Augustine made the saying “through faith to understanding” the first principle of theology. He assumed that between them there was a relation like that between conception and birth, labor and wages. “The fruit of faith is understanding,” he wrote, “Understanding is the reward of faith.” Augustine therefore urges “that the things which you already hold in the firmness of faith, you may also see by the light of reason.” God does not despise reason. “Let it never be [said] that God hates in us that by which he created us more excellent than other living beings.” (Augustine, Tractates on John, 22, 2; ibid., 29, 6; Epistle 120, zitiert in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics I:609.)
Bavinck beschreibt später das Verhältnis von Glaube und Verstand so:
Faith, the faith by which we believe, is not an organ or faculty next to or above reason but a disposition or habit of reason itself. (I:616)Believing is the natural breath of the children of God. Their submission to the Word of God is not slavery but freedom. In that sense faith is not a sacrifice of the intellect but mental health (sanitas mentis). Faith, therefore, does not relieve Christians of the desire to study and reflect; rather it spurs them on to the end. Nature is not destroyed by regeneration but restored. (I:617)
