Christians who celebrated Jesus’ resurrection from the dead last Sunday encountered one of the classic tensions in Christian experience: the tension between faith and reason.
Over the next weeks of this Easter season (Easter until Pentecost) I want to focusing on Jesus’ resurrection by reflecting in different roles of reason in Christian faith, especially in light of the resurrection.
Reasonable Faith or Faithful Reason?
Most of us reared in America inherited with our mother’s milk an Enlightenment worldview that implicitly trusts the superiority of reason as the gateway to truth. Hence, our conservations usually circle around questions about “how can reason make room for faith?”
When I left the U.S. to teach theology to Ethiopian graduate students reared in a worldview that implicitly trusts the priority of faith, suddenly most questions were from the opposite direction: “how can faith make room for reason?”
While books presenting Christian faith to spiritual seekers in the western world often have titles about reason accepting faith [e.g., Reasons for God (Timothy Keller) or Reasonable Faith (William Craig)], I challenged my Ethiopian students that one of them would someday write a book about faith accepting reason called Faithful Reason.
When we stop and consider, how reason and faith relate to one another is problematic for many Christians (of whatever worldview), yet we need them both!
The journey toward faith requires intellectual processing (reason)
Human intelligence is necessary to understand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as well as how the Bible claims these events impact all creation.
Whether our journey toward faith is short or long, complicated or straightforward, none of us make this trip without some intellectual understanding of these basic ideas.
For some of us, a major part of this journey toward faith is also addressing crucial intellectual questions about the meaning of suffering, other religions, or the church’s woeful complicity in so much human suffering throughout history. Reason is essential to honestly investigate such questions.
And yet, in my 40 years of ministry, I’ve found that, for a good many Christians, reason plays no role in believing that Jesus’ resurrection was an actual historical event.
They think of the resurrection not as an event (upon which we use reason to evaluate evidence for or against) but rather something Christians simply choose to believe regardless of any evidence. Reasonable evidence seems beside the point–or even counter-productive–because evidence detracts from the “I take it all on faith” stance which sounds spiritually superior.
A non-historical, irrational “I just choose to believe it” resurrection is dangerous for two reasons.
First and foremost, it is absolutely contrary to what the Bible proclaims!
The gospel resurrection accounts give clear, undeniable historical details. The New Testament writers take pains to convince us it was a real historical event with eyewitness evidence. And, as we’ll see in coming weeks, there is substantial additional evidence–not proof, but substantial evidence–supporting the premise that the resurrection really happened.
The second reason it is dangerous is especially pertinent for our moment in history. Some Christian groups in America today (as well as other parts of the world) have detached their worldviews from all reference to facts, evidence or use of reason. For these groups, there is no longer any genuinely “objective” truth, independent of whoever may or may not believe it. Now everything is relative; what my group chooses to believe becomes the only yardstick for truth.
Faith is never solely an intellectual decision
Reason can never marshal 100 % certainty for faith in Jesus; neither can reason (when we’re honest) generate conclusive evidence against faith in Jesus. As the Bible clears portrays, faith is not certainty; faith is trust.
Faith requires the risk of personal choice, a “leap of faith” (Kierkegaard), or an “absolute leap in the dark” (C. S. Lewis).
In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury offered a classic formulation of how faith and reason fit together:
“For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that unless I believe, I shall not understand” (emphasis added).
We assume it should be the other way around. First we have all our questions neatly ticked off, then, having all the answers in hand and having a clear understanding, we decide we can have faith.
Anselm maintains it is just the opposite, however. Reason helps us in our faith journey, often crucially, but the moment comes when we must risk everything simply trusting God with our lives. Reason might walk alongside faith down the path toward truth, but ultimately faith walks on alone.
Once we take that trusting step (or leap) of faith, however, we naturally want to understand more and more of this new relationship with God and all its implications for our lives: hence “faith seeking understanding.”
In Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Theologian Daniel Migliore perceptively sums up why reason is challenging, yet still essential to growing faith:
“We fear questions that might lead us down roads we have not traveled before. We fear the disruption in our thinking, believing and living that might come from inquiring too deeply into God and God’s purposes.”
But Migliore warns that fear of thinking about our faith comes with a price:
“As a result of these fears, we imprison our faith, allow it to become boring and stultifying, rather than releasing it to seek deeper understanding. When faith no longer frees people to ask hard questions, it becomes inhuman and dangerous. Unquestioning faith soon slips into ideology, superstition, fanaticism, self-indulgence and idolatry.”
Most of us have observed this danger in someone we know, if not in ourselves at times. John Calvin said reason is the greatest gift God gave to human beings, exactly because reason is our best defense against superstition, fanaticism and idolatry. Migliore concludes:
“Faith seeks understanding passionately and relentlessly, or it languishes and eventually dies.”
The tension: faith never depends solely on reason, yet faith can never do without reason.
In this paradoxical tension, perhaps we see faith and reason as static and predictable, two statues ever frozen in the same positions. From a “faith seeking understanding” viewpoint, however, it is better to think of faith and reason as dance partners!
Often faith is the leading partner, with reason struggling to keep up as they swirl around the dance floor. But then reason takes the lead, steering faith away from tripping over potted plants (logical fallacies) or blundering around the floor in blind exuberance (joining a cult).
If faith and reason are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, each placing a foot where the other’s foot has been just a second before as they swirl together, the nuances of the dance are beautiful to behold (even if, occasionally, toes do get stepped on)!
In this complex choreography of faith and reason, Jesus’ resurrection can take its proper place. And we will be better equipped to live faithfully and intelligently in God’s world.
Questions for Reflection
1) Have you thought much about the historical reality of Jesus’ resurrection, or just believed it because “that’s what Christians believe?” If you begin thinking of it as an actual historical event, what questions come to mind?
2) In your own life, have you been more of a person whose reason needed to make room for faith, or more of a person whose faith needed to make room for reason? Whichever is truer for you, what challenges have you faced because of your position?
3) If you’ve usually assumed reason is the enemy of faith, how do you react to the idea that faith needs reason? Or that reason and faith might actually co-exist as dance partners?
