Who Do We Trust?: Reason

Today, as this series on the question of authority within Christianity starts to draw nearer to its end, we turn to away from official sources of authority to the concept’s ‘bad boys’, things that people have been reluctant to consider reliable enough to consider authoritative, but which we all end up trusting to some extent anyway. Today I’ll touch on the role of reason in the life of faith, and then the series will wrap up with discussions of the role of culture and individual experience in Christian thought.

While reason has a difficult history in Christian thought, there is absolutely no biblical warrant for excluding it. After all, upon calling the prophet Isaiah, God tells his new recruit, “Come, let us argue it out” (Isaiah 1.18). The old King James Version translated this as ‘reason together’, and both fit well with the sense of the Hebrew root ykḥ (’decide, argue, appoint, refute, reprove’). It’s an invitation for all sides to show their cards and come to a decision. And, of course, in Jesus’ summary of the Law, the says the greatest commandment is to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind [dianoia, ‘thought, understanding, intention’]” (Matthew 22.37). (This is itself a reference to Deuteronomy 6.5, which has ‘might’ where Matthew has ‘mind’, but the sense is the same since the Hebrew conception of ‘might’ connotes bringing all of one’s resources — bodily, financial, and intellectual — to the table.) And, logical disputation has had a long history within Judaism, where it has been even said that, rather than being angry, God smiles when a Rabbi came up with a new way of understanding the Law.

And yet, on the whole, Christianity has taken a rather skeptical approach to the human intellect, focusing not on its possibilities but its dangers. This skepticism generally has two prongs. The first, and more ancient, has to do with the finitude of human intellect and language. It’s voiced by figures in both the East and West and from antiquity and the medieval period:

• “Anyone who tries to describe [God] in language is truly a liar—not because he hates the truth, but because of the inadequacy of his description” (St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity x.2).
• [Theology should be done] “like fishermen, not like Aristotelians” (St. Gregory Nazianzen, Homily 23.12 — the Greek is pithier, containing a near play-on-words: alieutikos ouk aristotelikos)
• “Whatever name one gives to [the divine life] … would not, properly speaking, apply to it, or else would properly apply to it alone.” (St. Gregory Palamas, In Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, II.iii.33)
• “The supreme knowledge which we have of God is to know that we do not know God, insofar as we know that what God is surpasses all that we can understand” (St. Thomas Aquinas, SS 1.8.1.1.ad 4).

The important thing to note here is that these statements are not about rejecting truth or religious knowledge, but about protecting them. And ironically, these concerns largely arise from the very philosophical systems they understand to be insufficient. Reason can therefore be a tool, but not a source for right belief.

The second prong, which is evidenced more in the Augustinian and Reformed traditions, understands that human reason cannot be trusted because it has been skewed by the Fall. By virtue (or vice) of Original Sin, we are fundamentally incapable of reasoning correctly.

The problem with this skepticism is that the same can be said for any potential source of authority. Our Scriptures are, after all, written in the same finite human languages in which we operate, Church Councils are made up of individuals also working from fallen and finite minds, and so on. If we demand anything human rise up to the perfections of an infinite God in order for them to be authoritative, we’ll be very disappointed. The fact is, the imperfection of reason does not suggest we cannot or should not use it (God-given as it is!), but simply that we must be humble in how we treat it and its outputs.

Moreover, even if we agree that human reason is unreliable, there’s simply no way of avoiding it. Even if we hold to a Fundamentalist doctrine of biblical inerrancy, we still have to use our ‘errant’ reason to interpret it; if we punt that further down the field by positing divine illumination which allows the faithful reader to interpret it properly, we still have to debate between differing interpretations. Using reason is simply unavoidable.

But beyond this, I’d like to posit that the human mind is not just a limitation in our theology. It can — and should — be a positive (if finite and fallen) contributor too. This is because the Scriptures make it clear that the world around us is intelligible and tells us something about God. We might call this a “lilies of the field” theology, from Jesus’ urging his disciples to take lessons from the natural world. Likewise, Paul leaves room for such a (partial and imperfect) natural theology in Romans 1.20-21, where he insists that Gentiles are ‘without excuse’ for not knowing God apart from special revelation. In other words, it is fully expected by the Scriptures that we can know something of God from reasoning from what we see in the rest of God’s creation.

