FIDEISM – All you want to know
FIDEISM – All you want to know
In view of the fact that empiricism led to skepticism in Hume (see Chapter One) and that rationalism cannot rationally demonstrate its first principles, fideism becomes a more viable option in religious epistemology. Perhaps, there is indeed no rational or evidential way to establish Christian theism. Does truth in religion, then, rest solely on faith and not on a reasoning process?
To this question fideists give an affirmative answer. And in this way philosophical skepticism or agnosticism and religious fideism are comfortably compatible positions.
An Exposition of Some Major Fideistic Views
The stress on the operation of faith in the truth of a religious system has been with Christianity since at least the time of Tertullian (d. a.d. 230). “I believe because it is absurd,” he cried. “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”1 Perhaps the best modern example of a fideistic position is found in Blaise Pascal.
The Fideism of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
By comparison with some others, Pascal’s fideism was moderate. He lived in a France drunk with the wine of Cartesian rationalism and increasingly drifting to deism. Pascal sensed an accelerated tendency to reject God’s revelation in favor of human reason. In view of this, his fideism was intended as an existential shock treatment to his complacent contemporaries.
The Critique of Rationalism. Pascal desired to destroy faith in reason so that he could restore “faith in faith.” Reason to him is the geometric or mathematical mind, the mind of science. However, the first principles of science cannot be demonstrated.
Further, the Biblical doctrine of original sin informs us that man is sinful and God is hidden (No. 445 ).2 Hence, human corruption stands in the way of Descartes’ theistic proofs. Furthermore, reason is really dependent on the heart for its very basis and function.
The heart is the intuitive center of man which views all things synoptically as opposed to partially. By contrast with reason, it is both more sensitive and more comprehensive. Even knowledge of first principles is intuitive “and reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base on them every argument” (No. 282).
Pascal’s conclusion to the analysis of man’s reason is skepticism and humility. Man is a “thinking reed” incapable of both total ignorance and absolute knowledge. “Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature.… Hear God” (No. 434).
The Way to Truth Through Faith. For Pascal, “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of” (No. 277). The heart is the absolute bedrock of all knowledge. It knows intuitively and holistically, not discursively or abstractly. Hence, “it is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason” (No. 278). Reason must submit to the heart, for “submission is the use of reason in which consists true Christianity” (No. 269).
It is not that Christianity is opposed to reason per se. “On the contrary, the mind must be open to proofs, must be confirmed by custom, and offer itself in humbleness to inspiration, which alone can produce a true and saving effect” (No. 245, emphasis added).
Reason alone will never find God. For “it is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason” and this “faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning” (Nos. 278, 279). It is therefore futile for man to attempt to reason his way to God. Faith, for Pascal, is generated by humility, submission, and inspiration.
Man must submit to the authority of God revealed in the Scriptures and the Fathers. God must take the initiative, for “those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them insight, without which faith it is only human, and useless for salvation” (No. 282).
For Pascal, “faith is different from proof; the one is human, the other is the gift of God. It is this faith that God himself puts into the human heart, of which the proof is often the instrument; but this faith is in the heart, and makes us not say scio [I know], but credo [I believe]” (No. 248). A proof at best may be the instrument by which God places faith in one’s heart. But what are these proofs?
What are the tests for the truth of Christianity? A true religion is one that cures human pride and sin. In this regard Christ alone is the proof of Christianity, “for in Jesus Christ, we prove God, and teach morality and doctrine” (No. 547). And “it is not only impossible but useless to know God without Jesus Christ” (No. 549).
Pascal does appeal to the miraculous history of Christianity, its high morality, its perpetuity and spread as evidence of its truthfulness (No. 482). However, none of these is absolutely convincing proof because “there is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition” (No. 144). The decision to accept or reject must be made by faith.
The Great Wager. Pascal’s famous Wager is perhaps the best example of his test for truth in operation.3 He begins by asking, “Who then will condemn Christians for being unable to give rational grounds for their belief, professing as they do a religion for which they cannot give rational grounds?” For “if they did prove it they would not be keeping their word. It is by being without proof that they show they are not without sense.”
Pascal then proceeds to pose the alternatives: “Either God is or he is not. But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates.… Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong. Nonetheless, one must choose. Which will you choose then?” he asks.
“Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases; if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist.” There is eternal life and happiness to gain if God exists and nothing at all to lose if there is no God. So,” asks Pascal, “what have you to lose?” Wager on God.
