The Reformation restored the holistic nature of faith to include both knowledge and trust in keeping with the organic unity of the whole person and our union with the whole Christ as taught in Scripture. These two elements, however, were again pulled apart more and more under the stress of Enlightenment thinking and criticisms. Faith was positioned on the chopping block of human autonomy which rushed down upon it like a guillotine. Despite attempts to save it, its lifeblood was emptied. True restoration would again be found only in reformation, in renouncing the absolute freedom of man and returning to God’s revelation in Scripture.

A New Dualism: Cold Orthodoxy and Pietism

Herman Bavinck provides a helpful summary of the dichotomy that resulted,

On the one hand, a cold orthodoxy emerged that interpreted faith only in terms of doctrine, and on the other hand, a Pietism that valued devoutness above truth. This dualism in religion, church, and theology was strengthened by a twofold orientation of the newer philosophy, that, after Descartes and Bacon, eventually ended up in dogmatism and empiricism (“Philosophy of Religion (Faith),” 26).

This new dualism sat uncomfortably with many—but was a new reconciliation even possible within the system of Enlightenment thinking? The attempted solution by Immanuel Kant would argue, No.

Kant’s epistemology was especially influenced by the criticism of David Hume, so that “he turned his back on dogmatism and became convinced that rationalism in theology and metaphysics was untenable” (27). In turn, he divided reality into two worlds, the noumena and the phenomena. The noumena consisted of things as they are in themselves, while the phenomena, in distinction, included things as they are knowable by the senses. Kant argued that genuine scholarship and science was only possible in the world of the phenomena since it alone is accessible to the human mind. The transcendental and supernatural world of the noumena was inaccessible and all proofs adduced for it end up in an antinomy.

Kant’s (Unsuccessful) Attempt to Save Faith

But Kant did not want to surrender the supernatural, nor the concept of faith, yet he knew neither could rest on cogent reasons and proofs of rationalism. He needed another, firmer foundation, which he discovered in the writings of Rousseau, the father of Romanticism. Rousseau, conscious of the sharp contrast between nature and culture of his time, “became the enthusiastic preacher of the gospel of nature.” Bavinck goes on,

In [Rousseau’s] teaching about society and state, education and religion, he turned from the corrupt culture of his time to the truth and simplicity of nature. In all areas, the historical had to make room for what was originally given, [abandoning] society for innocent nature, positive Christianity for natural religion, the false reasons of the mind for the impulse of feeling. Certainty about the truths of religion was also to be found in feeling. … For him the final certainty of these truths of the faith [including the existence of God] are not to be found in the theoretical but in the practical sphere, in the original and immediate witness of feeling that is deeper and much more reliable than the reasoning mind. Each person is assured in his heart about a supersensory world (27).

This idea would have a tremendous influence on the philosophy of Kant (and the theology of feeling of Schleiermacher among others). Specifically what Kant learned from Rousseau was that “religious truths possess a different certainty for people than truths of the mind or reason, of science or philosophy.” Religion and morality contain their own kind of certainty, that is, a certainty that is distinct from the certainty of natural phenomena. With this being the case, “metaphysics does not need to provide all kinds of proofs for God’s existence, the freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul. Moreover, science could then freely go its own way and be bound only by its own character and laws” (28). In short, the certainty of the noumena (religion) rests on a different foundation than the certainty of the phenomena (science). Herein is the dualism of Kant’s philosophy: there are two, separate foundations of a two-story reality constructed of the noumena and the phenomena.

Kant, however, does not adopt Rousseau’s idea that the foundation of the noumena is feeling; instead, he posits the foundation as “practical reason, the moral nature of man. In his conscience, man feels himself bound to a categorical, unconditional, absolute imperative” (28). The certainty of the world of the noumena rests on the foundation of man’s morality as he finds in himself the “thou shalt” of the moral law, which transcends all other powers in nature. From here, Kant argues, man can find certainty of other noumena realities: the freedom of his will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God.

