Believe That You May Understand

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. HEBREWS 11:3

Augustine joined the Manichees partly because they promised him knowledge without faith. The Catholic church, they said, asked people to believe things on authority; they would lead their hearers to truth by reason alone. It was an attractive offer to a proud young intellectual. It took him nine years to discover that the Manichees, too, demanded belief in a great many things they could not prove — and far stranger things than the church had ever asked. When he finally came to Christ, he came with a new understanding of how faith and reason belong together, and it became one of the most influential principles of Christian thought.

Everyone believes

The turning point, as he tells it in Book VI of the Confessions, was a simple observation. God, he says, gently persuaded him by making him consider “what innumerable things I believed, which I saw not, nor was present while they were done” — the events of history, the existence of distant cities, the word of friends and physicians. He believed, without having seen it, who his own parents were. Without trusting others, he realised, we could do nothing at all in this life. Faith is not a peculiar religious weakness. It is the ordinary way human beings come to know most of what they know.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. HEBREWS 11:1

This freed him from the arrogance that assumes a thinking person may accept nothing he has not personally proved. The real question is not whether to trust, but whom. And the Scriptures, he came to see, carried an authority that commended itself — spread through all the world, humble in style yet deep in meaning, open to the simple and yet unexhausted by the learned.

Faith first, then understanding

From this grew the principle for which Augustine is remembered: believe, that you may understand. He found it in the prophet Isaiah, in the old Latin version he read, which rendered a verse of chapter 7, Unless you believe, you shall not understand. The King James Version, following the Hebrew, reads differently.

If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established. ISAIAH 7:9

Augustine’s text was imperfect, but the truth he drew from it is thoroughly scriptural, and he could have found it in the words of Christ.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. JOHN 7:17

Faith, for Augustine, is not the enemy of thinking. It is where thinking starts. We do not first understand God and then decide to trust Him; we trust Him, and then begin to understand. In the Enchiridion he sums up the whole Christian life in a phrase: “we begin in faith, and are made perfect by sight.” Faith is the road; understanding grows along it; sight is the home at the end.

But notice that he wants us to understand. Augustine never used faith as an excuse to stop thinking. He wrote more than almost anyone in the ancient church, and he wrestled with every question he could find. His principle is not believe instead of understanding, but believe in order to understand. Faith that never seeks understanding has not taken God seriously. Understanding that despises faith has not taken itself seriously enough.

The Trinity: faith seeking understanding

The great example of this in his work is On the Trinity, which he laboured over for some twenty years. He begins where faith must begin — with Scripture — and spends the first books gathering what the Bible says of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He sets it out briefly in the Enchiridion too: the one true God is the Trinity, the Father, the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit, one and the same Spirit of Father and Son.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. MATTHEW 28:19

Only then does he go looking for understanding. He looks for traces of the Trinity in the human soul, which was made in God’s image. In the last book of the Confessions he offers a simple one: I am, I know, and I will. These are three, and yet one life, one mind; they cannot be separated, and yet they are distinct. In On the Trinity he develops others — memory, understanding and will; the lover, the beloved and the love between them. He is careful to say that these images fall far short. In the Confessions he calls them things “far other than the Trinity.” They are not proofs. They are the attempts of a believing mind to glimpse a little of what it already confesses.

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 1 JOHN 4:16

His image of the Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son has shaped Western worship and prayer ever since. It is fair to add that the Eastern churches have been uneasy with the way this was later expressed in the Western creed, and readers will meet that long debate if they read further.

The humility of the enquirer

Augustine was frank about how little any of us can grasp. He said in On the Trinity, in effect, that we speak of three persons not because the phrase says all that should be said, but so as not to be silent. His great mind ends, again and again, not in a solution but in worship.

O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! ROMANS 11:33

That is the pattern he offers every thinking believer. Start with what God has said. Believe it. Then think as hard as you can, pray as you think, and when you reach the edge of what can be understood, bow down. The end of theology is doxology.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List some of the things you believe on the testimony of others. Consider what this shows about the reasonableness of trusting God’s testimony.

2. Choose one doctrine you believe but do not understand well, and spend an hour this month studying what Scripture says about it.

3. If you have doubts, bring them honestly to God and to a wise believer rather than hiding them. Faith seeks understanding; it does not fear questions.

4. Read Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14, and pray this week consciously to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

5. When your thinking reaches its limit, stop and worship, as Paul does in Romans 11:33–36.

A PRAYER

Lord, I believe; help me to understand. And where I cannot understand, keep me believing.

Deliver me from the pride that will trust nothing it has not proved, and from the laziness that will not think at all.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, You are far beyond my mind. Yet You have made Yourself known.

Lead me by faith, grow me in understanding, and bring me at last to sight. Amen.