Devotions
Given to the CLU Faculty Meeting

October 2002

I’d like to meditate for a few minutes this afternoon on the University’s commitment to faith and reason.

One of the characteristics of human nature is the desire to understand, to understand oneself and to understand the world in which one lives.

Faith leads us to that understanding through revelation. Reason leads us to that understanding through inquiry, evidence, and interpretation.

A few institutions of higher education in the contemporary United States have placed faith far ahead of reason; most have affirmed reason first, last, and only.

CLU has chosen to embrace both.

I am not here to put forward an argument for the wisdom of this position; others have done so, and have done so far better than I could.

I am here to point out that embracing both creates a tension, and that those who believe in the University’s position live in that tension.

Situations like this, situations where apparently opposing ideas are simultaneously embraced, require certain virtues.

Tolerance, certainly. Respect, definitely. Patience, infinitely.

But, most of all, humility.

The tension between faith and reason requires that we --- each and all --- understand that all our knowledge is contingent, and our understanding partial, that tomorrow we could discover that we are wrong.

Whether our devotion is to the orthodoxy of religion, or to the orthodoxy of science, or to the orthodoxy of a political ideology --- we could be wrong.

To live in the tension between faith and reason, we must have the courage to inquire, to discover, to theorize, to contend, to argue for --- but always in the humility that comes with knowing that, at best, our knowledge is partial and our understanding limited.

To live in the tension between faith and reason is to have the courage to listen carefully to the other, to work collaboratively in our common effort, to move toward integration and mutuality.

There is a famous story about St. Thomas Aquinas, arguably --- with apologies to my Protestant brothers and sisters --- the greatest of all Christian intellectuals.

It is said that toward the end of his life, Thomas rose from prayer, having had a vision, and said, “Everything I have done is as straw.”

Some have interpreted this story to mean that Thomas disowned and demeaned his work in the world because he realized that only knowing God really mattered.

But this is, I believe, a misguided interpretation. Thomas knew that his work was important, because it was his work and his work was his way of doing God’s will, as best he understood God’s will.

Thomas wrote a prayer which is often used as a prayer for teachers.

“O God of loving kindness,” Thomas prayed, “give me grace to desire ardently whatever is pleasing to you, to examine it prudently, to acknowledge it truthfully, and to see it through to completion, to the praise and glory of your name.”

This is the humility of the believing intellectual: to put all of one’s energies --- intellectual energy included --- not into pursuing self-aggrandizement, not into merely fulfilling the dictates of state boards or accrediting agencies, but into doing God’s will as best we understand it.

We in the university are given a particularly challenging task --- to pursue truth in the full knowledge that we will never fully reach it and to do what we can to preserve civilization in the full knowledge that what we can do is not very much.

CLU’s devotion to both faith and reason puts us in a vital, creative, challenging middle, where devotion to the work for the sake of the work is essential, where respect and kindness and patience are essential, in the hope that, but without the guarantee that, we are doing what we ought.

Let us pray.
O Lord, from whom all good things do come; Grant to us your humble servants, that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that are good, and by your merciful guiding may perform the same. Amen.