guys for whom I worked as a Ph.D. graduate research assistant at Baylor U’s Institute for Faith and Learning), I came across a chapter written by Elshtain entitled “To Serve God Wittily, In the Tangle of One’s Mind.”  The creativity of the title drew me to it, and her insights in one paragraph in particular were too valuable to keep to myself.  She writes:

“To serve God wittily, in the tangle of one’s mind!  These are powerful and wonderful words.  They draw us away from an excess of solemnity, which is death to witty scholarship.  And they draw us into the tangle that is the human mind–that great and glorious instrument we either squander; use badly, or use well–ad Dei gloriam.  To use well means, I believe, to recognize that our minds have not and cannot escape the noetic consequences of sin.  Our minds cannot be perfect.  Our knowledge is never complete.  Humility is in order.  Yet even allowing for all this, there really is, or can be, light shining in the darkness.  Our epistemic urgency, our quest for knowledge, flows directly from creation itself.  God would not have created us with intelligence to develop and use if this were not central to his pronouncement that creation is good.  After all, we are asked to throw ourselves on God’s love and mercy rather than into an abyss of ignorance.  Critics of Christianity historically could point to such pronouncements as Tertullian’s unfortunate “I believe because it is absurd” as proof positive that faith demands the resignation of intellect.  Even Augustine’s quite different and justly famous credo ut intelligam, “I believe in order to understand,” came in for derision in many quarters, sometimes from those who failed to distinguish Augustine’s position from Tertullian’s, and sometimes from those confusing Augustine’s position with a too-simple fideism or pietism that views the intellect with deep suspicion or even hostility.  The relationship between faith, reason, and learning that finally made sense to me was and is unafraid of intellectual engagement and is deeply committed to the life of the mind.  It is embodied in a tradition that historically gave rise to such monumental tributes to the human mind’s understanding through faith as St. Augustine’s City of God, St. Thomas’s Summa theologiae, Martin Luther’s great works–this despite Luther’s deep suspicions of overreliance on such pre-Christian philosophers as Aristotle–and Calvin’s Institutes.  Even the great mystics stressed certain attributes of the mind–receptivity, a profound emptying of self in order that the mind and heart might be set afire by God’s fierce love.”

Source:  Jean Bethke Elshtain, “To Serve God Wittily, In the Tangle of One’s Mind.” In Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty (eds.), Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Academic Press, 2006):  39-40.