From the standpoint of reason, faith in God is a bet in which the purely rational odds are about even (No. 144), but in which the existential dice are highly loaded in favor of faith. There are no purely rational tests for religious truth. Even “contradiction is a poor indication of truth. Many things that are certain are contradicted. Many that are false pass without contradiction.”
Hence, “contradiction is no more an indication of falsehood than lack of it is an indication of truth” (No. 177 [384] ).4 Truth is tested in the heart not the mind, and the criteria are existential rather than rational.
The Fideism of Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Few pens have pierced the rationalist’s conscience as that of Kierkegaard. As Pascal disquieted the Cartesian rationalism, Kierkegaard declared war on Hegelian idealism. Hegel was interested in true propositions known logically (i.e., dialectically), but Kierkegaard was concerned with truth in persons who are known only paradoxically. Reality is not found in the objective world of universal reason but in the subjective realm of individual choice.
Life’s Three Stages. One of the easiest ways to capture the spirit of Kierkegaard’s thought is in his elaboration of the three stages of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each stage is separated by despair and is spanned by a leap of faith. When one passes to a higher level, the lower level is dethroned but not destroyed.
The contrast between the aesthetic life and the ethical life is the difference between feeling and deciding; it is a move from a self-centered to a law-centered life.5 In the ethical stage one comes from a life without choosing to the point of choosing life, from being a spectator to a participator, from deliberation to decision. It is no longer a life of the intellect but one of the will. Nor is it a life determined by immediate interests but one controlled by ultimate concern—that is, a shift of man’s center of interest from the present moment to lifetime duty.
The ethical life is a decided advance over the aesthetic but it is by no means final.6 The religious transcends the ethical as God transcends his law. In the ethical stage one chooses life but in the religious he chooses God. The ethical concentrates only on a lifetime duty; whereas the religious focuses on eternity. The ethical man has utmost respect for the moral law, but the religious man gives an ultimate response to the moral law Giver.
In moving to the religious center of gravity one leaves the realm of the objective and prepositional for the subjective and personal; he moves from the essential to the existential.
The manner in which the religious transcends the ethical is beautifully dramatized by Kierkegaard in his use of the story of Abraham.7 The moral law said, “Thou shalt not kill,” but God said to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love … and offer him there upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (Gen. 22:2). In this teleological suspension of the ethical Abraham’s faith transcended his reason, his existential decision superseded his ethical obligation.
Herein is the paradox, namely, that “the individual is higher than the universal.” “Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior.…” So this “is and remains to all eternity a paradox inaccessible to thought.” By this act of religious faith Abraham “overstepped the ethical entirely and possessed a higher telos [end] outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former.”8
The Nature of Religious Truth. Like the ethical, the rational is not discarded by Kierkegaard but it is disenfranchised. Religion does not relinquish reason entirely but it relegates it to a lower level. Objective scientific and philosophical truth has its place but by it a man can never reach God. This point is strongly emphasized in Kierkegaard’s later distinction between Religion A and Religion B.9
The former is natural religion but the latter is supernatural. The first is religiosity but the last is Christianity. A man with Religion A is still operating in the realm of the rational; whereas Religion B is paradoxical. The former involves an immanent concept of God but the latter is a transcendent or “totally other” God. Religion A originates in man’s general need for God but Religion B rests on the believer’s specific need for Christ.
Religious or existential truth in the highest sense, then, can be characterized as follows: it is personal and not impersonal; it is not something one has but what he is; it is not what one knows but what he lives. Objective truth is something we grip but religious truth is something that grips us. It is appropriated and not merely acknowledged. It is discovered by commitment and not by any alleged correspondence to the world.
In a word, truth is subjectivity. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively Christianity has absolutely no existence.”10 This point is clearly illustrated in Kierkegaard’s conception of the relation of Christianity with history.
If the first century contemporaries of Christ “had left nothing behind them but these words: ‘We have believed that in such and such a year the God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died,’ it would be more than enough.”11 In brief, one cannot derive the eternal from the historical nor the spiritual from the rational.
The Nature of Faith and Its Relation to Reason. For Kierkegaard, faith is man’s highest passion. Faith is not assent to objective propositions; rather, it is a subjective submission to a person, to God through Christ. It is a solitary act of an individual confronted with God. By faith man’s spirit is actualized. Faith is prompted by paradox and is directed toward a person.
It is an act of the will exercised without the aid of reason or objective guides. Reason plays only a negative and dialectical role in relation to faith; it enables us to understand that Christian truth is paradoxical.
