Danny ChaiMike briefly mentioned a quotation by St. Augustine that deserves greater attention, as it’s something that’s changed my life.
The quotation in question is St. Augustine paraphrasing Isaiah 7:9 – “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” This verse, and Augustine’s meditations on it, are utterly fascinating. As Mike mentioned, we usually look at things in the reverse. We try to understand things so we can accept them as true. I’ve written about this many times, but Stanford students in particular had a pathological need to understand the reasoning behind anything before they would go through with it.
Augustine’s makes two conclusions related to this verse. One, the order of things is the opposite of what we tend to think. If we truly want to understand things, we must first believe. Two, we are intended to understand what we believe.
I’m fairly certain he writes about this in multiple places, but I came across it in On Free Choice Of The Will (a book I honestly believe every Christian should read). Here’s the relevant passage:
Unless believing and understanding were two different things, and we were first to believe the great and and divine things that we desire to understand, there would have been no point in the prophet’s saying “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” At first our Lord himself by his words and deeds urged those whom he had called to salvation to believe in him. But later, when he spoke of the gift that he was going to give to those who believed, he did not say, “This is eternal life, that they may believe“, but “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the true God, and him whom you nave sent, Jesus Christ.” And he said to those who already believe, “Seek, and you will find.” For something that is believed but not known has not yet been found, and no one becomes ready to find God unless he first believes what he will afterwards know.
Mind-blowing. Like that last sentence. If that’s true, it has crazy implications to me about evangelism, discipleship, and my spiritual walk in general.
The intro to the translation I read has a really interesting explanation about why this makes sense. I can’t explain it any better, so I’ll just quote it:
Augustine is convinced that “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” Unless you have already come to have certain moral beliefs on the basis of what you have heard from your parents or teachers, you will never be in a position to see for yourself that these beliefs are true, and thus to attain moral knowledge. This may sound like arguing in a circle, or at least like a kind of prooftexting (“Here’s what I believe; now I’ll try to prove that I’m right”), but in fact it is a very plausible position. If you are brought up among people who believe that physicists are deceitful tools of an imperialistic conspiracy trying to dupe an unwitting public, you are likely to come to share that belief. As a result, it is highly improbable that you will ever take the trouble to study physics and thus come to see that physics tells us a lot of true and interesting things about the sensible world. If a physicist ever tries to demonstrate to you the truth of one of his claims, you will respond to his arguments, however cogent they may be, by shrugging your shoulders and saying “You only say that because you’re a physicist.” And yet (and this is the important point) the physicist will still be right, and your disbelief is utterly irrelevant to that. The law of gravity will not cease to operate simply because you are skeptical of physicists; even if everyone on earth lost all confidence in natural science, we would not thereby achieve weightlessness.
Moral truths are no different. Belief is required for understanding. If you are brought up among people who think that morality is just a matter of opinion, it is highly improbable that you will ever be able to see that moralists teach us a lot of true and interesting things about the intelligible world. If someone ever tries to demonstrate to you that some moral belief is true, you will respond by saying “You only say that because you’re a moralist.” And yet the moralist will still be right, and your disbelief is utterly irrelevant to that. The law against murder is not abrogated simply because you are a relativist; even if every human being repudiated belief in objective moral standards, murder would not cease to be wrong. So belief is necessary for the attainment of knowledge, but belief is incomplete and unstable until it is replaced by knowledge. All of Augustine’s philosophical writing may be seen as an attempt first to awaken belief and then to raise it to the level of knowledge.
There’s so much truth there. Like, I’ve personally experienced the futility of trying to convince someone of Christian truths who is completely close-minded to it. And I’ve seen how unstable a Christian’s faith can be when the faith is not lifted to understanding.
The intro focuses on moral truths, but I think the principle is more generally applicable, and I’ve been chewing on it a lot ever since I read it.
For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about healing recently. I’ve been repeatedly reading Matthew for months, and healing is probably Jesus’ primary public ministry in the book. He does a bunch of healings and talks about the kingdom. That’s Matthew in a nutshell. Therefore, healing must be important. And Scripture elsewhere also confirms that healing is something we should be praying for.
I think I’ve identified why, all my life, I’ve been so hesitant to do that, pray for healing. And that’s because it makes no sense. Jesus clearly doesn’t heal us every time we pray for it. Otherwise, Christians would never get sick. Or die. But they do. Therefore, I have not understood why we should pray for healing, since it can’t be guaranteed that we’ll always be healed. It seemed to make more sense to me to pray that we deal will with sickness rather than pray for healing. In short, my failure to understand has caused me to shortchange what I think is a clear principle in Scripture: pray for healing.
So based on the “unless you believe you will not understand” principle, and some other things going on, I’ve been experimenting with praying for healing more. So far I’m 2 for 2 – Abby had a 102 fever one night and, after praying (and Tylenol), it disappeared and she had no cold symptoms of any sort afterward. Unusual. Also, I had this strange sore throat (on just one side) that got progressively worse over 3 days. After praying one night, it disappeared the next day.
I realize these sound totally lame, as they’re relatively trivial things that clear up naturally all the time. But as I’ve written before, in many ways I’m just a baby Christian, so baby steps. I still don’t get how healing fits in with life. But I’m trying to pray for it more regularly, and hopefully I will come to understand.