Is Faith Contrary to Empirical Support?

Is faith antithetical to possessing (or seeking) empirical or rational supports for what we believe? If we may (with qualification) speak of believing as a sort of knowing, then does the Bible construe faith-knowing and rational knowing as mutually exclusive?^[8] Contrary to what is taught in some circles, true faith is not at all antithetical to empirical or rational supports. In fact, the apostles possessed more empirical supports for their faith than we can ever hope to possess, and certainly their spiritual “report cards” did not suffer for the fact.

If we pay mind to rational arguments for God, or use archaeology as an aid to faith, are we undercutting the proper role of faith? Some, indeed many, would say that we are. As they construe the New Testament, true faith in God must keep its distance from anything even remotely empirical. For them, faith only works by leaps—in fact, it is a leap, so that having faith in God is definitionally to make a leap of faith. The longer the leap, they seem to imply, the purer one’s faith. But this, I contend, is a wrong understanding of what the Bible means by “faith,” and it can really mess up our theology if we take it on board.

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• ^[1] Karl Barth used the term “Paul and the Reformers” to denote a common base of belief. Barth even wrote, “Those who accept the thoughts I have brought forward as germane to the essential facts thereby acknowledge themselves descendants of an ancestral line which runs back through Kierkegaard, to Luther and Calvin and so to Paul and Jeremiah” (The Word of God and the Word of Man [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928], 195). From the standpoint of Pauline studies, the misunderstanding that Kierkegaard is a faithful heir to Paul’s thought is as pitiful as it is profound. ↩
• ^[2] “πιστεύω, κτλ.,” TDNT 6.197-228, esp. 202. ↩
• ^[3] “πιστεύω, κτλ.,” 212. ↩
• ^[4] “πιστεύω, κτλ.,” 213. ↩
• ^[5] “Analogy and the Spirit in the Theology of Karl Barth,” in Mike Higton (ed.), Hans W. Frei: Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School Archive, 6-28, esp. 7 (at www.library.yale.edu/div/Freitranscripts/Frei01-Analogy.pdf). ↩
• ^[6] Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel, 146. ↩
• ^[7] Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel, 150. ↩
• ^[8] On the relation of believing to knowing, see Daniel Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel: A Structural Introduction to the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 10-11. Patte relates faith to knowing by exploring how “convictions” relate to “ideas”. ↩