“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. ” (Hebrews 11:3, ESV)

By faith we understand.

The entire verse is a mind bender. But the first phrase packs enough stopping power to drop the bully of Western thinking to its metaphorical knees. In the West, faith and reason are kept in tidy, distinct categories. Reason is the way we understand. Faith is the way we cling to things that we either don’t understand or are in complete conflict with what we do understand. Faith is not the way we in the West understand. Faith is not the way we know things.

This is due to the way we understand faith. I hope you get the tension contained in this wording. Faith is not the way we understand understanding. But we think we understand faith. Makes me giggle a bit. Mostly, I think we understand faith to be a blind leap in the dark – a hopeful, if not presumptive grasping at that which is unreasonable. There’s just enough truth in this to be a trap. Faith is not arrived at through reason. This is true. My apologetic brain almost wishes reason was the path to faith. But just because reason is not the path to faith, it does not follow from this that faith is a blind leap in the dark. Dark is actually a nice metaphor for how we typically understand faith. We think of reason as light. The Enlightenment is, in a sense, thought of as the age of reason. The age prior to this is referred to as the Dark Ages. Reason is the way we see. From this view, faith is the way we hope against reason in the dark. But what if this is exactly the opposite of truth? What if faith is the way we see beyond reason in the light?

Faith does not operate in the dark. In fact, faith is itself a way of seeing, a way of knowing, a way of understanding. Faith is a way of seeing a kind of light that remains opaque to reason alone. Faith is not against reason, though reason can choose to oppose faith. Faith is a way of experiencing light that reason can only guess at. Faith grasps a light that leaves mere reason alone in a dark closet, closing in on itself, imploding, shriveling, eating away at that which can never truly satisfy.

The rest of this verse, having established faith as a means of knowing, of understanding, tells us what we grasp when we boldly stare into this bright light through eyes of faith. We understand that the universe is made of that which is unseen. We see the unseen underneath the seen, under-girding it, originating it, sustaining it, holding it together.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ” (John 1:1–5, ESV)

Christianity is not a faith we reason into. We cannot reason our way to Christ. In fact, Jesus came to rescue from the blindness of merely seeing through the eyes of reason. The total depravity of man is not so much about our wickedness (though this alone is a serious enough issue). Our true depravity is  in our blindness. We are born dead and the path to life is only visible to men who are alive. So we are stuck. He must come to us. He must lead us out of the dark. The One who sees must speak to those in the dark and lead them from darkness into light.

“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. ” (Romans 10:17, ESV)

“the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.” ” (Matthew 4:16, ESV)

“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” ” (John 9:25b, ESV)