November 19, 2021

Faith Seeking Understanding

I deliberately chose Faith Seeking Understanding: Loving God with All Your Mind as my blog’s title because knowing what we believe as Christians, and why we believe it, is more important than ever in a culture becoming increasingly hostile to believers.

In this post, I will explain the meaning of “faith seeking understanding” and show how this quest relates to loving God will all your mind (Matthew 22:37).

What Does Faith Seeking Understanding Mean?

This idea was first expressed by Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430) as “Credo ut intelligam, “I believe so that I may understand.”

This exact phrase fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding” originated with Anselm of Canterbury (A.D. 1033-1109).

Christians who exercise faith seeking understanding desire to understand their faith. Or, as I often say, they want to know what they believe and why they believe it. To me, this is the essence of the meaning of faith seeking understanding.

So, while great philosophers coined the phrase, every Christian needs to pursue fully understanding his or her faith as far as they are capable.

The idea of faith seeking understanding is also a definition of theology. The theologian is a person of faith that, through his or her intellectual, reasonable, systematic study of Scripture, strives to understand his/her faith.

But faith seeking understanding entails more than intellectual inquiry. It demands that we love God with all our being, including our minds.

Love God with All Your Mind

Created in the image of God, we are rational, reasoning, intellectual creatures expected to use these capacities.

³⁴ But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. ³⁵ And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40 ESV)

Our faith, expressed as loving God with all our mind, demands we never stop seeking to understand God and how we are to respond to him. This seeking understanding of God never ends.

A Reasonable Faith 

So, what does all this have to do with faith? Isn’t faith blind? Aren’t we just supposed to believe what the Bible teaches because, well, it’s the Bible?

Contrary to other religions, reasonable and demonstrable truths are the foundation of Christianity. That is why we love God with all our minds and why we continually seek to understand what we believe. This pursuit of understanding never ends.

What does it mean to claim that Christianity is a reasonable faith? Here are a few reasons:

• The Christian faith is unique among other faiths because it makes claims the demand answers.
• Christians make claims based on historical evidence.
• Christianity’s claims that are falsifiable. They have the capacity for some proposition to be proven wrong.
• Christianity is objectively true.
• Christianity values rational thought.

Having said this, we need to consider the relationship between faith and reason.

Faith & Reason

Theologians continue to debate the relationship of faith and reason. Some answers to the question of how faith relates to reason are:

• Faith without reason. We only need to believe what the Bible says. Our belief needs no other proof. We don’t need to use reason to understand our faith. It is simply something we accept without question.
• Reason trumps faith. We should never have faith in anything we cannot understand rationally. For example, reasoning alone cannot explain the Incarnation. Thus, it is not to be believed. This is akin to Deism.
• Faith and reason complement one another, and we need both to understand what we believe. This is consistent with the biblical witness.

Here are some Scriptures supporting the role of reason in Christianity:

Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45 ESV)

And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:20 ESV)

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2 ESV)

I will not take the time to discuss these passages. They are just a few of many in the Bible that show us how we are expected to use our rational capabilities as we seek to understand and grow in our faith.

How Do Faith & Reason Work Together?

I suggest this is the likely sequence of faith and reasoning coming together.

• Knowledge of God (but not faith in God or understanding of God). This comes first because you cannot have faith in something or someone without having knowledge of that thing, no matter how imperfect.
• We receive faith as a gift of grace. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8 ESV.
• A desire to understand and know more about God.

The motto of faith seeking understanding is not suggesting that understanding or intellectual knowledge replaces faith. Faith is a gift from God. However, once we have faith, God expects us to use our minds, to use reasoning, to be rational in learning about our faith, and understanding it.

Reason Alone is not Enough

While God expects us to use the intelligence he’s given to us, our rational abilities are not enough, on their own, to bring the understanding of God we desire and need.

It is not enough to apply our intellectual powers to the questions our faith occasions.

Yes, we are to use our minds and apply reasoning and logic in our pursuit of this understanding. But that inadequate on its own. We also need the help of the Holy Spirit, which is divine illumination, derived from the grace of God.

So far, I’ve said a lot about the way God expects us to use our intellectual capacities to understand and grow in our faith.

But the Christian intellectual life has not always been in favor and continues to be dismissed in many churches.

Anti-Intellectualism in the Christian Church

From the early 20^th century until now, an anti-intellectual mindset continues in the church. Rather than belabor the point, I let the following quotes make my case.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig writes:

“American churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true.” (Craig, Reasonable Faith 3^rd ed. P.20-21)

Another Christian philosopher, Michael Austin, weighs in on the subject.

“Anti-intellectualism is rampant in the United States.³ For quite some time now, our culture has exalted feelings above reason, pragmatism over wisdom, entertainment over intellectual engagement, and we’re now seeing the fruit of these choices. The criticisms are now clichés, but they are nevertheless true. Image often trumps substance. Slogans are more effective than sound policy proposals. The art of persuasion is less about truth and evidence, and more about tapping into the emotion of one’s audience to get them to do or believe what one wishes. People focus more on the messenger’s rhetorical abilities rather than the message itself. In these and other ways, the church often has followed suit.”

Dangers of Anti-intellectualism

Failing to pursue the understanding of our faith leads to serious consequences.

• As Craig points out, a weakened faith, more prone to doubt, and an unstable faith.
• Easily swayed by false teaching. (Prosperity gospel, New Apostolic Revival.
• A weak faith will not withstand persecution.

Some Final Thoughts

Loving God with all our mind is not a suggestion, it is a command.

It is dangerous to be an intellectually lazy Christian.

For these reasons, every Christian must pursue an understanding of their faith as far as they are capable. Everyone isn’t a theologian, philosopher, or deep thinker. But all of us can learn more about what we believe and why we believe it.

I encourage all of you to ask yourself if you are fulfilling this command. If not, what can you do to love God with all your mind?

Make yours a faith seeking understanding!

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Coming soon: practical ideas on how to love God with all your mind.