Man’s basic problem is not ignorance of God’s revelation but offense at its intrusion into his life. Original sin hinder’s man’s ability to know truth. He cannot know the truth without being in the truth, and he cannot be in the truth without God placing him in it. The difference between human reason and God’s revelation is illustrated by Kierkegaard in the contrast between Socrates and Christ.12
Socratic wisdom brought forth truth from within by a backward recollection; whereas God’s revelation brings truth from without by a forward expectation. Human truth is immanent and comes from the wise man, but God’s truth is transcendent and is mediated through the God-Man. The truths of human reason are rational but those of divine revelation are paradoxical. God’s truth is neither analytic nor synthetic but antithetic and, hence, it can only be accepted by a leap of faith.
God is the center of the meaningful but real paradox of our faith. He is the Unknown limit to knowing that magnetically draws reason but which causes a passionate collision with man. Human reason can neither penetrate nor avoid God. The supreme paradox of all is the attempt to discover something thought cannot think.
God is unknown in himself and even unknown in Christ; his presence is indicated only by signs or pointers. The paradoxical revelation of the Unknown is not knowable by reason. Man’s response must be by a leap of faith which is given (though not forced on us) by God.
Faith in God is neither rationally nor empirically grounded; so the existence of God is neither rationally certain nor empirically evident. The empirical evidence for Christ tells us only that an unusual, humble man lived and died; and rationally man cannot even comprehend God let alone prove him. We cannot imagine what God is like nor what he is unlike. The most we can do is to project familiar qualities in the direction of the Transcendent that always fall short of him.
The existence of God cannot be proved from nature, for nature assumes God for believers and leads unbelievers to doubt God. The very attempt to prove God is folly, “for if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it; and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it. For at the very outset, in beginning my proof, I will have presupposed it, not as doubtful but as certain … since otherwise I would not begin, readily understanding that the whole would be impossible if he did not exist.”13
What is more, even if we could prove God’s being (in himself) it would be irrelevant to us; it is God’s existence or relatedness to us that alone has religious significance. God is presented to man for an existential choice, not for rational reflection.
“For to prove the existence of one who is present is the most shameless affront, since it is an attempt to make him ridiculous.… The existence of a king, or his presence, is commonly acknowledged by an appropriate expression of subjection and submission.… ”14 Thus it is that one proves God’s existence by worship not by proofs.
Kierkegaard is not claiming that there is an ultimate irrationality in God but rather a suprarationality which upholds finite rationality by transcending it and holding it in place. The real absurdity is in man’s situation: he must act in response to God as though he were certain without any reason for doing so. And God is an absolute paradox to man not simply because of the inability of the human mind but because of the depravity of the human heart.
Man’s task is not to comprehend God intellectually but to submit to God existentially. The paradox is not centered in the theoretical but volitional; it is not so much metaphysical as axiological. In short, God is both a folly to our finite minds and an offense to our sinful will.
The Test for Truth. As can readily be seen, there are no objective historical or rational tests for religious truth. Truth is subjective and personal, and the acid test is one’s submission to and abiding in truth. The surest test of the truth of Christianity is suffering. Suffering is the infinite dissatisfaction one realizes as he approaches nearer to God. Another earmark of living in the truth is solitude.
Faith is essentially a private relation to God; loneliness is the clear mark of that solitude. Finally, truth is realized in the suprahistorical, that is, when one becomes contemporary with the eternal Christ. Christ is not a past individual but a person present in the now of Christian experience.
In summary, fideism is not equivalent to irrationalism for Kierkegaard but it is an antirationalism. God cannot be known intellectually by reason but only existentially by faith. Truth is not testable objectively by logical criteria but only subjectively by a personal commitment. Faith, not reason, is the door to truth.
The Fideism of Karl Barth
The Early Barth. Karl Barth dropped a bombshell on the theological world with the publication of his Commentary on Romans (1919).15 In it he took a highly Kierkegaardian view of God and revelation. God is “wholly other” and revelation strikes the world with judgment from God, not knowledge of him. Nothing in the world can be identified with God’s revelation, not the flesh of Christ nor the Bible.
The Bible is only the crater left by the meteorite of God’s Word. Even Christ in his humanity stands fallen and under the condemnation of God. Revelation reveals man’s lostness but it tells us nothing positive about God.
Barth’s Shift from Radical Existentialism. In 1920 Barth republished his Commentary on Romans in which he shifts from an extreme Kierkegaardian emphasis to a more moderate position under the influence of Heppe’s Reformed Theology. And by 1931, in his work on Anselm,16 Barth acknowledges that God can be known by revelation.
The ontological argument makes no sense as a rational proof but it is an affirmation of faith: “I believe in order to understand.” Once one knows God by revelation, the ontological argument takes on meaning. We do understand God analogously by faith.
