Faith Seeking Understanding

Anselm of Canterbury wrote a short book in 1077 or 1078 and first called it Faith Seeking Understanding, fides quaerens intellectum. He changed the title to Proslogion, which means something like an address, and said so in the preface. The phrase he dropped became the most durable one-line description of the discipline that anyone has produced, and it is worth taking apart.

In the first chapter Anselm says that he does not seek to understand in order to believe, but believes in order to understand; and he adds that he believes this too, that unless he believes he will not understand. That last clause is a quotation. It is Isaiah 7:9 in the Old Latin version, which followed the Greek translation of the Hebrew, and which turned an unusual Hebrew wordplay about being firm and being established into a statement about believing and understanding. Augustine had leaned on that same rendering for decades, preaching that you should understand in order to believe his word and believe in order to understand God's word. So a whole tradition of theological method rests partly on a rendering that the Hebrew, as modern translations give it, does not support. State that plainly rather than hiding it. It does not follow that the method is wrong, because the method has to be argued on its own ground and there are other texts for it, but a student should learn this from his teacher and not from an opponent.

What the formula actually claims is narrower than either of its caricatures. It does not say believe first and never ask, which is fideism, and Anselm is the worst possible example of that: the Proslogion contains his argument for God's existence, and in Why God Became Man he sets out to argue the necessity of the incarnation by necessary reasons and with Christ, as he puts it, left out of account for the sake of the argument. Nor does it say that faith is a conclusion to be reached at the end of an inquiry, since Anselm is praying while he argues. It claims that faith gives you the object. You cannot understand a person you have refused to meet, and theology's subject is not a proposition but someone who has spoken.

The practical form of the claim is a rule about order rather than about permission. You are not forbidden to ask hard questions until you have enough faith; you are told that the questions get answered from inside the relationship rather than from a position of neutrality outside it, because there is no such position. Every reader of scripture comes with commitments, as the Hermeneutics track showed at length. Anselm's rule is honest about which ones he has.

There is a saying from the Egyptian desert that the Orthodox have never let the West forget. Evagrius of Pontus, in a treatise on prayer written at the end of the fourth century, says that if you are a theologian you will pray truly, and if you pray truly you are a theologian. It is quoted constantly and it is worth knowing where it comes from and what happened to its author: Evagrius was condemned in the sixth century in connection with the Origenist controversy, and a good deal of his work survived in Syriac and Armenian, sometimes under other names. That is a fact about the church rather than about the saying, and the saying has been received by everyone anyway.

The Orthodox make the same point by what they do with the word. In Greek usage the title 'the Theologian' is given to three people only: John the Evangelist, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Symeon, who is called the New Theologian. It is not an academic rank. Two of the three are known above all for contemplation and one of them wrote the fourth Gospel, which tells you what the word was thought to name.

The Western form of the same instinct is a fifth-century formula usually traced to Prosper of Aquitaine, that the law of praying establishes the law of believing, which is quoted in the shortened form lex orandi, lex credendi. It was written in an argument about grace, and the argument ran like this: the church prays everywhere for the conversion of unbelievers, and that public, universal practice is evidence of what the church believes about who does the converting. The principle cuts in more than one direction and both directions are used. Catholic and Orthodox theologians have used it to argue that a practice long established in the liturgy carries doctrinal weight. Protestants have used it to argue that a bad hymn is a bad doctrine getting into people faster than a sermon can get it out.

Two more facts belong here because they are correctives. The Proslogion, the book that gave the discipline its motto, is written as a prayer and addressed throughout to God, not to the reader. And Thomas Aquinas, on 6 December 1273, stopped writing the Summa and never resumed; the testimony given at his canonisation, in the deposition of Bartholomew of Capua, reports his companion Reginald pressing him to continue and Aquinas answering that everything he had written seemed to him like straw. He died the following March with the work unfinished. Take the story with the caution that a canonisation deposition deserves, and notice what it was doing in the tradition regardless: it was the church's standing reminder that the greatest system ever built was held lightly by the man who built it.

Now the corrective in the other direction, because this section could easily become a sentimental excuse for laziness. Holiness does not confer accuracy. Devout people have taught disastrous things devoutly, and some of the church's most useful work was done by people who were difficult, bitter, wrong about other subjects, or treated badly by the institution they served. Prayer is not a substitute for reading the passage. The claim is not that a praying theologian will be right, but that a theologian who never prays has stopped speaking about the subject and started speaking about a topic, and the difference eventually shows in the work.

