Introduction
Fideism and apologetics are commonly cast as mortal enemies that are diametrically opposed to one another by nature. One apologetic stands out in particular among the others in bearing the brunt of this opposition from this philosophical school, namely Evidentialism. The goal of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, to dispel the misconception that Fideism is naturally opposed to evidential apologetics, and secondly, to show that Evidentialism is in fact the proper and most natural apologetic of those belonging to the Fideist epistemology. In order to accomplish this task we will seek to define terms, elaborate on the common perception of dissonance between the philosophy and the apologetic and bridge the gap between them. Finally, we will seek to apply the information put forward to lay out an apologetic modus operandi for those who subscribe to Fideism that brings more balance and nuance to the table than what exists currently.
Fideism and Existentialism
Fideism and Existentialism have a long and intertwined history. Although not all Fideists are Existentialists, all Existentialists are Fideists. However, Fideism only exists outside of Existentialism before the rise of the anachronistically defined Existentialist terms and concepts or in moderate or modified forms within traditions that deem Existentialism to be unorthodox. In seeking to address the rule rather than the exception this paper will only cover Fideism as it appears in Existentialist thought with the exception of thinkers pre-dating Kierkegaard that are necessary for building a historic progression of the Fideist epistemology.
Fideism itself is the epistemological theory that the divine mysteries revealed to us cannot be arrived at by reason but must be accepted by faith over and against it.[1] While Fideism was never entirely absent from Christianity, its clearest and most explicit beginning can be attributed to Tertullian who stands out among his Patristic peers in that unlike them, his Fideism did not come in a primitive and undeveloped form, but he used key terms and concepts that would not be seen in such explicit and precise use again until the arrival of Kierkegaard and the Existentialists. A prime example of this is in his book On the Flesh of Christ, where he writes; “the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.”[2] After Tertullian, the use of natural law became more popular and faith became classically defined as intellectual assent. We see this quite clearly in Augustine who titles the fifth chapter of book two in his work, On the Predestination of the Saints, as “To Believe is to think with Assent.”[3] Augustine employed this definition of faith when he posited that some truths were somewhere between logic and experience and could only be arrived at by faith which was received as a gift of divine illumination.[4] On the surface this looks very agreeable to the modern Fideist. However, Augustine understood these truths that require faith to be much broader than that which the modern church considers divine revelation. Rather than restricting this to divine mysteries such as the trinity, incarnation, and the vicarious satisfaction, Augustine included things such as self-awareness, math, and other such laws of nature.[5] In broadening the area of knowledge that requires divine revelation and faith Augustine watered them down to the point that faith in Christ became an exercise of the same virtue required to put forward correct mathematical presuppositions. As the church progressed into the medieval age theologians began to build upon Augustine’s work, re-categorizing, defining, and nuancing while still keeping the foundational backbone of his thought. The most prominent of these men was Aquinas. Aquinas separated the truths of general revelation which he believed could be understood with the natural innate reason of man from the truths of divine mystery that could only be grasped by faith. In respect to faith Aquinas kept the basis of Augustine’s definition that revolved around thinking with assent but modified it to the point that it clearly distinguished between the naturally graspable truths and the divine mysteries by restricting it to believing things said in God’s Word. Yet, not all that was in God’s Word was needed to be grasped by faith in Aquinas’ estimation, because although the Bible tells us that God exists, he believed that we could know this without God’s Word via natural reason. It was only the doctrines that we could not prove through natural reason that we needed to trust God’s Word for, and this was where Aquinas laid down his definition for faith, a trust in things unprovable, and ultimately unreasonable in the sense that it is beyond the grasp of our mortal capacity for reason.[6] Aquinas does however but the breaks on this idea to caution that we do not go so far as to say that divine truth is contrary to reason in his book Summa Contra Gentiles wherein he writes; “it is impossible for the truth of faith to be contrary to principles known by natural reason.”[7]
