Many religious disputes about the nature and value of faith may rest on semantic
unclarity. Some writers may mean by “faith” something like “mere belief” in
propositions, without the personal trust in God that lies at the heart of the religious life;
others have a richer conception of faith, including not only belief, but a trust that
manifests itself in a disposition to actions. At the time of the Reformation, for example,
there was an acrimonious dispute as to whether faith alone was sufficient for salvation, or
whether works were also necessary. Richard Swinburne has argued that the disputants
had different conceptions of faith, with Catholics understanding faith as mere belief and
Protestants thinking of faith in a richer way that includes trust and a disposition to
obedient action, even though faith itself does not consist of “works” (1981, 104–24). The
Protestant conception of faith seems closer to what Aquinas termed “formed faith,”
which was seen by Catholics as sufficient for salvation. Though there may well be other
important issues in dispute, Swinburne seems right to maintain that the disagreement
rested partly on verbal confusion.
It therefore seems best to conceive of faith as a response of the whole person to God's
self-revelation, with trust, belief, and a disposition to obedient action all being significant
components. Such a “whole person” response is by no means purely intellectual. For
example, Jonathan Edwards speaks of faith as involving the development of a new set of
“affections,” and Kierkegaard describes faith as a “passion” that seems to include either
emotions or dispositions to have emotions of various kinds. Nevertheless, philosophical
discussions of the legitimacy and reasonableness of faith have tended to focus on the
aspect of belief. If the beliefs that are a component of faith are false, irrational, or
defective in some other epistemological dimension, this would seem to imply that faith as
a whole is an unreasonable stance. If I trust an individual because I falsely believe in the
goodness of that person, then my trust is misplaced. The relation between faith and
rational belief is therefore a crucial issue, and a proper treatment of this issue is linked to
general questions about the relation of faith to reason and the nature of both.
end p.331
Rationalism and Fideism
Views on the relation between faith and reason can be arranged on a continuum, with
rationalism and fideism occupying the opposite poles. The rationalist holds that faith
must be limited or governed by reason; the fideist holds that reason is damaged or
defective and must be repaired or restored by faith. The sense of the term “rationalism”
here must not be confused with the sense it bears in epistemology, when it is contrasted
with “empiricism.” In theology, an empiricist, someone who emphasizes the role of sense
experience in the acquisition of knowledge, can also be a rationalist, who affirms the
primacy of human reason (taking “reason” as a term for all of our natural human
faculties) over faith.
John Locke's epistemology provides a clear and historically influential example of the
rationalist perspective. Locke is open to the possibility of a special revelation from God,
and he sees faith in the traditional way as belief in a proposition “upon the credit of the
proposer, as coming from God” (1975, 689). Through faith, human beings can come to