The Later Barth. Barth began his Dogmatics17 in 1927 but restated them in a nonexistential way a few years later. There is knowledge of God for man because revelation is the action of the triune God. The Father is revealed through the Son (the objective reality) and through the Holy Spirit (subjective reality). And the Bible is the record or witness to this revelation.
The Word of God takes several forms for Barth. Christ is the primary and personal form; God is revealed in and through the person of Christ. The Bible is the secondary form of God’s revelation in that it is a verbal witness to Christ. The Bible is God’s Word in the sense that he speaks through it. It is a sacrament which gives us indirect access to God. We do not know the Bible is God’s Word by any objective evidence.
It is a self-attesting truth. We can no more stand outside God’s revelation than we can get outside our own experience. We must put the Bible to the test and allow it to speak to us.18
Our knowledge of God is not univocal; this kind of knowledge is possible in mathematics and chemistry but not in theology. On the other hand, neither is our knowledge of God through the Word of God purely equivocal, since we do know God indirectly through his self-revelation.
The only remaining alternative is an analogous knowledge of God.19 This analogy is not of course the thomistic analogy of being which Barth rejects because it makes God in man’s image, thereby attaining God through human efforts. Rather, it is an analogy of faith which is mediated through the Bible and given by God’s grace.
Barth’s “No” to Natural Theology. Despite Barth’s repudiation and modification of his earlier and more extreme Kierkegaardian existentialism, he remained strongly fideistic in his apologetic. There is a general or natural revelation but nothing can be built on it.20
In fact, Barth reserves some of his strongest words for an attack on natural theology. For to him “natural theology does not even exist as an entity capable … not even for the sake of being rejected. If one occupies himself with real theology one can pass by so called natural theology only as one would pass by an abyss into which he is to step if one does not want to fall.”21
Barth’s attitude to natural theology is summarized in the one-word title of his book to Emil Brunner, Nein (No). Not only is natural theology impossible but there is not even in man an active capacity to receive God’s revelation. To attribute to man the ability to receive God’s revelation is a denial of sovereign grace and is inconsistent with the effects of sin on man’s mind.
Man has a responsibility before God’s revelation but certainly no natural capacity for receiving it. And to assert, as Brunner does, a “general grace” is not to take seriously the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura and to ally oneself with the Roman Catholics.22
Even Brunner’s distinction between the material image of God in man (which is completely fallen) and the formal image or capacity to know God which remains intact is completely rejected by Barth. The image of God in man is completely destroyed by sin. There is not even a reparatio or capacity for repair. “The concept of a ‘capacity’ of man for God has therefore to be dropped.
If, nevertheless, there is an encounter and communion between God and man,” continues Barth, “then God himself must have created for it conditions which are not the least supplied (not even ‘somehow’ not even ‘to some extent!’) by the existence of the formal factor.”23 It is the Holy Spirit who miraculously creates the “contact point” with man.
Barth sets forth his view most positively in his response to Brunner’s contention that Calvin admitted the validity of a general or natural revelation. First, Barth contends that Calvin did not accept any second or “double” knowledge of God for fallen man besides or in addition to the Scriptures. Second, Calvin admitted only the possibility in principle—not in fact—of a knowledge of God via creation. That is, there is a subjective or hypothetical possibility but not an objective or actual possibility of knowing God by natural reason. Third, man’s “capacity” is for idolatry but not for the true deity.
Rather than a “contact” point it is a “repulsion” of God. Fourth, Calvin always used the principle of possible knowledge of God only to demonstrate man’s responsibility. “The fact that God is revealed in all his works is God’s scriptural testimony to us against the ignorance of man.… It points out that man’s inability to know him is his guilt.”24 Finally, for Calvin, true knowledge of God in Christ includes a real knowledge of the true God in creation. But it does not, says Barth, bring forth a second relatively independent knowledge of God through nature.
The Revelational Fideism of Cornelius Van Til
Fideism is not limited to nonevangelicals. Cornelius Van Til speaks from a strong Reformed, Biblical perspective theologically and yet in an absolute revelational presuppositionalism apologetically. As we shall see, this position may be viewed as methodological fideism.25
The Absolute Presuppositional Starting Point. Van Til admits, “I start more frankly from the Bible as the source from which as an absolute authoritative revelation I take my whole interpretation of life.” Furthermore, he writes, “I take what the Bible says about God and his relation to the universe as unquestionably true on its own authority.”