But because of Christianity’s historic skepticism about the use of reason, it took until the revolutions of European thinking known as the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution for any Christian movement to attempt to legitimize reason as a source of authority.

One such movement were the English Latitudinarians in the 17th Century. Just as it’s hard to separate Descartes’ turn to Rationalism from a socio-political climate that soured him on Scripture and Tradition as authorities, the Latitudinarians similarly arose in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Like Descartes, they were looking for a way of moving forward beyond the intractable poles of Protestant and Catholic theology. But, Latitudinarians were still actually quite traditional in that they continued to operate on the assumption that human minds are finite and prone to error. Combining this skepticism with their acceptance of the new information about the world provided by the nascent Scientific Revolution, they rejected theological certainty: A degree of theological latitude was required, one that would allow for a variety of belief and knowledge. Latitudinarians therefore de-emphasized adherence to doctrine in the name of a reasonable and practical Gospel. (A movement I can relate to!) As one of their leading figures, Edward Fowler, put it: “The grand design of the Gospel is to make men good: not to intoxicate their brains with notions, not furnish their heads with a system of opinions; but to reform men’s lives and to purify their natures.” At its best, Latitudinarianism minimized doctrinal squabbling and allowed the Church to get down to the business of being and making disciples of Jesus. But, there is no question that it also easily slipped into Deism, materialism, and even atheism. And in fact, it was largely as a reaction to the ‘lukewarmness’ of Latitudinarian Christians that both the Evangelical and Anglocatholic Revivals arose, as renewals of energy on the Reformed and Catholic poles of the Church of England respectively.

While this was going on within the English Church, this same Modern spirit was also working its way through the emerging field of biblical studies. In the mid 17th century, scholars such as Hobbes and Spinoza had started pointing out difficulties and discrepancies in the text of the Pentateuch. About a hundred years later, Jean Astruc applied the techniques that had been developed to correct texts of ancient literature to the text of Genesis, and concluded that Genesis was a composite document. Textual analysis of this kind continued, with increasingly controversial findings, culminating in 1876 when a German scholar, Julian Wellhausen, developed what became known as the Documentary Hypothesis, in which our present texts of the Pentateuch are the result of a stitching together of four separate traditions. All of this asked a startling question: Do the Scriptures exist apart from history, or are they themselves a part of history? And how does our answer to this question change our understanding of divine revelation? These questions were only heightened by new archaeological discoveries in the Ancient Near East, which (among other things), called into question the biblical timeline and discovered startling similarities between some of the Bible’s stories and Babylonian mythology. And, these challenges were themselves superseded by further discoveries that called the historicity of the Bible into question, such as the theory of evolution, the discovery of dinosaurs, place tectonics. Some Christians happily accepted these truths and found that they actually had very little impact on Christian theology and faith. But others saw them as a direct assault on the faith and rejected them out of hand.

So where does all this leave us? Again, as with all of the authorities we’ve covered in this series, different Christians are going to have different levels of comfort. And the goal is just to bring these concepts and discussions out into the open so we can have better conversations about it. When it comes to the role of human reason and its outputs in Christian life and faith, here are some of the considerations that have become important to me over the years:

• An infinite God far surpasses any human reason, concept, or language. Anything we can say about God is at best metaphorical.
• Our minds, finite as they are, are God-given and they are only means we have through which we can understand the world. Therefore, it’s disingenuous to deny reason any role in theology and faith.
• Philosophies, whether formal or tacit, are human constructs that help us to structure and interpret the world around us. They are not authoritative sources of theological truth, but can legitimately help us to understand it.
• All Truth is God’s Truth. Therefore, no emerging scientific understanding is opposed to God.
• I agree with the Latitudinarians that the point of Christianity, its Scriptures, and its Traditions, is to change lives, not to build up systems of knowledge.
• We must be willing to un-say whatever it is we say about God.