As finite formulators of truth, theologians (anyone who seeks to think God’s thoughts after him) are forced to nurture their understanding of God within a limited span of time. How each theologian uses his or her time is a personal decision. Personal, finite encounters with a three-personed, infinite and omniscient God require humility and faith.
Theologizing requires humility of heart because in order to understand God, we need his help. Exercise of the intellect apart from dependence upon the One ‘from whom are all things’, renders the theologian philosopher, one who seeks wisdom without seeking the wise One. Such contemptuous disrespect for the God of truth characterized St. Augustine’s pre-conversion search for rational certainty. Resistant to the inspiring preaching of Ambrose, Augustine desired certainty for the things he could not see, the kind of certainty that accompanies the equation of 7+3=10.In reflection upon this memory he writes: “By believing I could have been healed so that my mind’s clearer sight would be directed in some way to your truth, which endures forever and is lacking in nothing.”Augustine distilled this realization into the oft quoted phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”
Faith is the flipside of Godward humility and the healing hand for true theology. However, faith in God does not reduce God’s immensity to comprehensibility. More to the point, Colin Gunton writes, “God is incomprehensible in not being graspable; but not incomprehensible in the sense of being entirely beyond our understanding.” As a result, theologians are humbly and delightfully called to plow the fields of Scripture and culture, pressing into God by faith and by reason.