If this should appear to beg the whole question, we must remember that Van Til confessed that “to admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning.” For, he continues, “the starting point, the method, and the conclusions are always involved in one another.”26
Presuppositions cannot be avoided; non-Christians have them as well as Christians, but they are diametrically opposed. “But the Christian, as did Tertullian, must contest the very principles of his opponent’s position. The only ‘proof’ of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no possibility of ‘proving’ anything at all.”27
All Facts Are Theistic and Christian. Apart from the Christian world view nothing really makes sense. For “without the presupposition of the God of Christianity we cannot even interpret one fact correctly. Facts without God would be brute facts. They would have no intelligible relation to one another.” Later he adds, “We maintain that there can be no facts but Christian-theistic facts.
We … find again and again that if we seek to interpret any fact on a non-Christian hypothesis it turns out to be a brute fact, and brute facts are unintelligible.” The reason for this is that no fact stands alone.
“We maintain,” writes Van Til, “that unless God has caused the existence of the universe, there would be no possibility of scientific thought. Facts ould be utterly unrelated.”28 Non-Christian scientists do, however, discover truths because they “are never able and therefore never do employ their own methods consistently.”29 They cannot avoid God’s truth entirely because they live in God’s world.
There Is No Really Common Ground with Non-Christians. The only “common ground” with unbelievers is that they too are creatures in God’s image and live in God’s world. But there are no common notions or methods; non-Christians approach the world differently from Christians and they view it differently.30 We have a common world with unbelievers but no common world view.
The contact point with unbelievers is the imago Dei. But even here the “point of contact” is the “point of conflict.” For “if there is no head-on collision with the systems of the natural man there will be no point of contact with the sense of deity in the natural man.”31 Conflict is inevitable because of human depravity and sin.
The Effects of Sin on Human Reason. Unbelievers not only ought to know there is a God but they do know it. There are “no atheistic men because no man can deny the revelational activity of the true God within him.”32 However, despite the fact unbelievers cannot deny God, they repress the knowledge of God. It is for this reason that no methods are really neutral. Depraved, sinful man is always in autonomous control over the methods he uses. Even the basic laws of logic cannot be used apart from God’s revelation to discover truth.
For “neither can [we], as finite beings, by means of logic as such, say what reality must be or cannot be.” For in this case “man must be autonomous, ‘logic’ must be legislative as to the field of ‘possibility’ and possibility must be above God.” This is why all traditional apologetics are doomed to failure, for to argue from facts to God is impossible and “on any but the Christian theistic basis there is no possible connection of logic with the facts at all.”33 By the nature of the case, then, all theistic arguments for God’s existence must fail.
The Role of Rational and Historical Evidence in Van Til’s Apologetics. Does the inability of autonomous human reason to arrive at God by “facts” and “logic” mean that Van Til has no use for reason and evidence? By no means! Historical apologetics are wrong if used to prove the existence of God or the truth of Christianity. For apart from presupposing these truths, historical “facts (such as the resurrection) make absolutely no sense at all. Nevertheless,” writes Van Til, “I would engage in historical apologetics.…
But I would not talk endlessly about facts and more facts without ever challenging the non-believer’s philosophy of fact. A really fruitful approach,” he adds, “argues that every fact is and must be such as proves the truth of the Christian theistic position.”34 In short, once one presupposes the truth of Christian theism then and then alone do history and historical facts (such as the resurrection) make sense.
Likewise, rational and theistic apologetics have a valid place within the framework of one’s absolute presupposition of the ontological Trinity of the Bible. Indeed, Van Til believes that we must presuppose the absolute certainty of God’s existence vis-à-vis the mere probable force theists give to their arguments. So there is in this sense an “absolute certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. Therefore,” writes Van Til, “I do not reject ‘the theistic proofs’ but merely insist on formulating them in such a way as not to compromise the doctrines of Scripture.”35
Of course therein is the fideistic hitch in his whole approach, for it would appear that the Bible is assumed to be true by an act of faith in its self-vindicating authority in an admittedly circular reasoning process. If that is the case, the “proofs” of God and historical “facts” of Christianity would have absolutely no meaning or validity outside the fideistic acceptance of the presupposition that Christianity is true.
Summary of Some Central Fideistic Premises
A number of tenets are generally common to fideism in relation to Christian apologetics. The emphasis varies from one writer to another, but the central contentions are very similar. Fideists characteristically claim or stress that:
Faith alone is the way to God. There is little disagreement among fideists on this point; the only way to the truth about God is through faith. God cannot be attained by human reason. Indeed, human reason often hinders, if not obscures, the knowledge of God.2. Truth is not found in the purely rational or objective realm, if it is there at all. Certainly religious truth does not have an objective basis or character. Truth is subjective and personal, not objective or propositional.3. Evidence and reason do not point definitively in the direction of God.