If this moral world order is to be true reality and not an illusion, and if it is to triumph one day over all that is great and strong and mighty in this world, then man must be free in his actions and his soul must be immortal to receive his reward in the hereafter, and God must exist in order to reconcile in eternal harmony the terrible opposites between virtue and luck that exist on earth. These are not conclusions legitimately deduced from preceding scientific premises, but they are postulates put forth by man according to his moral nature. He cannot prove, he cannot demonstrate, that it is all true, but he is subjectively certain of it; he believes and acts as if it were true; he does not know, but he believes, and he has moral grounds for his belief” (28).

The Destruction of Faith in Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel

At this point, we have come far afield from the Reformation and biblical view of faith as including both knowledge and trust in an organic unity. Kant sought a safer place for faith by relinquishing all elements of knowledge about divine truth and relocating it solely to a supernatural order, but, ironically, in so doing he destroyed it.

Schleiermacher will move in a similar direction in theology, having basically the same epistemological commitments as Kant, but instead of a moral/ethical direction, he will move toward the mystical sense of absolute feeling. In distinction from Kant, Schleiermacher “held that willing and acting and knowing do not disclose the supersensible world, because this willing also moves in opposites and never reaches unity. This unity, enjoyed only in feeling, which precedes thinking and willing and is completely independent of absolute power” (29).

In the opposite direction of both Kant (ethical) and Schleiermacher (mystical) was the German Idealist, Hegel (speculative/rationalism). He elevated reason to a cosmic principle with the progress of history being the absolute Spirit or Mind realizing itself. Religion, then, is merely a developmental stage in the movement of absolute thought in history.

Van Til’s Critique of Kant

Cornelius Van Til wrote, “If Kant’s position were to be retained, both knowledge and faith would be destroyed.” That is, not only does Kant fail to arrive at any true knowledge in the realm of the noumena by way of practical reason and faith, but equally so he fails to arrive at any true knowledge in the realm of the phenomena by way of theoretical reason. Despite his desire to salvage God, morality, and all else that belongs to the noumena, he makes wreckage of the noumena along with the phenomena. After totaling both realms on the speedway of human autonomy, Kant is left with an irreparable theory of knowledge.

The reason for this totalizing failure is his starting point in man, rather than in God’s revelation. Kant imprisoned God to the noumena and made the link between the noumena and phenomena not God’s self-revelation but man’s sense of morality. Accordingly, God is ignorant of the phenomena and man is enthroned over the natural world as an autonomous interpreter of the facts of the phenomena. Both God and the world are man-contained, dependent on him and relative to him. Man does not think God’s thoughts after him, that is, in accordance with and submission to the comprehensive knowledge of God, but comes to the natural world as if it was comprised of uninterpreted, brute facts. Man has therefore replaced God in Kant’s theory as the world’s primary interpreter and definer. Van Til writes,

Knowledge and faith are not contradictories but complementaries. Kant did not make room for faith, because he destroyed the God on whom alone faith is to be fixed. It is true of course, that Kant spoke of a God as possibly existing. This God, however, could not be more than a finite God, since he at least did not have, or did not need to have, original knowledge of the phenomenal world. Kant thought that man could get along without God in the matter of scientific knowledge. It is thus that the representational principle which we saw to be the heart of the Christian theistic theory of knowledge is set aside. If man knows certain facts whether or not God knows these facts, as would be the case if the Kantian position were true, man’s knowledge would be done away with. Whatever sort of God may remain, on Kant’s view, he is not the supreme interpretive category of human experience (A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 109; see esp. pp. 106-13 for his full critique).

No One Can Serve Two Masters

On the basis of God’s self-revelation in Scripture, Bavinck counters the dualism of Kantian philosophy by returning to the central unity in man. He argues that Kant’s ethicisim, Schleiermacher’s mysticism and Hegel’s rationalism suffer from “a significant one-sidedness” and “diminish man’s universal character.” These anti-theistic systems divide man in two and separate what belongs together. The result is that true religion is lost since it is reduced to either moral duty or aesthetic emotion or a philosophic view. “But according to the Christian, confession [sic] religion is other than and higher than all those views; religion must not just be something in one’s life, but everything. Jesus demands that we love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. In our thinking and living, there can be no division between God and the world, between religion and culture; no one can serve two masters” (29).

The Westminster Larger Catechism defines justifying faith as

a saving grace, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he, being convinced of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself and all other creatures to recover him out of his lost condition, not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the gospel, but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness, therein held forth, for pardon of sin, and for the accepting and accounting of his person righteous in the sight of God for salvation (72).

