Topic 7 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Faith and Knowledge
There is a strand of Christian tradition that treats faith and knowledge as opposites - as if believing means suspending critical thought, and thinking means undermining trust. This is a misreading of both faith and knowledge, and it has done real damage to Christian intellectual life. The biblical tradition does not pit faith against understanding. It assumes that genuine faith engages the mind along with everything else.
The Hebrew word for "know," yada, carries a sense of intimate, experiential knowledge - not just intellectual assent to propositions. When the Old Testament says that Israel is called to know God, it is not calling for the accumulation of data about a divine being. It is calling for a relationship that involves the whole person - will, emotion, and mind together. The New Testament continues this pattern. The Greek word gnosis (knowledge) appears throughout Paul's letters not as an alternative to faith but as one of its fruits and expressions.
The long history of Christian scholarship - from Augustine and Anselm through Aquinas, Calvin, and Edwards, and on into modern figures like Alvin Plantinga, N.T. Wright, and Miroslav Volf - is a testimony to the conviction that faith seeks understanding. Anselm's famous phrase fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) captures the relationship well. Faith is not the end of inquiry. It is, for the believer, the beginning of a deeper kind of inquiry - one that takes seriously both the evidence and the commitment.
What does this mean in practice for Bible reading? It means bringing your full intelligence to the text rather than leaving your questions at the door. It means being willing to sit with hard passages, to consult scholarship, to change your mind when the evidence warrants it. A faith that is afraid of honest questions is a faith that does not fully trust the God it claims to worship. The tradition represented in these guides holds that the God who made the human mind is not threatened by its use.