Faith and Reason Reconsidered: Aquinas and Luther on Deciding what is True1

The Thomist 63 (1999): 1-48 FAITH AND REASON RECONSIDERED: AQUINAS AND LUfHER ON DECIDING WHAT IS TRUE1 BRUCE D. MARSHALL St. OlafCollege Northfield, Minnesota IN WHAT MAY REMAIN the most widely read book in English about Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton locates Thomas's chief contribution to the Church, and to the whole human enterprise, by contrasting him with Luther. "It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of the Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."2 Thomas's great achievement, Chesterton argues, was to achieve a perfect balance and harmony between faith and reason, Christ and Aristotle. Luther's great importance lay in his singleminded effort-remarkably successful, Chesterton ruefully concedes-to destroy whatThomas achieved. Luther's passionate hatred of reason rudely dissolves the problem Thomas had so exquisitely solved. Thus no comparison between them on the problem of faith and reason is really possible, since properly speaking Luther, having simply rejected reason, has no position on the issue at all. Indeed, while the two figures can rightly be compared for their great though antithetical historical influence, in the nature of the case there can be no comparison of their views on any matter of theological and philosophical substance. 1 This paper considerably revises a presentation first given at a conference on Trinitarian theology in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in March 1993, and published in German in the proceedings of that conference: Joachim Heubach, ed., Luther unddie trinitarische Tradition: Okumenische und philosophische Perspektiven (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1994). 2 G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956; first published 1933), 33. 2 BRUCE D. MARSHALL "To compare these two figures bulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible."3 This paper argues that Aquinas and Luther hold basically the same view of faith and reason: the view that the most central Christian beliefs, those generated by communal interpretation of Scripture according to creedal rules, enjoy unrestricted epistemic primacy. It is not my purpose here to argue that this is the right theological view to have of how to decide which beliefs (or candidates for belief} are true; that I have done elsewhere.4 But of course in order to hold this view one need not rely upon the contemporary idiom I have just used to state it. Despite their distance from us and their genuine differences from each other, Aquinas and Luther each counts as a rich precedent for a theological epistemology which accords unrestricted epistemic primacy to the Christian community's most central convictionsto the deliverances of faith rather than to those of reason. Of course much has changed since Chesterton's dismissal of Luther sixty years ago. A generation of Catholic and Lutheran scholarship has found Aquinas and Luther to be not only comparable, but in profound agreement, on some utterly central theological matters-above all the justification of the sinner and the wider complex of issues surrounding that topic, traditionally regarded as the most important and most divisive in CatholicLutheran theological controversy.5 Unfortunately school theology , both Catholic and Protestant, has barely begun to get the message that Aquinas and Luther might both be greatly misunderstood if they are assumed to be opposites. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly the case than on the question of faith and reason. Though in our day few would put the matter quite so bluntly as Chesterton, the assumptions which lead him to play Aquinas and Luther off against one another remain largely in place. Defenders ofAquinas on faith and reason 3 Ibid., 194. 4 In Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: University Press, 1999). 5 Above all see Otto Hermann Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas van Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Griinewald-Verlag, 1967; reprint 1985). FAITH AND REASON RECONSIDERED 3 (most, though not all, Catholic) still tend to assume that Luther was a naive if perhaps admirably passionate fideist, whose hatred of reason isolates Christian theology from the rest of human knowledge and thereby makes it impossible to...