With things moving in the proper direction away from Augustine’s definitions toward a more pronounced distinction between things knowable and unknowable, the perfect conditions were in place for Luther to break free from the churches obsession with natural law. The way that Luther saw it, Aquinas was right to differentiate between things we can know through reason and things we must receive by faith. However, he did not agree with Aquinas on where the line was drawn for these things. For Luther, all that could be known of God was to be known in and through His revelation to us which came in the highest form of what Aquinas understood to be the unknowable mysteries that we could only apprehend through faith. Luther agreed with Aquinas in saying that we could know God through nature, but because of our sin we have lost our natural capacity to grasp these truths[8]. If then we are to know anything of God, be it His existence, or the divine mysteries, we must grasp it by faith, because our reason has been darkened to the point that aided or unaided it still cannot fathom these truths. As David C. Steinmetz describes this necessity of faith, “the revelation of God is hidden under a contrary appearance” and as such it is “against what the eye can see, against what reason, prudence, and common sense dictate, the onlooker must deny the evidence of his senses and grasp the Word of the prophet by faith.”[9] In factoring in the depravity of man and its impact on our mental faculties, Luther moved from where Aquinas was, in believing that in no way could divine truth be contrary to reason, towards acknowledging that our nature and its reason has been damaged by sin to the point that if we are to grasp divine truth at all it must be to the rejection of what our post-lapse reason tells us. As Kierkegaard stepped onto the scene he brought with him a focus on this idea of faith contrary and opposed to what we can reason or grasp with our natural senses and saw faith in and through this concept of grasping the “absurd” entirely on the basis of God’s Word, making faith not just a trust in God s Word to grasp things beyond the capacity of our natural reason but generally characterized as a trust in the absurd and that which is contrary to our post-lapse reason. He explains this concept through the example of Abraham believing in God’s promise to him in the face of the command to sacrifice Isaac, saying; “He believed by virtue of the absurd; for all human reckoning had long ceased to function.”[10] This changes the fundamental concept of faith from something that grasps truths beyond our reason, into something that grasps truths contrary to our reason. The root of this change is derived from the heightened concept of sin and its effect on the mind as well as the distinction between the hidden and revealed God that Kierkegaard drew from Luther.
Fideism and the philosophical rejection of apologetics
fideism has placed upon the table its proposition that the truths we are discussing in the gospel, the incarnation, the trinity, and even the existence of God are naturally opposed to the fallen and distorted reason that we are functioning with post-lapse. Therefore, all attempts to prove the existence of God will be lost on the reason of the fallen mind and even if grasped in some distorted way such as it is in Calvin’s sensus divinitatis,[11] it will be to our detriment rather than our benefit. For, as Luther explained, we cannot understand God apart from His revelation to us in the incarnation and humiliation. A God may exist and He may be holy, just, and all-powerful, but this would be to our terror unless He came as a man Himself, to die for us in our place, and was resurrected three days later to raise us also to new life in Him. But that He did do all these things is entirely contrary to our fallen reason. The discipline of apologetics, as Wayne Grudem describes it, is “providing a defense of the truthfulness of the Christian faith for the purpose of convincing unbelievers.”[12] As a general rule this is done through the use of natural reason and sometimes going so far as to state that truth as revealed in God’s Word is not contrary to reason but in fact is the only consistently logical conclusion according to natural reason such as in Presuppositionalism.[13] It is not hard to see then how Fideists have historically opposed the theological discipline of apologetics just as they have commonly opposed the study of natural law. The reason for this opposition to apologetics is two-fold; firstly, the concept of a discussion of God apart from the incarnate Christ and His gospel is inconceivable and entirely negative to the Fideists. Secondly, it seeks to flip the concept of Gods revealed knowability on its head. The revelation of God in Christ becomes instead the revelation of Christ in an abstract divine creator, evidential probability, or even consistency itself. The way this fits into the question of apologetics is quite simple; if divine revelation is in fact something that must be accepted by faith rather than reason then it would be impossible to prove the existence of God, the trinity, the incarnation, and resurrection via the use of reason or the senses. Following the Fideist theory and method, the only way to convert sinners is through the proclamation of the gospel which is causal unto regeneration, not evidence to be weighed.
Evidentialism
The big three apologetic methods which are: classical, presuppositional, and evidential. Evidentialism is itself an epistemological theory that posits that a belief is right if it has evidence to support it.[14] As this relates to apologetics, one using an evidentialist approach will seek to defend the faith-based upon evidence. Commonly it is defined as an apologetic that seeks to prove Christianity on the basis that its evidences are both higher in quality and quantity; therefore it has the highest probability among other religions of being true.
