To a friend about Jesus, contemplative spirituality, and mere human reason.

To a friend about Jesus, contemplative spirituality, and “mere” human reason.

I understand the impetus toward the “contemplative spirituality” movement and its relationship to emergent theologies and post-evangelicalism in general. Its relationships are not the problem. I don’t avoid the Contemplative Renovare maharishi yogi stuff because it is guilty by association. If that were what Jesus taught I guess it would be Christianity. The problem is that it is all so sub-Christian. Christianity is inherently rational and represents God as a rational being; a thinking being. It is the anti-rational nature of it all that holds its subversion of a truly Christian Spirituality. In the Scriptures, the faith we live is always considered to be a moral life, but never less than a thought life, and the highest spire of human flourishing presented through rational means to the reasonable human mind created in the reasonable image of God.

To imply that true Spirituality is unreasonable is to imply that God Himself is irrational, and I don’t think we want to say that.

In His every sermon, explanation, and argument that we find in Holy Scripture, Jesus brought Scripture to bear as a related and coherent whole, because that’s what’s necessary to understand what God has really said. He uses what is called, the analogie de fia, the “analogy of faith”, where the verse in dispute is clarified by using the necessary or implied logical inferences of other scriptures, and by using the clear statements to clarify those open to misinterpretation.

There is an immense unstated rule in His method that implies a great deal about the metaphysical world as He sees it. What a person does practically is the expression of their theory. With mere men, not always their stated theory, but the one they really hold, will speak through their actions. A person will act upon what they really think and will pursue that which they truly love, whatever their words to the contrary. When Jesus approaches a given theological question, His first order of business is always the same. Logic. Reason. Reconcilability. Rationality.

I know people argue about this, but it isn’t very useful, because it is simply what He does. He takes whatever passages of Divine revelation are relevant to the answering of the question at hand, and by induction and deduction shows what the answer must be. He is not an opinion oriented Pastor. He is a rugged Biblicist. When He says, “The Scriptures cannot be broken.”, that is what He means. That it cannot be false, and it cannot be self contradictory, because self contradiction is a way of showing falsity.

Truth is propositional. This is a hard one to wrap our minds around, but simple propositional form is the unavoidable center of all coherent thought and action, for both God and men. Subject, Object, Copula. Everything is relational, and every truth in the form of a relation between something and something else or something and itself. There just isn’t any other way for things to be. So of course Jesus is logical, because to be illogical is to be confused, or ignorant, or just plain wrong. God in Christian Theology, is an eternal mind. He thinks. He is personal. In fact, tri-personal. But He is not confused about either what He thinks is true or what He thinks is false or the relationship between the two. He knows that He exists instead of not existing. He knows the difference between Himself and the things He has created. He knows what He loves and what He hates and what time of the day it is, and all of these are logical distinctions. Logic is just our little name for the way God thinks. We think the way we do, and think well when we do, because He thinks the way He does, and we are created after His image and likeness.

The implication of this being, that that which is irrational, is ungodly. Irrational, sub-rational, super-rational; wherever you want to go with it, it is fallen, and dark, and ultimately brutal. God is Good. And because God is good He is also Truth, and truth neither lies nor errs. Logic is not some eternally existing Platonic thing outside of God to which He looks for verification of a principle. Logic is a primary personal attribute that doesn’t exist “outside” of persons at all. What some people derogatorily describe as “mere human reason”, is the imago Dei, the image of God. At worst we should call it ” Divine reason”. The ability to think true thoughts about God, the self, and the world and to reconcile those thoughts in a true understanding so that we might see the face of God in Jesus Christ demands that our thoughts be reasonable.

If someone wants to disagree, they would either need to do so without using propositions or without using logic, and so without using words, because the use of any word presupposes the identity and meaning of the word used as opposed to an infinite series of other possible meanings. So, no words, no numbers, no images, pictures, symbols, or representations of any kind because all of these presume the laws of identity and non-contradiction. We simply cannot speak, not even to object, without using them.

This in itself tells us things about the Eternal God who raised us from the dust and breathed life into us, bringing forth children from the clay. Logic itself is not something He created, because if it were, He would have had to have not created it before He created it, and that is a logical distinction.

Getting beyond the object-subject distinction is the rage in the halls of philosophical confusion right now. Theo-babble is on the rise. The thinker’s flavor of the week. But the Christian cannot let themselves be confused by these kinds of pious sounding words without meaning. There is a God, and we are not Him, and that is a logical difference. To fail to reason well is to succeed at reasoning paganly. To begin with true premises and end with false conclusions is the beginning of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

And since we who know Him long to be like Him, let us think as He thought and do as he did.

Neiswonger