Despite New Atheist–style arguments and popular assumptions to the contrary, Christian faith is not irrational. As Pope Francis said in a 2015 homily, it’s founded upon a “reasonable love,” or “love accompanied by reason.” “But love!” he insisted, underscoring that reason and cold hard facts alone cannot contain the complexity of human knowing.
But cold hard facts are helpful. On a recent family walk through the local woods, one of my children said something along the lines of, “Why can’t God make himself more obvious? Wouldn’t more people believe if there were more miracles?” After years of uncritical childhood trust in our weekly church attendance and in the informal catechesis of our everyday life, my young adult child was rightly asking for evidence and tacitly wondering whether our faith is reasonable.
My first thought was “Oh no! Do these questions signal the beginning of a loss of faith?” I realize I have to accept that it’s a real possibility. But that is just because when we come to these heady moments in life when we feel the need to step back and examine what we believe, it’s usually because something has happened to prompt us to put those beliefs in the balance. And so we start asking questions to discern if those beliefs can still hold enough weight to support us. It’s possible they won’t. But we also need to ask these questions to work out our faith and to appropriate it more deeply into our lives. This was my second, more hopeful thought.
As we continued our hike, I shared that I also wouldn’t mind if God would occasionally whack us on the head with a clear and unmistakable sign of his loving presence. And I pointed out that we’re in good company. Right at the very start “Doubting Thomas” wanted evidence: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).
Thomas gets a bad rap for this scene. If he doubts anything, it’s the testimony of others who have seen Jesus. It seems just as likely that he didn’t so much doubt it as much as he wanted to corroborate it. And surely, at this point, his mind is in a fog from the overwhelming grief of Jesus’s brutal execution. The news that Jesus is alive seems too good to be true, and Thomas very understandably wants to see for himself.
“There is enough light for those who truly wish to see.”
At an earlier point in his ministry, Jesus becomes frustrated at a demand for evidence, for an authenticating sign, but his frustration doesn’t seem to be at the request itself but rather at its antagonistic motive (see Matthew 12:38–39). Jesus’s whole career, after all, was full of signs and wonders to announce the kingdom of God. And he doesn’t say to Thomas, “It’s too bad you needed to see for yourself, Thomas. Blessed are those who don’t need signs and who can blindly believe.” I suspect this is often how the passage is taken—as a plug for a blind faith without evidence or reason.
On the contrary, Jesus invites Thomas to inspect the evidence, to come and see for himself. But Jesus also knew that all but a very small slice of a single generation of Christians have had to be like Thomas before he saw the risen Christ. All of us who have come after that first generation have to rely on the apostolic testimony. When Jesus says to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe,” it’s not so much a rebuke to Thomas as a blessing to the rest of us.
But Jesus isn’t telling us to believe without evidence. John tells us right after this moment that he has recorded the events of Jesus’s life so that we might believe. And from what I understand of the current state of research on the historical Jesus, very few (if any) responsible scholars of the ancient world doubt that the Gospels are reliable historical records of a remarkable first-century life.
Even the late E. P. Sanders, a widely respected agnostic scholar, admitted the historical record of Jesus’s empty tomb and some kind of post-burial experience of Jesus amongst his followers was “a fact.” Sanders concluded, “What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.” Anglican New Testament scholar John Dickson observes that this type of conclusion—that “something very odd must have happened” but we’ll never really know what—is “typical of the secular study of Jesus.”
In other words, the Christian faith is unique as trust in a historical record, a record open to rational scrutiny and preserved in the New Testament and early Church. But still, a historian can only say so much. Even if you were an eyewitness, it would still require faith that Jesus’s Resurrection means what he says it means and that he is who he says he is. It’s powerful evidence, but it still requires trust that this real, historically particular man conceals the godhead in his flesh.
Blaise Pascal thought that this tension between the evidence for God’s existence and the hiddenness of God in Christ is the unique genius of the Christian faith. Christianity, Pascal explains in fragment 681 of his Pensées, “strives equally to establish these two things: [1] that God has left perceptible signs in the Church so that he can be recognized by those who sincerely seek him; and [2] that he has nevertheless veiled these signs in such a way that he will be perceived only by those who seek him with all their hearts.”
Pascal does not mean that faith is blind or unreasonable. “There is enough light for those who truly wish to see,” he writes (fr. 274). But he also insists that while reason has an important role in the life of faith, it has its limits.
It has limits because if God is the loving and personal God revealed in Jesus Christ, then those perceptible signs are not ultimately meant to be taken simply as evidence that God exists. They are an invitation to come unto him for rest. Our reasonable desire to scrutinize evidence plays a good role in this movement. But it’s a role analogous to the one it plays with my children or my wife. We communicate with all sorts of subtle “perceptible signs,” and it’s our love for one another that sharpens our attention so that we can interpret and respond to those signs better than anyone else.
In short, we know each other most fully when we love each other. It’s the same with God. We can study God in all kinds of ways, and this is good. But when Pascal writes, “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know,” he doesn’t mean to cast faith in irrational or sentimental terms (fr. 680). He means, with Pope Francis, that because God is love, it is ultimately “only on the path of love” that we can know God.