Faith and Reason: Reasonable Faith

Recently I was out of town and away from my local church and I was watching a sermon on tv being delivered by a local pastor from the city in which I was staying. This was a very popular pastor in the city and the head of a large church with several satellite campuses, so he was speaking to thousands of people. He made a statement in his sermon that I found to be deeply problematic. He said, “Those who come to God must be willing to take a step of faith that is, in part, unreasonable.” He had the word ‘unreasonable’ projected on the screen in all caps, bold, and underlined. He then said this, “If it were only always reasonable, what then would be the point of faith?” He was saying that you have a choice to make: is it going to be faith OR is it going to be reason? You are either going to be guided by reason or guided by faith. Apparently, it can’t be both. So, here we have an evangelical Christian pastor with significant influence over thousands of people implicitly perpetuating the idea that there exists a conflict between faith and reason: that faith is contrary to reason. If you’ve been following this series so far you will know that this is just an unfortunate, and sadly, all-too-common, confusion. As I have tried to show over the course of three episodes, faith properly understood, is not contrary to reason, faith is contrary to sight. The writer of Hebrews doesn’t say that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things that are unreasonable, but rather of things that are not seen. As I have tried to show, faith is a mode of knowing that relies on the testimony of another rather than on that which is “seen” through sensation or intellection. We exercise faith when believing something we cannot see either with the “eye” of sensation (by which we know beings in the world), or with the “eye” of the intellect (by which we understand first principles and what follows from them). It is critical for us to understand that believing something in the absence of sight is not the same as believing something in the absence of reason. It is always appropriate and rational to believe something in the absence of sight when that belief is based on the testimony of a trustworthy witness. It is never appropriate or rational to believe something in the absence of reason––we ought never to believe something that is unreasonable. Now, there are things that go beyond reason, things that are suprarational, things we cannot fully comprehend with our finite intellects. But, once again, believing something that is beyond reason is not the same as believe something that is unreasonable; believing something that is suprarational is not the same as believing something that is irrational. Many of the things that we believe as Christians are beyond the ability of our intellects to fully comprehend (our finite minds can never fully comprehend the infinite God); yet it is reasonable for us to believe things that we cannot fully comprehend for ourselves as long as we rely in the testimony of one who can comprehend them and who can therefore bear witness to them. So, when properly understood, there is no conflict between the notion of faith and the notion of reason, as such. The truth of the matter is that the relationship between Christian faith and reason is not one of conflict, but of harmony. In fact, despite what we hear all the time from well-meaning pastors, Christian faith is not, in any way, a blind, an illogical, or an irrational faith, rather, Christian faith is a an eminently reasonable faith.