The other relation is to the church. Theology is done for a community and answerable to one. That is not a limit on a free inquiry; it is the recognition that the questions came from somewhere. The doctrine of the Trinity was not produced by scholars with time on their hands; it was hammered out by pastors whose congregations were being taught that the Son was a creature, and who had to decide what could be said at a baptism. When you meet a doctrine in this track, it will help to ask what pastoral problem made someone bother to state it, because there almost always was one.

Every Christian tradition accepts some development. The word Trinity is not in the Bible, nor is homoousios, nor is the formula of two natures in one person, and almost nobody wants to give those up. So the question is never whether doctrine develops. It is how you distinguish a legitimate drawing-out from an addition that has smuggled itself in, and the traditions answer differently.

The oldest criterion in the West is from Vincent of Lerins, writing in 434 under a pen name. He is remembered for one sentence, that we hold what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone, and that sentence is usually deployed against innovation. What gets left out is the chapter in the same work in which Vincent argues that there is genuine progress in the church's understanding, using the image of a body that grows from infancy to age while remaining the same body with the same members, and insisting that the growth must be in the same doctrine, the same sense and the same meaning. Vincent is not a static thinker. He is trying to describe growth that is not mutation, and both Catholics and Orthodox start from him.

John Henry Newman gave the question its most influential modern treatment in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, written in 1845 while he was moving from the Church of England to Rome, and published in the year he was received. His argument is that Christianity was given as a living idea rather than a finished formula, that a living idea in a human community necessarily unfolds over time as its implications are worked out under pressure, and that the church's later dogmas are that unfolding. He offers seven notes by which a true development may be told from a corruption: preservation of its type, continuity of its principles, its power to assimilate, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, and chronic vigour. His famous line in the introduction, that to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant, states what he took the alternative to be.

The objections are serious and they come from three directions. Protestant critics argue that the notes are too elastic to exclude anything a determined defender wants to keep, so that the theory functions as a licence rather than a test, and that a criterion which cannot in practice rule out a candidate development is not a criterion. They add that Newman's essay was written by a man in the act of converting, which does not make it wrong but does explain its destination. Orthodox critics object to the framework itself: on their account the church does not develop doctrine but articulates, under attack, what it has always held, so that a theory of development is a solution to a problem the East does not have. Some Orthodox writers allow more room than that, and the internal Orthodox discussion is more varied than the standard summary suggests. And there are Catholic critics too: Nicholas Lash's study of 1975 argued that Newman's theory is considerably more ambiguous than either his defenders or his opponents usually allow. It is also worth knowing that Rome itself has had to police the concept, condemning a modernist version of the evolution of dogma in 1907, in the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi, while continuing to hold Newman's.

Protestants have their own doctrine of development even where they dislike the word. The Westminster Confession's formula that what is necessary is either expressly set down in scripture or may be deduced from it by good and necessary consequence is a theory of development in four words, and the deductions have been disputed ever since. The Reformed and Lutheran confessions accept the ecumenical creeds on the ground that they can be proved from scripture, which means they accept fourth-century formulations as legitimate growth while rejecting later ones, and they have to be able to say what the difference is. The standard Protestant criterion is that a development is legitimate if it draws out what the texts already assert and illegitimate if it adds a new material claim; the standard objection is that the traditions disagree about which is which in every disputed case.

The practical test all sides use, whatever theory they hold, is worth having. Ask what a proposed development is doing to the texts: is it a way of holding two scriptural assertions together, or is it supplying something scripture does not contain? Ask whether it can be shown in earlier form, even implicitly, or whether it appears without ancestry. Ask what it does to the doctrines around it, since additions that require the rest of the system to be rearranged are usually foreign bodies. And ask what problem it was invented to solve, because a doctrine's history is often the plainest evidence of its nature.

The word heresy starts out neutral. Hairesis in Greek means a choice and then a party or a school, and the New Testament uses it that way: the Sadducees are a hairesis in Acts 5:17, and the Christians themselves are called one in Acts 24:5 by an opposing lawyer. The BSB renders it differences at 1 Corinthians 11:19, factions in the list of works of the flesh at Galatians 5:20, and destructive heresies at 2 Peter 2:1, where the hardening is clearly under way. At Titus 3:10 the BSB translates the adjective as a divisive man, where the King James had a heretic. So the word's journey from party to false teaching happens partly inside the New Testament and is completed afterwards.

Orthodoxy, right opinion or right worship, is its counterpart, and the pair has to be handled honestly. Walter Bauer argued in 1934 that in many regions of the early church what was later called heresy came first and what was later called orthodoxy was the position of the Roman church imposed afterwards, so that the labels record who won rather than what was original. The thesis was influential and the reply has been substantial. Critics from H. E. W. Turner in 1954 onward have argued that Bauer's regional reconstructions do not survive the evidence, and the publication of early Christian papyri from Egypt weakened the case at what was supposed to be its strongest point. The fair summary is that Bauer's strong thesis is now rejected by most specialists while his insistence on real early diversity has been largely absorbed, so that nobody serious now describes the second century as monolithic.

