Faith or Reason

Pour another cup and let's see what there is to think about this morning. The beginning of 'reason' can be traced to some of these early philosophers mentioned below. Centuries later we see reason being refined by enlightenment, science, physics, and quantum physics so that the path of faith and reason have diverged. But is that how it all started.

For the earliest thinkers, reason was a path to faith. Whether you approach it from the study of Greek philosophers who sought to find the divine connection through reason or the Jewish thinking of men like Philo, who paralleled the understanding of “logos” with the Rabbinic Wisdom literature, the concepts of faith and reason are inseparable.

Post-modern thinking tends to make us choose reason over against faith. To those at the extreme end of being rational minded, faith has little or no importance, it is useless. Only reason is essential to understand what is necessary in life. And for those at the other end, faith requires becoming a part of and claiming by experience that which cannot be obtained through reason. So the perpetual battle continues. One trumpeting their way over the other.

People often ask me, “What does your church believe about.....?” The fallacy of modern faith is that we are so engaged in the context of our post-modern world heavily into logic that even faith must be couched in the language of reason. Faith is tends to be equated with fact. The goal or object of faith tends to be the concrete statement of logic, “I believe this to be the ultimate truth.....” Once identified as the unquestionable truth, written in stone, forever unchangeable, then 'faith' is actually no longer needed for we have truth surrounded, captured. Now our only necessity is to let no one steal the truth from us. Nothing could be further from the meaning of faith.

The Greek language had a word for this kind of thinking but it was not the word used by either the philosophers or the gospel writers when it spoke about faith. The word for faith meant commitment, trust, loyalty, and engagement. Faith was ordering our lives by that to which we commit ourselves. Having faith like that of Jesus, that is, being committed to the way of Jesus, to the understanding of how God calls us to live as did Jesus, and to live by the example of Jesus was to 'believe' in Jesus or to believe in the way Jesus believed. It was commitment to a way of understanding God and life. Before being called Christians, the people of Jesus were called 'People of the Way'.

For those who gave us philosophy and science and the Hebrews thinkers who formed the context of Jesus' life, faith and reason were all part of the same path. As we become more of one we tend to deny the importance of the other. Faith and reason are powerful forces that we must use together to propel us to the pinnacle of our human potential. Don't listen to those who say we must throw one or the other aside.

Oops. The coffee stopped. Time for a fresh cup.

Comments

  1. blmJuly 27, 2010 at 7:59 PM

    Both are needed, and faith should not defy reason, but we can't assume that our human reasoning will ever lead us to comprehend, describe, name, or capture the reality of what we call God.

    ReplyDelete

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