God and Reason(4)

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.
-        Proverbs 26:4, 5

Be ready
Every believer is charged with duty of being ready to give an explanation for the hope he shows to the watching world (1 Pet. 3:15).

Christianity and Politics (4)

If you can
When asked by a woman what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had given the people, Benjamin Franklin famously quipped, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The warning was meant seriously, because like all the Founders, Franklin was well aware of the dangers that faced republics.

The principal danger, of course, was tyranny, which the Founders understood as the government depriving people of their God-given rights and liberties. The Constitution’s system of checks and balances was intended to make that more difficult, but if unscrupulous persons were elected to key positions in the government, tyranny remained a possibility. As a result, the Founders emphasized that the only real protection against tyranny was the character of the people elected to office.

God and Reason (3)

And taking the twelve, he said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” But they understood none of these things.

The importance of the mind
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the mind in human life, or of reason as a primary tool of the mind.

Christianity and Politics (3)

Aristotle rediscovered
Augustine’s "City of God" left the Latin speaking world with a view of government that was at best ambivalent: it was ordained by God and thus potentially good, but given the reality and pervasiveness of sin, it was inevitably corrupt and part of the City of Man, a world ruled by selfishness and self-seeking pride, even when led by a Christian Emperor.

God and Reason (2)

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Romans 1:19

Our “reasonable” God
We have seen that, according to the teaching of Scripture, God is reasonable. He invites us to communicate with Him, to know His purposes and will, and to understand our lives and destinies in the light of His Word and plan. God approaches us, who have been made in His image, with the protocols of reason, so that He may engage with us in ways that go beyond reason in a relationship of love we can experience more readily than express (Eph. 3:19).

“Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD…” Isaiah 1:18 (1)

Reason, faith, and God
Is God reasonable?

That is, can we understand the way God “thinks”? Are His reasons accessible to our reasoning ability? Can we know God by means of reason? Are there good “reasons” to believe in Him? Is reason contrary to faith? Can reason be a tool of faith? A hindrance to it? And what is the relationship between reason – the human ability to figure things out logically – and divine revelation?

All these questions were sparked in my mind as a result of reading Roger McCann’s article, “Is God Irish?”, which appears in the September 9, 2012 issue of Philosophy Now magazine.