Faith, then, is the highest knowledge, because it is the act of the integral soul, the insight, not of one eye alone, but of the two eyes of the mind, intellect and love to God. With one eye we can see an object as flat, but, if we wish to see around it and get the stereoptic effect, we must use both eyes. It is not the theologian, but the undevout astronomer, whose science is one-eyed and therefore incomplete. The errors of the rationalist are errors of defective vision. Intellect has been divorced from heart, that is, from a right disposition, right affections, right purpose in life. Intellect says: “I cannot know God”; and intellect is right. What intellect says, the Scripture also says: 1 Cor. 2:14—“the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged”; 1:21—“in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom knew not God.”
The Scripture on the other hand declares that “by faith we know” (Heb. 11:3). By “heart”the Scripture means simply the governing disposition, or the sensibility + the will; and it intimates that the heart is an organ of knowledge: Ex. 35:25—“the women that were wise-hearted”; Ps. 34:8—“O taste and see that Jehovah is good” = a right taste precedes correct sight; Jer. 24:7—“I will give them a heart to know me”; Mat. 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God”; Luke 24:25—“slow of heart to believe”; John 7:17—“If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself”; Eph. 1:18—“having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know”; 1 John 4:7, 8—“Every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God.” See Frank, Christian Certainty, 303-324; Clarke, Christ. Theol., 362; Illingworth, Div. and Hum. Personality, 114-137; R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 6; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Rev., 6; William James, The Will to Believe, 1-31; Geo. T. Ladd, on Lotze's view that love is essential to the knowledge of God, in New World, Sept. 1895:401-406; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 14, 15.
C. Faith, therefore, can furnish, and only faith can furnish, fit and sufficient material for a scientific theology.—As an operation of man's higher rational nature, though distinct from ocular vision or from reasoning, faith is not only a kind, but the highest kind, of knowing. It gives us understanding of realities which to sense alone are inaccessible, namely, God's existence, and some at least of the relations between God and his creation.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:50, follows Gerhard in making faith the joint act of intellect and will. Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 77, 78, speaks not only of “the æsthetic reason” but of “the moral reason.” Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 91, 109, 145, 191—“Faith is the certitude concerning matter in which verification is unattainable.” Emerson, Essays, 2:96—“Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul—unbelief in rejecting them.” Morell, Philos. of Religion, 38, 52, 53, quotes Coleridge: “Faith consists in the synthesis of the reason and of the individual will, ... and by virtue of the former (that is, reason), faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding [pg 005]of truth.” Faith, then, is not to be pictured as a blind girl clinging to a cross—faith is not blind—“Else the cross may just as well be a crucifix or an image of Gaudama.” “Blind unbelief,” not blind faith, “is sure to err, And scan his works in vain.” As in conscience we recognize an invisible authority, and know the truth just in proportion to our willingness to “do the truth,” so in religion only holiness can understand holiness, and only love can understand love (cf. John 3:21—“he that doeth the truth cometh to the light”).
If a right state of heart be indispensable to faith and so to the knowledge of God, can there be any “theologia irregenitorum,” or theology of the unregenerate? Yes, we answer; just as the blind man can have a science of optics. The testimony of others gives it claims upon him; the dim light penetrating the obscuring membrane corroborates this testimony. The unregenerate man can know God as power and justice, and can fear him. But this is not a knowledge of God's inmost character; it furnishes some material for a defective and ill-proportioned theology; but it does not furnish fit or sufficient material for a correct theology. As, in order to make his science of optics satisfactory and complete, the blind man must have the cataract removed from his eyes by some competent oculist, so, in order to any complete or satisfactory theology, the veil must be taken away from the heart by God himself (cf. 2 Cor. 3:15, 16—“a veil lieth upon their heart. But whensoever it [marg. ‘a man’] shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away”).
Our doctrine that faith is knowledge and the highest knowledge is to be distinguished from that of Ritschl, whose theology is an appeal to the heart to the exclusion of the head—to fiducia without notitia. But fiducia includes notitia, else it is blind, irrational, and unscientific. Robert Browning, in like manner, fell into a deep speculative error, when, in order to substantiate his optimistic faith, he stigmatized human knowledge as merely apparent. The appeal of both Ritschl and Browning from the head to the heart should rather be an appeal from the narrower knowledge of the mere intellect to the larger knowledge conditioned upon right affection. See A. H. Strong, The Great Poets and their Theology, 441. On Ritschl's postulates, see Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 274-280, and Pfleiderer, Die Ritschl'sche Theologie. On the relation of love and will to knowledge, see Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900:717; Hovey, Manual Christ. Theol., 9; Foundations of our Faith, 12, 13; Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:154-164; Presb. Quar., Oct. 1871, Oct. 1872, Oct. 1873; Calderwood, Philos. Infinite, 99, 117; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 2-8; New Englander, July, 1873:481; Princeton Rev., 1864:122; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt, 124, 125; Grau, Glaube als höchste Vernunft, in Beweis des Glaubens, 1865:110; Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 228; Newman, Univ. Sermons, 206; Hinton, Art of Thinking, Introd. by Hodgson, 5.
2. Man's capacity for the knowledge of God
In the capacity of the human mind for knowing God and certain of these relations.—But it has urged that such knowledge is impossible for the following reasons:
A. Because we can know only phenomena. We reply: (a) We know mental as well as physical phenomena. (b) In knowing phenomena, whether mental or physical, we know substance as underlying the phenomena, as manifested through them, and as constituting their ground of unity. (c) Our minds bring to the observation of phenomena not only this knowledge of substance, but also knowledge of time, space, cause, and right, realities which are in no sense phenomenal. Since these objects of knowledge are not phenomenal, the fact that God is not phenomenal cannot prevent us from knowing him.