The councils, then. Nicaea in 325 was convened by the emperor Constantine, which should be stated rather than glossed, and the political dimension never went away: bishops were exiled and recalled by imperial decision, the settlement of 325 was effectively reversed in the decades after it and had to be won again, and the assembly at Ephesus in 449 was so disgraceful that it is remembered as the robber synod. Anyone who tells you the councils were serene deliberations is selling something. Anyone who tells you they were therefore only politics has to explain why the losing side kept coming back for sixty years over a word.

The word at Nicaea was homoousios, of the same substance as the Father, and Arius's slogan was that there was when the Son was not, which makes him a creature however exalted. Notice what the council was protecting. If the Son is a creature then Christians worship a creature, and the baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19 puts a creature in a series with the Father, and the thing that saves is not God. The dispute looks abstract on the page and it is not: it is about whether what happened at the cross was God's own act. The often-repeated jibe that the church split over a single letter comes from a later stage of the same argument, when a party in the three-fifties and sixties proposed homoiousios, of like substance, with an extra iota. That proposal was a serious attempt at a middle position by people who were frightened of what homoousios might be made to mean, and treating it as a joke about pedantry misses both the seriousness and the chronology.

Constantinople in 381 completed the creed on the Holy Spirit. Ephesus in 431 fought over whether Mary may be called Theotokos, God-bearer, which was a claim about the Son rather than about his mother: if the one born of her is one person who is God, the title follows, and if it does not follow then the incarnation has been divided into two subjects. Chalcedon in 451 gave the definition that most of the church still uses, and its shape is worth noticing. It says that Christ is made known in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. Four negatives. The definition does not explain the union; it fences it, marking the four ditches on either side and leaving the road between them. That is often what a creed is doing, and a student who expects a council to hand him a mechanism will be disappointed and should not be.

One more fact, because it is the honest end of this section. Chalcedon was not received by everyone. The Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East over the earlier dispute, stood outside the settlement, and they have been called heretics in Greek and Latin books for fifteen centuries. In the twentieth century theologians from those churches and from Rome and Constantinople sat down together and worked through the vocabulary, and a series of joint statements from the nineteen-seventies onward, including the common declaration of Paul the Sixth and Shenouda the Third in 1973, the agreed statements of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox joint commission in 1989 and 1990, and the christological declaration signed by John Paul the Second and Mar Dinkha the Fourth in 1994, concluded that the parties had been confessing the same faith in different technical vocabularies, with the word nature carrying different senses on each side. Full communion has not followed, and the remaining obstacles are real and mostly not christological. Hold both halves of that. The words had to be got right, because a wrong answer at Nicaea would have emptied the gospel. And some of the church's worst quarrels were between people who meant the same thing and could not hear it, which should make you slower with the word heretic than the tradition has often been.

From here the track works through the standard headings: God, creation and providence, humanity and sin, the person and work of Christ, the Spirit, salvation, the church and the sacraments, and the last things. You know now that the list is a convention with a history and not a revelation, and you know what the arranging is liable to cost.

Here is the working rule, and it is the point of this whole module. Doctrine is argued from texts. Every position you meet will be tied to passages, and you should read them in their own contexts rather than accepting them as proof-texts in a row. A student who cannot name the passages behind a position does not hold that position. He inherited it, which is not the same thing and will not survive the first serious question put to him by someone who has done the reading.

That cuts against you as much as for you. It is easy to learn the texts for the view you already like and to know the other side only by its label. So make this your habit: for every contested doctrine in this track, write down the three strongest texts for the view you reject, in their own words, and the best answer that view's defenders give to your favourite text. If you cannot do that, you do not yet understand the disagreement, and you certainly cannot teach it.

Two more habits. Keep a list of the questions you could not settle, and be willing to leave them on the list for years. A theologian who has no open questions has either finished the subject or stopped asking, and it is never the first. And when you find yourself unwilling to examine a position, notice it, because that reluctance is data about you and it is usually pointing at the place where your own tradition has done your thinking for you.

Finally, remember what the subject is. The discipline you are starting is about a person who has spoken and acted and who is not a topic. Anselm wrote the sentence that names it while on his knees. Everything in this track is meant to end in a congregation being told the truth by somebody who has checked it, and if it ends anywhere else it has failed, however accurate it was.