Faith seeking understanding 1: Evangelical suspicion of Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding”

My formal theological training has not been typical for an evangelical Baptist. Rather than attending an evangelical Bible college, I did a 1 year post-graduate diploma at St Stephen’s House in Oxford. Then for my MPhil (at Trinity College, Bristol), I focused on a 12^th century monk (technically a canon regular) called Richard of Saint Victor.

Depending on the circles you mix in, popular level church history may jump from 100AD to 1900AD (some charismatic circles), or from about 500AD (after the early church councils) to 1500AD (reformation). Either way, medieval church and theologians tend to be ignored. And I understand that. The early medieval church didn’t have the sort of Trinitarian and Christological developments that make the patristic period interesting. The late medieval church was certainly going wrong in some important ways. And the reformers tend to keep much that was good in earlier periods while returning to the Bible to reform what had gone astray.

But for people who have read the Bible several times, and have read some theology, there is benefit to reading some medieval theologians. Partly because the pre-reformation medieval Christians, for all their faults, are our ancestors in the faith. The good news of Jesus, though it was obscured by some of the traditions, comes down to us through the church of this era. We will understand modern Christianity in the West better if we understand our history. But we will also find approaches and insights from Christian engagement with scripture and their culture that may benefit us.

I’m going to argue in this blogpost series that Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” offers an approach that evangelicals could benefit from. But in this first post, I’m going to outline why it does not at first glance seem like an approach evangelicals would use.

Anselm (the one I’m interested in) became Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109). He is famous for his “faith seeking understanding” writings; the Proslogion, the Monologion, and Cur deus homo. The concept of faith seeking understanding can be traced back to Augustine. But it is Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogion, first uses the phrase fides quaerens intellectum. He succinctly sums up the relationship of faith and understanding: “For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand.”

The concept of faith seeking understanding is certainly one many evangelicals would approve of. But when they begin reading Anselm, they would find something surprising. Anselm rarely uses the Bible in these works! Evangelicals are “Good News” people, and that means they are focused on Jesus and his saving death, and they rely on the Bible to know Jesus. We know we need God’s revelation in the Bible to know God. So a typical evangelical sermon starts with the Bible text, and then draws out truths, meaning, implications, from that text.

But Anselm’s main works of “faith seeking understanding” begin with statements about reality that do not rely on the Bible. He then proceeds by logical steps to show important Christian truths like the existence of God (ontological argument based on a most perfect being). Or he moves in “logical steps” to show the necessity of incarnation and a sacrificial death for human salvation (satisfaction atonement theory). The effect is to suggest that we can prove the Christian faith without the Bible. That the Christian faith is something anyone ought to be able to figure out without the Bible, without special revelation.

[As an example of how Anselm writes, here is a paragraph from Monologion 3 Therefore, since truth altogether excludes the supposition that there are more beings than one, through which all things exist, that being, through which all exist, must be one. Since, then, all things that are exist through this one being, doubtless this one being exists through itself. Whatever things there are else then, exist through something other than themselves, and this alone through itself. But whatever exists through another is less than that, through which all things are, and which alone exists through itself. Therefore, that which exists through itself exists in the greatest degree of all things.]

By contrast the Bible itself says that the gospel is a revelation from God through the apostles, a mystery which humans could not figure out but which God has now revealed. Ephesians 3:2-5 Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly. In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.

So at first reading, it seems that Anselm is unlikely to be helpful for evangelicals committed to letting the revelation of God in Scripture be the source and standard of truth. It seems like Anselm is relying on what every human can know, and logic, to determine whether Christianity is true or not. But in the next few posts, I’ll try to show how Anselm is doing something more interesting with his “faith seeking understanding”, and that this approach could point to fruitful exploration for evangelicals today.