According to Wilken (and Augustine from whom Wilken draws his thought), why is faith unavoidable? Why is it beneficial? Cite some passages.
To encapsulate why faith is unavoidable, and in the words of Saint Augustine himself, “Nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe only what can be held with absolute certainty.” When I first read this quote at the beginning of the reading, I had to really stop and think about what it meant and whether I believed it; then it dawned on me, I was using faith. As I continued to read, I realized in the action of reading what Wilken presented I was partaking in what it means to have faith, the unavoidable necessity of it, and how in every aspect of our lives — especially in reading — we use faith to reach conclusions. I think as human beings we have a natural inclination to know; an innate curiosity for knowledge, a thirst for the absolute truth. We are naturally skeptic, so when we read Scripture that sometimes calls into question our knowledge of what is “certain truth,” we have to use faith in order to truly understand it.
However, as Augustine puts so well, there is very little in this world we can know for certain, and the things we do know for certain require extensive knowledge and research to prove, leading to instability in society. Wilken emphasizes the necessity of authority in coming to have faith and how “its appeal is to the understanding, not to the will” (175), all of which occurs by the human person making the deliberate decision to trust not the information itself but rather the one presenting it, something I found incredibly intriguing. We should not be asking what to believe or what to have faith in but rather who to believe and who to have faith in. Only then can we believe the reasoning behind the witness, and as Wilken explains, “[r]eason leads to understanding and knowledge” (174). Because of this putting of faith in authority as trustworthy, the act of faith is unavoidable — we do this every day. Almost all of the knowledge we know of the world around us comes from an authority figure, someone taught us how to read, how to write, what our name is, everything we know comes from someone else.
Similarly, Christian faith is inevitably bound to this authority — we must be willing to put confidence in the knowledge and belief of someone else if we are to ever come to understand how God works. We put our confidence in our mother when we were a toddler in coming to understand why a certain string of letters put together equals a word when written down, so we must also be willing to put our confidence in those who claim to have knowledge of God, even if skepticism clouds our mind and infiltrates our hearts. I believe it is a matter of being open to others’ knowledge, whether that be in the written word of Scripture or talking to a friend who has seen the love of God in her own life. Otherwise, we must accept the possibility of being ignorant and rejecting a belief that very well may be truth. There is no way to be exposed to this information except through the exercise of faith.
Foundations of Theology 
Theresa, I first just wanted to say that the first paragraph you wrote is extremely well-written. You really have a way of making your message come across. One thing I found interesting about your analysis is that you associated knowledge and faith very nicely. Having faith in someone else’s knowledge essentially makes their knowledge become yours. The only thing I’d challenge about your post is that there are some things in life that we do get from our own reasoning such as our own name. By being called our name constantly by everyone, we reason that our name is associated with who we are.
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