Faith and reason: Friends or enemies?

Does having faith in God mean you cannot or should not use your head properly any longer? If we would be honest with ourselves, this is one of the nagging questions that come to mind when we take a cursory look at the current Christian landscape in Ghana and other African countries. It is as if one must throw away his mind in order to be able to believe in God.

It seems that strong faith is equal to bad reasoning or less thinking. I have actually heard one of the well-known preachers on radio say that the Word of God (i.e. the Bible) is not for the mind but for the spirit.

This is a false division and a very tragic one indeed, for it is wrongly assumed that the mind has no place in spiritual life. It is statements of this sort that make non-religious folks get confirmed in their belief that every religion is devoid of reason.

Yet Christ never called for undiscerning minds. He called for thinking people! It seems some Christians today, however, are afraid that scrutinizing the teachings of the Christian faith might lead them to lose their faith. [Perhaps, this may be due to stories they have heard from people who claim that their rigorous research led them to disbelieve in God.] But this fear is unwarranted.

“You will seek me and find me when you seek with all your heart,” is what the God of the Bible promised the Jews once (Jer. 29:13). Also, Jesus said to his disciples, “… seek and you will find ...” (Matt. 7:7).

An honest hunger for truth is the prerequisite for proper reasoning. The Christian faith is not a blind faith; you do not need to abandon your mind and jump into a fairy tale world as some believers today are making it seem. Instead, it is the proper response of trust to the God who is there and who has proven, through countless marvellous deeds (seen and unseen), that he is worthy of our trust. Oxford mathematics Professor, John Lennox, is credited with the following statement:

“Fictional gods may well be enemies of reason: the God of the Bible certainly is not. The very first of the biblical Ten Commandments contains the instruction to 'love the Lord your God with all your mind'. This should be enough to tell us that God is not to be regarded as an enemy of reason. After all, as Creator he is responsible for the very existence of the human mind; the biblical view is that human beings are the pinnacle of creation. They alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.”

Professor Lennox is spot on. The God of Bible is the reality of the really real, so to speak, and does not oppose proper reasoning. In fact, he is a reasoning God. Jesus asks people to count the cost before becoming his followers. He wants people to deliberately think things through before making a commitment to him. He says he is the Truth. It is therefore not surprising that he is not worried in the least by a person’s honest examination of his life and teachings. In fact Jesus is convinced that any genuine truth lover or seeker will find him too attractive to resist, for he says, “… Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me” John 18:37 GNB. I am convinced that anyone who is honest in the heart will be forced to use his head correctly. Dishonest hearts hate proper thinking. This is the bane of the current popular Christianity which is spewing out false teachings and practices at dizzying speed. Anytime Christians stop thinking properly, a false spirituality follows.

Jesus often used parables to force his listeners to think. The gospels contain a number of questions, a lot of which are asked by Jesus himself. One of the trademarks of Jesus is that he often answered questions with questions to compel people to come clean in their assumptions: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?,” some people asked him; “Whose image is on the coin?,” answered Jesus. “Good teacher what must I do to be saved?,” asked one person; “Why do you call me good?,” replied Jesus. “What must I do to receive eternal life,” one teacher asked; “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?” Jesus asked (Lk 10:25,26).

I am inclined to think that some Christians today have a struggle with morality because they think it is some people at the top in the Church who have agreed and made such laws to restrict people’s freedom. Yes, I agree that in some churches this might be the case. But Biblical Christian morality is nothing about oppressive and antiquated laws that we cannot understand nor see why they should exist. When the Christian has thought deeply and carefully about God’s nature, he recognizes why he ought to live the way that the Bible prescribes because God’s love and holiness naturally draw boundaries for righteous living. Loving the Lord with the mind means thinking after God’s thoughts as expressed in the Bible, wrestling with them, asking questions, probing and searching and researching to find answers that fit the facts in there. The early church fathers were thinkers who thought long and hard through the Christian teachings and also engaged head-on with the prevailing philosophies in their day. These include men like St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Origen, Iraneaus. In later centuries, we find Christian men like Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, and C. S. Lewis thinking deep on the Christian faith. Further, critical thinking about the universe as a creation of God led men like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler (just to name a few) to make wonderful contributions to the field of scientific enquiry.By thinking, probing, and wrestling with the teachings of the faith and the happenings in reality, these men were able to understand God and the gospel of Christ and even our universe better and explain them to others.

Is this the same attitude we have among Ghanaian Christians today? No, we dare not think critically, ask questions or search the scriptures to verify the Man of God’s interpretation of the scriptures, since it is a direct “revelation.” If we do so, we would be challenging God, so the thinking goes. And which faithful believer wants to be God’s challenger? We would rather settle for misinterpreted Bible verses and building our faith on erroneous teachings. The reluctance to engage in proper reasoning when it comes to Christian doctrines is a great threat to Christianity. Interestingly, when the great Apostle Paul went to preach the good news in Berea, the historian, Luke, with a sense of commendation said, “The people there were more open-minded than the people in Thessalonica. They listened to the message with great eagerness and every day they studied the Scriptures to see if what Paul said was really true.” Acts 17:11 GNB.

How many preachers today would be comfortable knowing that they are being scrutinized by an open-minded congregation every time they preached? Yet such an attitude in a congregation would force the preacher to be on his toes and not compromise the Bible’s teachings, or even preach cheap, un-researched sermons. I am not at all calling for Christians to become disrespectful or unduly critical of their pastors and elders. I am calling on Christians to halt the unbalanced worship which involves only the heart and spirit without the mind and where we do not have any respect for what is true. Once a certain teaching sounds like what we want for the moment, we do not care for its truthfulness or falsehood. And yet Jesus says that not only must worshipers of God worship in Spirit but they must also worship him in truth; and the mind is what serves as a filter where truth is concerned. Without truth as a guide, Christianity becomes exactly the kind that we have in this country today – limitless superstition, fear of the intellect, oppression and abuse. Jesus wants his followers to have alert intellects – wise as serpents, as he put it – along with childlike (rather than childish) faith; one that is simple, single-minded and teachable.

The Christian faith is healthy enough to contain and satisfy logical thinking and honest questions and curiosity. Jesus says he is the truth, and we know that truth corresponds with reality. This means that sound logic (a feature of reality) should characterize Christian teaching and practice. Since God, through his Son, created all things including our minds, he wants us to think and think properly after his thoughts and his marvellous work in creation, to understand them as much as our minds can take and to be able to worship him with a deeper understanding and devotion.

Robert G. Coleman is the author of the book “Why Don’t I Feel My Faith” (E-mail: boabs2010@gmail.com; Blog: www.rgcoleman.wordpress.com)