Reason vs Revelation
Jim Babka on Feb 29th 2008
The point of Thomistic Natural Law is that Reason is not opposed to Revelation (a.k.a., truth revealed by religion, and specifically, in the Christian instance, by the Bible).
Reason and Revelation are not enemies or even opposites. They are complements to one another. Each, in the opinion of this author, as well as many esteemed minds of the past, is diminished by the absence or suppression of the other.
There may be disagreements between persons on how, specifically, these two things complement one another. But very few people that I’m aware of believe these two concepts are outright enemies within their own persons.
Yes, there are fundamentalists out there. Yes, there are also hardcore atheists out there. Yet everyone reasons, even if they do it inconsistently or poorly — so poorly, in some instances, that they’re dangerous. And everyone has faith in something, even if they might want to call their “faith” by a different name.
Even more important, as someone who values the Bible: Revelation requires interpretation. How else can one interpret Revelation if they lack Reason?
At best, what can be said is that each person has a presupposition that starts with either Revelation or Reason. But what does that tell us about the result? Not much.
As the Answers in Genesis crowd (6-day creationist) proves, one can start with Revelation and then start playing science (albeit poorly).
One could just as well start with Reason and then turn to Revelation for support — a stance that appears to have been quite popular in the Founders that my co-blogger Jon Rowe quotes. But just a couple generations after the Founders, this Reason to Revelation approach was used, amongst other things, to reinforce pro-slavery arguments.
Using our capacity to reason, we can see that both 20th century young earth creationists and 19th century southern slavery apologists were doing bad theology.
Some would say the person that starts with Reason is “on the side of” Reason and that they are therefore unorthodox (Christians). It would be, for example, impossible to be an Evangelical, and still really, truly value Reason. Perhaps, that would be true if orthodoxy necessarily meant fideism. But we now have 800 years of Thomistic Natural Law which started in Christian tradition (and one could argue 2,000 years of Natural Law since Paul appears to commend it in Romans 1). Christianity has adapted quite nicely, for the most part, to the idea that, for example, church and state exist in different spheres, and it was historical experience (not to mention the very practical theology of persecuted Heugenots) that helped Christians better understand how church and state — how both Acts 5:29 and Romans 13:1-7 — fit together.
As we review the American Founding, Enlightened Natural Law was, according to the indispensable John Locke, discovered in the way that Adam’s state of nature was formed, lived in, and bequeathed to humanity. Was Locke’s view of Natural Law an argument from Reason or Revelation?
Before you answer, please note that Locke also believed atheists couldn’t be trusted and should not be permitted to hold public office. In other words, no one who disposed of Revelation could be trusted as far as this singularly important Natural Law philosopher was concerned. The very concept of an oath of office was based on the oath-taker’s accountability to the Divine Judge of the Universe. Revelation was (is) requisite. From a Lockean (and I would argue, even the Founder’s) perspective, you could use that Revelation in the way a Deist (Thomas Paine), Socinian, or Arian (Adams and Jefferson) might. But use it, you must. Of course, the public at the time wasn’t quite as “broad minded.”
In the Baconian view, Theology was the Queen of the Sciences. The creation and development of Natural Philosophy (the predecessor to modern science) was a search to better understand God — an attempt to do better theology. Indeed, in our own Declaration of Independence, it was to that Creator that our Founders turned — the same Creator they knew from their upbringing and the ever-present Christian milieu in which they lived, Who came to be better understood as a result of the work done by Natural Philosophers. With that Declaration, a People embarked on what has become the longest-running experiment in human liberty.
Yet in Aquinas and Locke we have individuals who started with Revelation and used Reason to support their arguments — often to a productive (though of course, not perfect) result (unlike the Answers in Genesis crowd).
Reason and Revelation have a hand-in-glove relationship. Revelation without Reason is, at best, superstition — if it could even be that. The Founders were wise to run from superstition.
Yet the Founders still retained and valued Revelation because they believed it told us that each of us, as individuals, matter to the Creator and that, someday, we will answer to that Creator for how we treat others. Reason without Revelation is, therefore, generally impersonal (sometimes dangerously so) and blind.
