Faith and Reason

The tension between two inheritances, drawn from Faith is Not Blind. Bruce C. Hafen reads the conflict through American coins: “Liberty” carries the Greek legacy — reason, “know thyself,” man as the measure of all things — while “In God We Trust” carries the Hebrew legacy of faith and obedience over human reasoning. “This tiny comparison contains the seeds of countless arguments contrasting reason with faith.” One can “fall off the edge at either the right or left extreme.”

The book’s resolution is that faith and reason are different instruments and that reason has a ceiling. Becoming Christlike “is more about acquiring skills than it is about learning facts” — “simply knowing something will not sanctify us.” Because “by its very nature, faith ultimately takes us beyond the boundaries of reason,” conditioning faith on rationality risks “shrink[ing] back from a sanctifying experience.” Reason can still point toward faith rather than replace it — Faith is Not Blind offers Francis Collins and the fine-tuned physical constants (God is a Scientist) as reason pointing at the divine. The macro frame, the book argues, collapsed over the twentieth century: the medieval church, then The Age of Reason’s Enlightenment, then relativism dissolved the outer “life” box, leaving only personal preference — and Wehner’s line distills the alternative, “We are changed by what we love more than by what we think.”

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — the Hebrew (“In God We Trust”) vs. Greek (“Liberty,” reason, “know thyself”) inheritances; reason has a ceiling, and conditioning faith on rationality risks shrinking back from sanctifying experience.
• The Age of Reason — the Enlightenment as the moment reason began displacing the church as the explanation for the meaning of “life,” part of the macro-frame story.