On the contrary, one is left by reason in a state of equipollence or even paradox. And certainly there are no valid proofs for the existence Of God.4. The tests for truth are existential, not rational. Truth is tested personally in one’s life by submitting to God, and so forth, but not by human reason. Even such a time-honored principle as that of noncontradiction, if used as a positive test for religious truth, is a rationalistic hangover.
Some fideists would even reject noncontradiction as a negative test for truth, namely, as a guide to what is false.5. Not only God’s revelation but his grace is the source of all truth. Truth comes from the top down. If man could know God by natural reason, God’s grace would be negated and human works would be established as a means of knowing God.
An Evaluation of Fideism
Like other positions, fideism is not devoid of significant contributions to our understanding of Christian truth and life. But as a methodology for establishing the truth of a theistic or Christian world view, fideism is completely inadequate. First, let us outline some of the positive features.
The Positive Contributions of Fideism
The antirationalistic emphasis of fideism has significant value. Man can neither rationally comprehend nor logically demonstrate the existence of the transcendent God of Christian theism. God is beyond reason’s futile attempt to grasp him completely and with logical necessity. Especially is this true of the geometric and deductive rationalisms of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The mathematical model is insufficient; God is more than the Great Mathematician. God’s nature cannot be understood in purely mathematical terms nor can his existence be demonstrated with mathematical certainty.
Further, fideists are right that neither evidence nor reason is the basis for one’s commitment to God. A believer does not love God because of the objective evidence any more than a husband loves his wife on the grounds that he possesses objective evidence about her nature and existence. One’s faith in God is based on who God is and not on the alleged evidence about his nature and existence. The basis for belief in God must be God himself.
To deny this is to replace God with evidence about God. It is to replace God as the object of one’s faith with human reasoning about God. This leads to a related point.
Objective evidence alone does not induce a religious response. Apologetics as such does not and cannot produce faith in Christianity. Whatever preliminary, instrumental or confirmatory role Christian evidence may have, only the response of the believer to the work of the Holy Spirit can result in a personal appropriation of Christ.
Rational arguments cannot coerce faith in God, and historical evidence cannot produce a commitment to Christ. Faith operates in the subjective and personal dimension that goes beyond purely rational processes. Objective evidence at best is only a tool through which God can operate, but faith is never the product of historical facts alone.
Another contribution of fideism is the understanding that faith is more than intellectual, it is volitional. Fideism has rightly stressed that faith in God is not mere intellectual assent; it is a heart commitment. Faith is more than rational, it is volitional. When one believes in God, it involves a commitment of his whole person and not merely an acknowledgment of the truth of certain statements about God. The mind can know something is objective without the will responding positively or the heart trusting in it.
In addition, the fideistic stress on the personal dimension of truth is an important contribution to our understanding. For religious truth is ultimately truth about a Person (God); it is truth that must be appropriated by a person (the believer) in a personal way, namely, by a personal commitment. Whatever propositions about God one can utter and however accurately they may depict God, there are no substitutes for God himself.
In the final analysis religious propositions are about a Person. The subject and object of religious statements are personal; religious truth is deeply personal in nature. In short, fideism is a welcomed corrective to the abstract and deadening influences of religious rationalism.
An overlooked contribution of Van Til’s view is his insistence that no scientific or historical “facts” make any sense outside of a metaphysical framework. Non-Christians too have stressed this point.36 All facts are “interprafacts.” Without an overall context and relationship, there is no structure for meaning and truth.
Even the resurrection of Christ makes no sense in a naturalistic world view; it is simply an unusual event at best in anything but a theistic universe. Unless there is a God, miracles are not even possible.
Hence, one can never use a miracle as such to prove God’s existence, since the very fact of a miracle (as an act of God) presupposes that God already exists. How can one know there is an act of God unless there is already presupposed a God who can act? The same events and “facts” do have different meanings within different world views. Van Til is correct: there is no Christian truth unless this is a theistic world.
Another emphasis that should be acknowledged by evangelical Christians is the insistence by the above fideists that man’s sinful condition affects his response to God. Men ought to love and serve the true God but they do not, and their choice does indeed influence their whole way of thinking about reality. In actual practice, the non-Christian operates on different presuppositions and comes to different conclusions. His basic “faith” or beliefs are different since he refuses to obey God.
Nonbelievers cannot avoid having presuppositions about the world; there must be something to think with in order for one to think about the world. Some framework is necessary if one is to have thoughts about reality, even for those who allegedly refuse to think about it. In short, world views are unavoidable, and different world views are based on differing presuppositions. And man’s sinfulness does indeed influence the world view he formulates.
