This Currents feature presents the perspectives of two member school presidents on a religious, social, or cultural topic. In this issue, they discuss how academic inquiry may inform belief, and whether one’s personal faith commitments should be included in scholarly work.

Mario DiCicco, O.F.M.
President, Franciscan School of Theology

The Scholastics summarized their scholarship in support of faith in the Anselmian axiom: “Fides quaerens intellectum”: faith seeking understanding.  Earlier St. Augustine had struck a variation in his famous “credo ut intelligam”: I believe in order that I may understand.  These thinkers felt that scholarship and faith were not parallel realities but inseparable affinities as intimately related and indispensable to each other as sail and rudder are to a ship.  Faith is the rudder which gives direction to scholarship to guide its conclusions from foundering on the shoals of irrationality and thus becoming untrue to the Gospel, while scholarship is the sail which gives greater form to faith to deepen one’s attachment to God, the object of faith.

Without a passion for scholarship—that unquenchable yet always unrequited desire to read the sources as critically as possible to reach ultimate truth–faith can easily slide into magical belief, a manipulation of the divine, and a satisfied, one-dimensional emotional pietism.  Likewise scholarship without the humility of faith can become—in the hands of the curious–information without purpose, a desire to know without understanding, where heart and mind are at odds.

In my own personal life, I have always needed scholarship in the form of constant reading and research to energize and direct my faith to keep it practical, relevant, sane.  In my professional discipline of New Testament studies, I prized scholarship for what it brought to the sacred documents to enliven my own faith.  Above all, I see my combined faith and scholarship as transformative only to the extent that both have an outer thrust toward action in the world, toward service to others.  Otherwise, knowledge inflates (1 Cor. 8:1) and faith is dead (James 2).

This faith/knowledge nexus, one in service to the other and respecting the boundaries of each, can enrich every member of the GTU.  The example of the Scholastics is instructive for us: some wrote their Summas on their knees, seeking illumination in prayer to increase faith through knowledge—and, conversely, to bring their faith to penetrate ever more deeply the great mysteries of life.

James A. Donahue, Ph.D. ’82
President, Graduate Theological Union

Every scholar’s work is shaped by deeply held convictions. Yet intellectual inquiry must always be both critical and defensible on objective and rational grounds. There is no easy bifurcation between faith and reason.

As theologians, we often live on either side of the divide. At one end, some swear that faith always trumps cold analysis. At the other, people go to great lengths to keep their faith hermetically sealed off from their scholarly endeavors. But our studies make the biggest impact when we build a bridge across the gap, a via media where faith flows into inquiry, and inquiry’s findings, including its objective data, cross back over into faith.

The GTU does not believe that a chasm must exist between beliefs and scholarship. One of my favorite moments here occurs at the beginning of the academic year when I greet the new doctoral students. In my welcome, I make it clear that we do not ask our students to check their beliefs at the door as they enter into the Ph.D. program and pick them up when they graduate. Rather, at the GTU we invite them to bring their worldviews to their work in order to critically assess, shape, and develop them. The insights from their scholarly inquiry will in turn challenge their beliefs.

The new students always seem energized and relieved when I say this. Judging by the titles of their Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses, their enthusiasm carries over into an end product shaped by both their practical interests and faith commitments. My own research as an ethicist has provided a grounding counterbalance to my passion for practical theology and applied ethics, giving me not only a realistic sense of how individual practices and prejudices develop, but how they must be constantly evaluated and assessed.

Good theological research crosses chasms real and imagined. It is a constructive act, arising from the interlocking pieces of belief and idea, theory and practice, faith and reason. I am proud of the bridges we are building here at the GTU.

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