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This approach focuses on the reasonableness of faith. Faith need not be incompatible with reason
and the findings of the sciences. Revelation in this model is basically understood as
communication of truths/doctrines and faith consists in intellectual assent to these revealed
teachings.
An intellectualist faith became predominant in the 19th century, which is in continuity with the
dualistic Hellenistic worldview that gives primacy to reason over feelings and the spiritual over
the material, expressed in the earlier theologies of Augustine and Thomas.
Augustine (354-430 CE) was influenced by neo-platonism which is a revival and religious
reinterpretation of the Philosophy of Plato (427-347 BCE) and flourished from the 3rd to the 6th
century AD. A major doctrine of Plato is the notion of the two worlds – the world of truth and
ideas and the world of the senses. The world of ideas is unchanging, fixed, permanent. This is the
world of the real. The world of the senses, on the other hand, is changing, ephemeral, and unreal.
This world is not the ultimate reality but simply a shadowy reflection of the world of ideas. As
such, the idea of what is human, just, and good, existed in the “heavenly” realm or world of
ideas.
Appropriating aspects of neo-platonism, Augustine taught that God places in the human mind the
knowledge of ideas that exist eternally in God him/herself. Revelation is through this direct
illumination from God and not through the senses or concrete experience. Faith thus consists in
inner enlightenment through contemplative knowledge and understanding. Contemplative life is
viewed as per se superior to the active life; such dualism is absent from the biblical
understanding of contemplation, which does not dichotomize between the body and the soul,
reason and emotion, the spiritual and material realities.
Augustinianism was the dominant theology till the 13th cen. when a few Dominican theologians
started dialoguing with the philosophy of Aristotle, a student of Plato. Thomas Aquinas (1225-
74) could not accept the Augustinian concept of revelation as illumination for it left aside the
function of the senses. Thomas found Aristotelianism more helpful: the world of ideas cannot be
divorced from the world of the senses. Our knowledge of God also stems from the senses. For
him, revelation is the communication of conceptual truths that can be known through the
empirical, visible, historical realities in the world. While recognizing the role of the senses in
knowing, Thomas, like Augustine gives primacy to the rational aspect of the person. Faith for
him is intellectual assent to the conceptual truths communicated by God.
While both Augustine and Thomas held reason as the most important part of the person, it is the
industrial revolution (18th-19th cen) and the age of enlightenment (18th cen.) that were the
immediate precursors of rationalism.
While Dei Fide Catholica rejected rationalism, it was nevertheless a child of its time. Its notion
of faith is intellectualist; Vatican I basically understood revelation as communication of
propositional truths or doctrines. Faith, in turn, primarily consists in intellectual assent to these
revealed doctrines. It is an act of the mind assenting to the divine truth.
The intellectualist faith also developed in the early 20th century among Protestant groups that
stress literal/fundamentalist interpretation of Scriptures. This model has been aggressively
propagated by Conservative Evangelicalism (19-20th cen.) and in the late 20th cen. by the
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (alliance of confessing evangelicals, that started in
1977). If in the Catholic Church, God’s revelation is found primarily in church doctrines, for
Protestants, this is found in the Scriptures. Scriptures is regarded as a collection of of divine
affirmation, conveying literal truth, that is valid always and everywhere; conveys literal truth.
The Bible in the original manuscript is viewed as entirely free from error.
Strengths
Sources:
Dulles, Avery, sj. “The Meaning of Faith Considered in Relationship to Justice,” in The Faith
That Does Justice: Examining the Christian Sources for Social Change, 10-46, especially 14-22.
Ed. John C. Haughey. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1977.