Fideism and Evidentialism as moral enemies
The clash between Fideism and Evidentialism arises firstly in that they seem to be opposing ideologies. It would seem at first glance that either truths can be true based upon evidence, or truths can be contrary to reason. However, Evidentialism banks truth upon evidence, not upon reason. In doing so, it leaves a spot open for these ideologies to cohabitate a common space.
Moving towards a fideist evidentialism
This use of evidentialism in apologetics is a misuse of the evidence and the ideology itself. The evidence should not be used to weigh probability, but to testify of and proclaim an event. The Scriptures teach us that conversion is brought about by the hearing of the Word. Certainly, this does not mean in the hearing of any of the Scriptures. It is not from the hearing of a collection of words taken from the Bible such as “and”, “then”, and “therefore” that sinners are converted. Rather, it is from conveying the good news of Jesus Christ that God took upon full humanity to live a life free from sin, to bear our guilt, die with it on the cross, and be raised again to grant us new life in Him that the Holy Spirit affects the hearts of men just as Paul teaches in Romans 10:17. This proclamation is not mere “evidence” to be weighed by the rational faculty of a depraved man, but is the means by which the Holy Spirit plants faith in us and grows it. Proclamation therefore is causal, just as God’s Word has always been, such as when He said let there be light and there was, so also He proclaims by the blood of Christ your sins are forgiven and so they are. But before this was written down in the Word for us to hear read and preached, it was spoken of as testimony, and before it was spoken of in testimony, it was manifest in reality. Certainly, to those watching Christ die on the cross, and rise again in glory this was no less efficacious unto conversion than a reading of the passion and resurrection of Christ from the gospels. In this we might say that the Fideist in fact bases his apologetic not on the Word, but on proclamation. The evidence of the truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is no less a proclamation of this gospel truth that can only be accepted by faith than the Word is, moreover, the Word contains testimony of its evidence in the form of 500 witnesses over the course of 40 days as we learn in 1 Corinthians 15:6. Therefore, we are not left without the proclamation of this event because God has given to us evidences for it. As such, to use these evidences in defending our faith we are not appealing to reason, but appealing to the power of the Holy Spirit through the proclamation of the gospel which is, without doubt, efficacious in the hearts of all as Isaiah 55:11 has promised us. If a Fideist is going to engage in apologetics, which will occur with or without the Christian initiate it, he ought not to settle only for reading John 3:16 but should employ the whole armory of proclamation that God has given to us.
The goal of fideist evidentialism: proclamation
Up until now, the Fideists have by and large opposed public apologetics altogether. The issue with this is that in real life apologetic situations arise whether we initiate them or not. The Fideist knows this. If an unbeliever approaches a Fideist and demands a defense of why they are a Christian, they will likely proclaim the gospel to them. This is itself an apologetic. In truth, Fideists do not reject apologetics as is commonly asserted, even by their own account. The Fideist must only reject that which is contrary to Fideism, this being the use of reason to apprehend divine truths and the separating of the existence of God from His character, work, and relation to us. In doing these two things mainstream apologetics be they either according to the classical, presuppositional, or the evidential model become diametrically opposed to the I-Thou revealed relationship with God that can only be grasped by faith over and against reason and the faculty of the senses. Yet, in evidential apologetics what we find is a wealth of proclamation in evidential proofs that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ did indeed occur. These proofs ought not to be used to weigh the probability of Biblical revelation in comparison to other faiths, but must properly be used for causal proclamation, as a means of grace, as the Word before it was written. To clearly grasp this concept we must understand that the evidences that the gospel occurred factually in history are not a supplement to God’s Word, they are God’s Word, and just so the Holy Spirit uses them to affect the hearts of men in and through the proclamation of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of their sins, in this we see the truest form of the revealed I-Thou apologetic.
[1] Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, Cherith Fee Nordling, Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), pp. 52
[2] Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, V.
[3] Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, 2.5.
[4] Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (New York: Oxford, 2010), pp. 379.
[5] Ibid 378
[6] Ibid, 383.
[7]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 1.7.
[8] David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), pp. 24-25.
[9] Ibid, 25.
[10] Soren Kierkegaard, trans. Walter Lowrie, Fear and Trembling (New Jersey: Princeton, 1941), pp. 76
[11] John Calvin, trans. Robert White, The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2014), pp. 4.
[12] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), pp. 22.
[13] C. Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics and Philosophy & Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), pp. 97
[14] Ibid, 42.