Finally, even if you personally find Revelation useless, the fact remains that this culture is, in large part, composed of people who profess faith in the Creator. It seems to spring from a human longing (a.k.a., the God-shaped hole) and it’s not going away any time soon. As an outsider to this perspective, you should both insist on and be pleased by real attempts to do better theology — theology where Reason is given great respect — by those who profess faith in God, because as we’ve all seen, fundamentalism is dangerous.
And people of faith should be pleased by the new tools, yielded by progress, that permit us to do better theology — to better understand our Creator and Savior. Rejecting the truth discovered through history, science, etc., is commitment to a man-made tradition, not to The Truth (John 8:32).
Hardball delenda est.
Filed in The Basement
I consider reason and revelation to be diametrically opposed. Reason uses logic and evidence available to anyone. Revelation is only available to those who believe they have received it.
Until god decides to tell us all the exact same thing, revelation is indistinguishable from hallucination.
I also disagree with your statement, “And everyone has faith in something, even if they might want to call their ‘faith’ by a different name.”
I have no faith. Faith is belief without evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence. I believe only that which I have good reason to believe.
Thank you for your post, Jim. As far as I can tell, you and I are in agreement. People generally seem to fall into one of three camps. Either they consider biblical revelation foundational (because our reason is corrupted by the fall), they consider reason foundational (because, as you say, scripture cannot even be interpreted except by reason) or they consider reason and revelation to be more complexly related to each other. I think any of these can be made defensible positions.
The trouble is that people in differing camps usually talk past each other when they try to talk about these things. Because where you pitch your tent, in this case, really is such a basic … ‘decision,’ it is very difficult to try to get behind that decision and suss out just how you could have done it differently. Even my calling it a decision is problematic, because many folks in the second camp would say that they were just born there. It’s sort of the natural position, and the only reason people emigrate (so the story goes) is that they don’t have the courage to face up to reality. But because the decision is so basic, it also shapes all the meanings that structure the way we think about things. One camp can call the original decision of where to ‘live’ an act of ‘faith’ but if the other says that no such original decision can take place, then how could they accept that as a definition of faith? That would lead them to the conclusion that no one on earth has ever had faith, which would just be strange, because we have this word, so the word ‘faith’ must signify something else that the faithful aren’t really seeing clearly, etc.
The third camp, though, seems to me to be the hardest to explain. One can say that reason and revelation are not ultimately, metaphysically distinct from one another because they both come from the same God, the perfect Three in One, and that’s all very well and good, but then what does that mean for *how* I ought to go about relating such and such a scripture verse to my reason? If the relationship between reason and revelation is not for me (as a living, embodied person) straightforwardly hierarchical, then what actually is it?
What if there’s something that seems very important and somehow part of the revelation of Christ, but it doesn’t seem to be a part of scripture as such (say, the immaculate conception of Mary)? One, after all, does not only interpret the scripture through reason but also within a particular historical context, and different historical contexts make different demands on what constitutes a validating claim. For instance, today, we live in a time when many people are trying to find the voices of women within Christianity. Were the voices of women within the church maintained through orality rather than through the fixed and written word, and, if so, perhaps the “purification” of Christianity that took place in the enlightenment did not mean cutting out old pagan influences but meant making demands on God’s revelation that it take place first and fully on the fixed page, and only secondarily through interpersonal dialogue? But there have been times in history in which “the written” has not been exalted and not been treated as more trustworthy than “the spoken.”
Very nice, Jim. That “we hold these truths to be self evident, etc.” is the philosophical common ground of the Founding. The holding, not the truths.
In my view, attempts to replace rights endowed by a Creator [which comes from the Judeo-Christian "created in God's image" concept---imago Dei] with some other rationale for them have failed.
Even if another scheme of rights were valid, it’s simply not the one America was founded on. If we’re to replace imago Dei with something more “neutral,” let’s at least acknowledge that we’re doing so.
I agree this is a great essay. And I would note, somewhat after Rawls, that reason is where public arguments should take place. And we should all be able to acknowledge, in good faith, that orthodox believers, liberal believers and atheists all have the ability to be “reasonable.”
Well, Jon, I agree and don’t. I’m certainly against anyone thumping the Bible as a political argument, however, there are certain moral judgments that the individual makes according to his own code, be it religious or something else.
One is surely entitled to vote his conscience without having to answer to anyone else’s standard.