Faith Seeking Understanding

I remember sitting in the side office of the reception room of the Office of the Undergraduate Admissions at Notre Dame late during sophomore year. I worked there, sharing the auxiliary office with a dear, sweet lady named Judy. Between handling epic amounts of paperwork and answering dozens of phone calls, often from worried parents and frazzled teenagers, Judy was basically the gatekeeper of the Our Lady's Administration, shepherding people to their help while defusing nervous hearts and angry tempers.

Amid the shuffling papers, tour guides' coming to get their name tags and business cards, and my own organizing our student hospitality program, we had new piles of paper on our desks. Judy was organizing the new influx of materials on Notre Dame's different departments and majors. The newest stuff was newly designed cards from the majors of the College of Arts & Letters. Having completed almost two years at Notre Dame and feeling very satisfied with my major, I wasn't a free agent looking for a home. However, I was (and always will be) an impassioned theology major who was curious what his department was touting to prospective students.

I picked up a Theology card off the stack and began to read. I can't remember exactly the points that the card made, but I remembering progressing through it and smiling - as a current theology major, almost halfway through his coursework, I felt like I was experiencing exactly what the card was promising to potential theology students. The card wasn't making the major into something more glamorous or pristine than it was; it didn't use fluffy quotes or fancy graphics. It led its reader to the main point of theology, of the study and discussion of God: faith seeking understanding.

This great quote from St. Anselm is probably the greatest explanation of what theology is and should be. Yes, the little theology major card did use this quote, but it used it well. And it used the quote justifiably because, not only did some of my professors use the quote to describe their personal and their classes' approach, that's what studying theology at Notre Dame is.

I'm not just writing to uphold Notre Dame Theology - excellent as it is and as excellently as it prepared me as a person of faith and as someone who aspires to minister and catechize to others in the Church. I'm writing to uphold this as the definition of theology that people should embrace and know. Theology isn't just MTS and PhD students striving after the academic and intellectual pursuits; it isn't just deeply orthodox people digging into tradition to pile up some trivia. Theology is the quest of any and all believers to nourish their faith with a greater understanding.

Faith is that commitment we make in our hearts to believe in that which we cannot prove, that which our reason cannot deduce conclusively. Taking things on faith does not mean that we stop thinking, reflecting, or praying about them. It means that we have to consider them in a broader light than solely reason, and our Catholic tradition embraces the cooperation of faith and reason, which can and will nourish our spirits.

We need a broader narrative of intelligibility. We can't bracket our thoughts to solely what we can explain with scientific precision and clarity. We have to incorporate in the breadth of God, the One who isn't limited by space or time, the One who is omnipotent.

We need to embrace transcendence. We believe in a God who is in time and who entered time, a historical God who has directly acted in human history, most profoundly by becoming man as Jesus Christ. Yet, He is also a God who is above and beyond time, greater than any of our explanations of nature can articulate.

We need to extend beyond reason, fact, and science. We can study the bible historically-critically, and we can learn greatly by contextualizing the writings in their authors, their cultures, their historical settings, and their formation. However, those things cannot fully penetrate our spirits without what Pope Benedict XVI calls the "hermeneutic of faith". Our reading of the Bible must be encompassed by the belief in the greater truth of God and our faith in Him as Love.

Theology - by a barely educated layman or a lifelong priest and theologian - is one's faith in pursuit of greater understanding. It isn't the pursuit of complete and total understanding, of finding every answer. It isn't the pursuit of dead ends that force one to take on some kind of blind faith.

It's a faithful effort toward asking the questions and seeking to gesture at mystery. It's embracing one's imagination as a means of using the gift of thought to reach out to something that reason cannot fully articulate. It's the struggle to discover the depth and riches of Scripture and Tradition that are so full of potential nourishment for our minds and hearts.

When we say, "I believe," from the Latin credo, we aren't claiming a conclusive belief in something that we either understand fully or believe blindly; we are saying that we have faith in the truth of what we are asserting, in the tenets of our creed. We are promising that we will strive toward better understanding of the mysteries of our faith, mysteries not because they are unsolvable but rather because they invite wonder, curiosity, and awe. Theology is our chance to undertake that pursuit. Theology is faith seeking understanding.