A Critique of the Fideistic Test for Truth
In spite of the many important insights fideists offer into the nature of religious truth, their method and test for truth are decidedly inadequate. There are several reasons this is so.
1. First of all, fideists confuse epistemology and ontology. That is, they fail to distinguish the order of knowing and the order of being. The Christian fideist may very well be right about the fact that there is a God, but this begs the question unless he can tell how he knows this is the case. God may indeed have revealed himself to us through the Bible, but how do we know that the Bible is the Word of God? Other books with contrary teachings also claim to be the Word of God (e.g., the Koran). Assuming the truth of Christianity, a Christian fideist is right in what he believes about God but wrong in the reason for that belief.
Certainly, if there is a God and all truth comes from him, it follows that even the very criteria of determining truth from error will be God-given. But God is what is to be proven, and we cannot begin by assuming his existence as a fact. If we do not have any tests for truth with which we can begin, we can never make truth claims nor can we even know something is true. We can simply believe without justification what we want to believe.
But in this case, so can any idiotic, insane, or contrary view be simply believed. And how is one to say who if anyone has the truth? Without an epistemological way of knowing the truth, no ontological truth claims can be pressed.
2. Fideism also fails to clearly distinguish belief in and belief that there is a God. The fideist shares some important insights on belief in God. Such a belief must be personal and existential and not purely abstract and intellectual. On the other hand, is it possible to have an intelligible or credible belief in God unless one has some way first to believe that there is a God? Can one, for example, place his trust in his wife unless he first has some warrant for believing that she is his wife?
Would it not be the greatest folly at day’s end to rush into the arms of the waiting wife at the front door if that is the wrong door and another’s wife? One must have some evidence that he is taking the right path and embracing the true object of his love before he makes the existential commitment. Likewise, before one makes a leap of faith in God he must have some reason to believe that it is the true God to which he is committed. Another overlooked distinction follows from this.
3. Fideists do not differentiate clearly the difference between the basis of belief in God and the support or warrant for that belief. This distinction has been clearly drawn by some major theists. Thomas Aquinas, for example, held that faith rests solely on the testimony and authority of God. Evidence may be used to support, confirm, or even accompany this belief; but it must never be the basis for believing.37
The fideists properly stress the basis for belief, namely, God or his revelation; but they seem to neglect entirely the warrant or support for exercising this belief.
In short, evidence bears directly on belief thatthere is a God but not directly on belief in God. “Belief that” is an intellectual matter and there are rational arguments for it. But “belief in” is an existential concern that has no such objective tests for truth. Fideism is right on the latter but almost completely overlooks the need for criteria or test for the truth that there is a God, or that the Bible is the Word of God, and so on.
4. In line with the foregoing criticism, fideism often neglects and sometimes virtually negates the need for the propositional in its zeal to stress the personal. There is no reason, in contrast to Kierkegaard and Barth, that God’s revelation cannot be both personal and propositional.
The Bible claims to be a propositional revelation, that is, a revelation in and through words.38 Indeed, it is difficult to understand any meaningful sense of the words know or understand as applied to the person of God unless they have some cognitive content that is expressible in words or propositions. Surely the object of religious faith is a Person (God), but there is no way to rule out of hand that propositions can be uttered about that person.39
Revelations do not have to be impersonal just because they are written, as anyone can testify who has carried on a romance by mail! As a matter of fact, the complete fideistic attempt to deny that God is verbally expressible entails necessarily some verbal expressions about God. As such, fideism—like agnosticism and rationalism before it—is self-defeating.
5. Fideists fail to understand the implications of the difference between the unavoidability of and the justifiability of presuppositions. We may grant that presuppositions are unavoidable; men cannot think without epistemological and even ontological assumptions. However, the crucial question is not whether we can avoid using presuppositions but whether we can justify those we use. There are all kinds of differing presuppositions available.
We may presuppose that this is a naturalistic world, or a pantheistic one, or a theistic one, and so on. But which presupposition should be chosen and with what warrant? In one sense all men are fideists—that is, all have basic things they believe about reality which they have no purely factual nor demonstrably rational grounds for holding. However, the important questions about these differing beliefs are these: Are they arguable? Is there any way to adjudicate their conflicting truth claims?
Can some beliefs be eliminated as false and others be established as true? If so, by what method or test for truth? Fideists do not face these questions squarely; or if they do, they tend to provide nonfideistic answers, such as to believe otherwise is contrary to one’s experience, to reason, to his hope for the future, or it brings undesired results. But to answer this way is to return to rationalism or to move on to experientialism or pragmatism as tests for truth. This is no longer methodological fideism.
