In discussing some issues with Ken on another thread today, I was led to reflect on the role of reason in Christian faith. Lately I've been writing a lot about John Henry Newman. Newman 's brother Charles was an atheist convert. In a letter to his brother, Charles alleged that the Bible was full of "error and evil and meanness and folly." Newman responded that the contents of scripture are "not to be brought into evidence for or against revelation, because man is not in a state to judge them." He also argued (as summarized by Francis McGrath) that "the very idea of revelation implies the 'revelation of something' beyond reason whose genuineness is sanctioned by its credentials and not by its contents. If content is the only criterion, then authentic revelation would be virtually impossible. Revelation stands or falls by its credentials and not by the 'practice of measuring' its contents by 'any preconceived ideas or morals or philosophy'" (John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation, p. 29).
The kind of thinking described above may resolve the problem of divinely-ordained genocide in the Old Testament for the Bible inerrantist, but it also resolves the problem of divinely-ordained unbeliever-killing for the Muslim Brother. And of course, Newman applied it selectively. Although our conscience shouldn't be allowed to judge the content of scripture, Newman was more than willing to adduce conscience as an evidence for the existence of God. Newman's argument from conscience was that our experience of conscience tells us that we are designed with an awareness of a higher law with eternal consequences. The discerning reader is left, then, to wonder how Newman can argue that conscience reflects an eternal law but then forbid it from judging the content of our holy books. My conscience, at least, tells me that the genocide of the Canaanites and the killing of women and children that God allegedly demanded of the Israelites in the Old Testament is evil and contrary to the law of which I seem to be instinctively aware.
On a related note, Newman spent a lot of time polemicizing against "rationalism", which he defined as making "our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed." He asserted that "a rationalistic spirit is the antagonist of faith, for faith is, in its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach, simply and absolutely upon testimony." The word "rationalist" he slung around like it was the worst insult imaginable. Ironically, though, he wrote of the conscience that "in a heathen country, it will be able to discriminate with precision between the right and the wrong in traditionary superstitions" (University Sermons, p. 17). But he apparently only thought that this sort of discrimination was valid under the "Dispensation of Paganism". Since we now have and accept Christian revelation, we no longer have any right to judge it. This is what is commonly termed "question begging" and a "double standard". We don't allow reason to judge our revelation, but we demand that pagans judge their own revelations by it. What Newman was trying to do, in effect, was to construct a paradigm that forbids criticism of itself, while providing a podium from which to criticize everyone else.
I am reminded, in reading Newman, of another famous Catholic thinker who took a similar view. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, wrote for his order a document titled "Rules for Thinking With the Church". This document enjoined in part, "Always to be ready to obey with mind and heart, setting aside all judgment of one's own [...] That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black." Not coincidentally, one of the more common slurs employed against Newman by Protestant polemicists was "Jesuit".
We today have the good fortune of living in the modern era, in which the concrete fruits of reason (in the form of medicine and technology) are everywhere evident. Our experience of the world shows us that the sort of inference we call a syllogism is generally valid, and that when employed with "true" premises it can lead us to useful conclusions. What does not seem to produce useful results is leaving beliefs unchallenged and unexamined. As such, I am not willing to beg the question as Newman demands. Begging the question has resulted in a whole world full of people with such strongly-held beliefs that they're willing to kill for them. Fortunately, reason offers us a way beyond the impasse.
Reason, of course, can lead people to differing beliefs, as well. I do not claim that reason is perfect, pure, or easy to use. The scientific and historical disciplines, among others, have had to produce whole volumes full of strict critical standards in order to assure the validity of their conclusions. Hard experience should teach us that if we would judge revelation by reason, we must do so with discipline and with humility, and must be aware of reason's very real limitations. But it should also teach us that when we do so, reason is capable of forging compromise and consensus. In fact, reason may be the world's only hope of forging some kind of shared future (excluding one ideology's extermination of its competitors). Reason cannot accomplish this, of course, if we are unwilling to employ it.
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