Faith is not merely the intellectual assent of the mind to the redemptive revelation of God, it is also a receiving and resting upon the person of Christ. By this definition the Reformed go beyond Rome’s demand for nothing more than an historical assent to the truth by including a heartfelt trust of the whole person. This personal and active dimension of faith is evident in the words used throughout the Old Testament to express the concept of believing. We’ll turn to Geerhardus Vos’ survey of these words in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics on soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) to see this.

אמן (“To Believe”)

The first and most often used word is אמן. Vos notes that in the hiphil form the word is best rendered as “demonstrating faithfulness,” “generating faithfulness,” or “establishing oneself.” It has to do with “an active disposition of the soul, an action that produces change” (72).

The word also takes on certain nuances depending on the preposition connected with it. With the preposition לְ (“to”) it generally has to do with holding something to be true. This is seen in Deuteronomy 9:23, which speaks of Israel’s failure to actively believe: “you rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God and did not believe him…”

With the preposition בְּ (“by,” “in”) it usually denotes a trustful resting in a person or in a truth. This is used of Abraham in Genesis 15:6, “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Now Abraham’s faith was more than just his holding the promise of God to be true. “As this promise was a matter of life for Abraham, so this promise was also a living testimony for him, and his faith was not merely concerned with the truth in the abstract but with the God of the truth. A personal relationship came about between the consciousness of Abraham and God. Thus we may already say in general that [Abraham’s believing here] is the trustful acceptance of the testimony of a person that becomes a basis for certainty for us through the conscious conception of that person” (73).

בטח (“To Trust”)

A second word that is used in the Old Testament is בטח which means “to be sure,” and so with the preposition בְּ (“in”) it means to trust in someone. So Psalm 28:7, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped.” Vos comments, “Here, too, the personal relationship comes out. Depending on the testimony is accompanied by and derives its strength from this personal relationship” (74). The imagery of the Lord being the psalmist’s personal shield is a helpful picture of what it means to trust in him.

חסה (“To Take Refuge”)

We find a third word used in Psalm 57:1, “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by.” The Hebrew word here is חסה, which means “to hide” or “to take refuge in.” This trust of the psalmist’s soul is not a mere intellectual assent to the truth, but an active trusting in God. The intense imagery of taking refuge in the midst of a destructive storm would be incongruous with a mere acceptance of the truth with the mind. The whole trusts in the Lord and so seeks refuge in him.

קוה (“To Wait”)

A fourth, and final, word used is קוה—an intense, active word that can mean “focusing the mind on something.” At times it might carry the sense of “hoping” in the biblical sense that carries certainty and conviction or “an intensive focusing of the intellect that definitely expects the realization of what is desired” (74). It is usually translated as “wait”: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 27:14). “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isa. 40:31). “This waiting … is not a passive state, depleted of all expression of life. Rather, it is an extending and securing of the heart, a reckoning on Jehovah connected with the inner strength of the soul” (74).

Summary and Conclusion

Vos summarizes the various elements that belong to the concept of believing in the Old Testament (pp. 74-75):

1. Faith is an activity of the intellect as it accepts the testimony of another.
2. Faith can be much more than an activity of the intellect. As trust it is that deeply moral action by which, in order to have stability, man, as it were, puts himself into another.
3. As such, faith does not have a passive but an active, dynamic form.
4. As trust, faith is accompanied to a greater or lesser degree by a sense of security. Faith not only seeks certainty but finds it and also produces certainty. It knows itself to be certain and safe and lives in a reality with its conceptions that is not yet present.

Faith is a free gift from God that is kindled in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. All of the benefits we have spoken of are not true of faith in the abstract—our faith is not in faith itself—but because of the concrete object of our faith, namely, Jesus Christ. By faith we are united to him (you might say with Paul we are put in him) as our living and personal Savior, in whom we have died and in whom we have also been raised to new life. Today he not only supplies us with a place of security and rest as we navigate the tempestuous waters of this present age, but also works in us faith by his Spirit so that we do not fail to arrive on the shores of the crystal waters flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Rev. 22:1).