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Faith and Knowledge

Knowledge, science, is the application of human intelligence to the empirical world. Math is just another word for intelligence. To believe in Creation is to believe that our intelligence is God-given, that there can be no conflict between Science and Creation. Science describes Creation in all its complexity. Difference is essential to the world. Otherwise, we would all be a pre-Big Bang lump. Our knowledge of our own little piece of the world does not mean that someone else’s knowledge is wrong.

Faith is an attitude. An attitude that one’s own knowledge is complete and better than someone else’s knowledge is not faith in God but in oneself. “I Am Who I Am. Do not put false gods before me.” St Athanasius describes many of the idols of his time as objective representations of human thoughts and feelings. (Contra Gentes) In our day, many of our idols remain abstractions, like “Money” From the 5th Reading of the Easter Vigil we hear God say “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55) The attitude of faith colours knowledge, and faith in God means frankly accepting the limitations of one’s own knowledge.

The Gospel from the afternoon Mass of Easter (from John 20) tells the Resurrection story on the Road to Emmaus. It is a deeply layered and thoughtful summary of the Passion and Resurrection and a description of how an attitude of faith colours and therefore changes previous understanding. Both disciples (both Cleopas and I the Reader) had studied and knew the Scriptures well. But how did we interpret them before being shown it was necessary “that the Christ should suffer these things and then enter into his glory.” All those readings during the Easter Vigil were efforts to replay what the Stranger explained on the road to Emmaus. The key words are “he interpreted to them…”

How often we need an interpreter. Words unfamiliar from another language, but also words familiar all our lives from a new perspective “open our eyes” and colour our understanding so “our hearts burn within us”: not new knowledge but familiar knowledge, coloured by faith.

The disciples on the road had hoped that Jesus the Prophet would free Israel from the Romans; but the living Christ, in the breaking of the bread revealed that it is love that defeats death and colours all our understanding.

~Agnes Beirne