Faith Thinking - Trevor Hart (1)
Faith Thinking[1] – Trevor Hart (01; 1/2/25)
“Theology is not undesirable, it is unavoidable. What matters is that it should be good theology.”[2]
Trevor Hart’s fine book on faith thinking is about thinking done within the parameters of Christian faith. It is not “thinking about faith” as if we can stand outside of faith and evaluate it by commonly shared standards of evaluation. It is rather an exercise in “faith seeking understanding.” This was St. Augustine’s most famous claim: faith is the necessary starting point for understanding. Faith in God, the teachings of Scripture, and Christian doctrines are the ground on which reason can operate.
The theology or “faith thinking” Hart commends is not the much-maligned work of academic theology alone. It is the work of every believer, every church, and every kind of ministry, including the academic kind. Faith thinking and daily life and ministry cannot and should not be separated. Faith thinking is obviously done in different ways and with different foci on each of these levels, but they must be integrated and not isolated from one another. That they have become estranged is a chief mark of what ails the church in the West today.
If faith thinking or theology is to be an integrated function of the church at all levels, we need a definition of the thing itself. Hart describes faith thinking/theology as an inter-related and reciprocal process involving three elements:
1. Understanding “faith” as a fundamental disposition of human existence. Every person thinks based on unprovable assumptions about the make-up of the world, human beings, and our place and function in the world. Even natural science makes such assumptions. It assumes at least (i) that the world is real and orderly and makes sense; and (ii) that human beings are so equipped to grasp and explain the order and sense the world makes. Without such unprovable[3] assumptions science, or thinking generally, cannot get started! This is true, as I said, of every human being.
2. faith thinking/theology, thus, “must always seek better to understand that in which it is faith” (17). Theology must deal with the content of what it believes. In the book of Jude we read about “the faith that was once and for all handed on to the saints” (Jude 3). But that faith is never understood “once and for all.” For every believer, church, ministry group, or academic theologian their grasp of the width and depth of their faith (hopefully) grows over time. Hart notes, “Christian faith is driven by a desire to know more of that which is its source and raison d’être, to learn to speak and to think more appropriately of that reality, and of the various component parts of the knowledge of it that has been handed down through the ages by the community of faith” (17).
Faith is to better grasp its “internal coherence.” Descriptively, faith seeks a more cogent and coherent expression of what it believes and interpretively, expressing that faith it a way that makes sense for the contemporary situation.
And then, there is and normative and prescriptive aspect. Normatively, faith learns to better answer two questions: “What has the church said and believed, and how can we best express that so that people today will be able to understand it?” Prescriptively, faith asks and tries to answer the question “What should the church say and believe today?”
At this point concern arises for the “external reference” of faith. That is, how does our faith relate to the truth of the world we live in. This entails “critical” reflection on our faith. Hart writes, “faith—standing upon the shoulders of a tradition that it has inherited from the past—must nonetheless always be open to the possibility that its encounter with the truth might force it to part company with that tradition in some fundamental way. We cannot proceed on the assumption that it will, but we must always be open to the possibility that it might” (18-19).
3. Faith must then endeavor to understand its “place within its own specific historical and cultural context” (19). This, Hart explains, involves asking
“how far the commitments peculiar to Christian faith can be fitted together with that view of our world and the place of humans within it entertained by most of our contemporaries, the assumptions, attitudes, and practices that might be referred to in a wholesale manner as the mindset of twenty-first-century western society. This is a vitally necessary task which must be repeated afresh on a regular basis. Yesterday’s answers will not address today’s questions; and while the task of theology or ‘faith seeking understanding’ is certainly not restricted to the answering of questions and problems thrown up by the agenda of society, nevertheless even in that more fundamental task of bearing witness, of seeking to give some meaningful account of itself and the object of its hope, faith must already take these factors into consideration, otherwise it will be forced into a ghetto of its own making, a self-imposed irrelevance and obscurantism” (19-20).
Since we live and interact in our “twenty-first century western” world, we will inevitably be faced with issues and questions which we will have to and want to answer in line with our faith for these are our questions and issues to. This process will be genuinely dialogic. Each side may well have things to learn from each other and reframe their views accordingly. This process, what Hart calls “external coherence” is an ever-ongoing one. “Theology, therefore, entails the attempt to sketch an intellectual contour of reality as it appears from within the stance of a living and active faith in Christ, “a continuing intellectual effort after honest belief capable of throwing light on existence in all its complexity.”[4] This process best takes place within a community of faith and practice.
In sum, ““Asking questions is part of what it means to be human, . . . asking questions in the light of the grace of God in Jesus Christ is part of what it means to be Christian.”[5]
Summary
1. Faith thinking/theology is faith actively seeking understanding. Every form of thinking involves working from unprovable assumptions. Faith, grounded on the scriptures theological traditions of the church, works toward responsible theological answers to the changing questions and issues of different times and places.
2. The process involved includes internal coherence (what the church has said and believed, and how can we best express that so that people today will be able to understand it?” and “What should the church say and believe today?”) and external reference (how does faith respond to the issues and questions of its time and to the truth.
3. This process is dialogic, a genuine give and take between various perspectives from which each may share with and learn from each other.
[1] Hart says he aims this book “at those to the person who is approaching the question of how to do theology for the first time” (22). I think he overshoots that aim by a good bit. It is not a book for beginners.
[2] Hart, Trevor. Faith Thinking, Second Edition: The Dynamics of Christian Theology (p. 22). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
[3] We can “prove” these assumptions on the basis that they obviously work and allow us to do science and to think (a posteriori as the philosophers say) but not before such work is done (a priori).
[4] Church of England Doctrine Commission, Christian Believing, 4.
[5] Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Eerdmans), 17.