6. Fideism faces a final dilemma. Either it makes a truth-claim or it does not. If fideism is not making a claim to be true, then it is not a position in philosophy but simply a study in psychology. For where there is no truth claim, one has not entered the arena of truth. On the other hand, if fideism makes a truth-claim then it must have a truth-test. For not all truth claims can be true, at least not contrary ones.
And if one is to be able to sort out the true from the false, there must be a test for truth. Hence, either a fideist offers a justification for his belief or else he does not. If he does not, then as an unjustified belief it has no rightful claim to knowledge (since human knowledge is justified belief).
On the other hand, if the fideist offers a justification for his belief—as indeed the whole argument for fideism would seem to be—then he is no longer a fideist, since he has an argument or justification for holding his belief in fideism. In short, either fideism is not a rightful claimant to truth or else it is self-defeating.
But in neither case can it be established to be true.
Summary and Conclusion
There are many significant insights provided by fideism into the total picture of religious knowing, such as the stress on the personal, subjective, and existential dimensions of religious truth and life. However, as a test for truth of a world view (such as Christian theism), fideism is entirely inadequate because it really offers no test. Contrary beliefs can be “experienced” or claimed to be true by fideists.
But unless there is some rational or objective way to adjudicate these conflicting claims, the truth question cannot be settled.
At the bare minimum, fideists must allow the principle of noncontradiction to be a negative test for truth; else there would be no way to distinguish the true from the false. As has already been shown (in Chapter One), there is no way to deny the validity of the law of noncontradiction without employing it in the very denial. This too is a self-destructive movement in total fideism. Fideists must either justify their beliefs (which destroys fideism) or else it disqualifies its claim to truth.
SELECT READINGS FOR CHAPTER THREE
Exposition of Fideism
- Barth, Karl. Nein.
- ———. Church Dogmatics, vol. I.
- Kierkegaard, Söoren. Fear and Trembling.
- ———. Philosophical Fragments.
- Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.
Evaluation of Fideism
- Bartley, William. Retreat to Commitment.
- Collins, James. God in Modern Philosophy, chap. X.
- Diamond, Malcolm. The Logic of God.
- Geehan, E. R., ed., Jerusalem and Athens.
- Sauvage, G. M. “Fideism” in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. V (1909).
1 Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, 7.
2 Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Pascal are taken from his Pensées, Brunschvicg edition.
3 Pascal, “Wager” in Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Books, 1966).
4 Pascal, “Wager.”
5 Sören Kierkegaard, Either/Or.
6 See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
7 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
8 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pp. 80, 66, 69.
9 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, sec. II, p. 483 f.
10 Kierkegaard, Postscripts, p. 116.
11 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 130.
12 Kierkegaard, Fragments, chap. 2.
13 Kierkegaard, Fragments, p. 49.
14 Kierkegaard, Postscripts, p. 485.
15 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. from the 6th ed. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933 [first German edition published 1918]).
16 Barth, Anselm.
17 Barth, Church Dogmatics.
18 Barth, Church Dogmatics.
19 Barth, Church Dogmatics.
20 Barth, Nein.
21 Barth, Nein, p. 75.
22 Barth, Nein. pp. 79–85.
23 Barth, Nein, p. 89.
24 Barth, Nein, p. 108.
25 Van Til’s apologetic may be viewed as a transcendental argument. See the chapter by Knudsen in Jerusalem and Athens, ed. E. R. Geehan.
26 Van Til, Defense of the Faith, p. 118.
27 Van Til, “My Credo,” C, 5, in Jerusalem and Athens, p. 258.
28 Van Til, Defense, pp. 11, 69, 86.
29 Van Til, Defense, p. 120.
30 Van Til, “My Credo.”
31 Van Til, Defense, p. 116.
32 Van Til, Common Grace, p. 55.
33 Van Til, Defense, pp. 264–65.
34 Van Til, Defense, pp. 263, 258.
35 Van Til, Defense, pp. 120, 256.
36 See Paul Feyerabend, ed., Mind, Matter, And Method: University of Minnesota Press, 1966.
37 Thomas Aquinas, On Truth, XIV, 8 and XIV, 1, ad 2. Cf. Summa Theologica, II-II, 2, 10.
38 See my From God to Us, chap. 2.
39 See my Christ, The Key to Interpreting the Bible, chap. 6.
[1]Geisler, N. L. (1976). Christian apologetics. Includes index. (47). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
