SMITCHing

My wife occasionally serves up a deliciously misspoken turn of phrase. I find it delightful, especially her most recent which is the title of this post. "I'll see it when I believe it"got me thinking because it captures an aberrant view of faith, and what it means to really believe in something. Her remark was in reference to a local meteorologist's promise of good weather in our native Oregon. Many in the church would agree with her statement as an orthodox expression of how faith and knowledge intertwine. Martin Luther certainly did. We can paraphrase him with a simple statement, "It is always faith seeking reason." Luther believed that a cognitive AND relational knowledge of God through the Scriptures—what we would call faith—was superior to human reason. Luther did not discount human reason, but he did see it as subordinate to divine revelation. He believed that faith was an affective response of the heart to God's self-disclosure, as access...