Intellectual Humility and the Practices of Faith

Abstract

This chapter examines the practices with which intellectual humility is enmeshed in the Christian life: patience and gratitude, which are both manifested in prayer. The discussion recognizes that intellectual humility does not function in isolation, as a virtue in its own right, but is expressed through, and fed by, other practices within the life of faith, as the minds of believers are rightly ordered with respect to God. Patience and gratitude are not represented within the New Testament simply as dispositions, but as deliberate volitional activities, by which the lordship and the goodness of God are acknowledged and behaviours modified accordingly. The chapter traces the key ways in which faithful servants are represented as ‘waiting upon God’ and giving thanks to him, and considers the ways that that these practices are represented as bearing on the epistemic and volitional characteristics of those servants.