Reasons for Reason

Christianity is no friend of rationalism, but it is rational. That is to say, although divine truth comes by revelation not by unaided reason, that revealed truth is nevertheless reasonable.

I was speaking recently about the emergent church (yes, some people are still interested) when someone asked me why I was so down on mystery. I tried to explain that if mystery means God’s essence is incomprehensible, then I’m all for mystery. But too often mystery is a cover for anti-propositional bias, a suspicion of truth claims, or just plain intellectual laziness. There are things we can’t know about God, but then there are some things we can know if we are simply willing to think (cf. Deut. 29:29).

But American culture does not encourage careful thinking. Cogito ergo sum has become emotio ergo credo. A couple weeks ago I was on a plane to California talking with a nice middle-aged woman. I wasn’t in my seat more than two seconds before she started talking to me–and talking to me a lot. This lady from SoCal was your classic “spiritual not religious” believer. She believed in God, wanted people to be compassionate, and tried to notice the many beautiful things in our world. She didn’t know the gospel from a granola bar. I admit I’m not the world’s best personal evangelist, but I tried my best to make the good news clear.

And yet my arguments bounced off her like Tigger on Red Bull, chiefly because she seemed completely disinterested in arguments. She talked about how much she loved the Bible, but later she said she also loved the Bhagavad Gita (she tried the Koran but found it too “intense”). When I explained that those two books are pretty different and irreconcilable in many parts, she was unconcerned. She called herself a Christian, but on takeoff claimed the sunset in front of us was God. I tried to explain how the Creator-creature distinction is essential to Christianity and how the entire the story of the Bible depends on it. She seemed mildly interested, but still preferred to think of God as everything. When we talked about the “lost” gospels, my historical reasons for rejecting those books meant little to her. It’s quite possible I was inept, or maybe she just didn’t know what to say in response. But I think in large part this amiable woman just didn’t want to be bothered with facts.

At one point she told me about how she used to attend the Church of Higher Consciousness (or some such thing). Being bothered by God’s wrath she asked her pastor how to make sense of Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt. He told her this was a lesson in not getting stuck in your past. You know, you got to keep looking forward and not look back. She really liked this interpretation and then asked me what I thought. “Well,” I said, “that’s not really the point. The story is really about God’s judgment. Even Jesus used Lot’s wife as warning that we must be ready for the coming judgment” (see Luke 17:32). She told me she liked the first interpretation better.

How do you give a reason for the hope that you have when the people asking you aren’t interested in reason? It seems to me one of the first tasks of evangelism today is to reintroduce the law of non-contradiction. More and more we can’t just drop the bridge diagram on people, we need to go back and tell the larger story of creation, curse, covenant, Christ, commitment, and consummation. And even before that we may have to help people simply think; help people not just find the truth, but believe that it exists, that it is inconsistent with error, and that it does not automatically correspond to what we wish it to be.

Want to think more about thinking? Check out the Desiring God National Conference this weekend. I’m sure John Piper’s new book Think: the Life of the Mind and the Love of God will be worth reading as well.