Ministerial Reflections

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As Aquinas noted, faith may go beyond reason but is never contrary to reason. God is the source of reason. We live in an ordered universe and world in which logic, reason, and knowledge are possible. True knowledge of the world, self, and of other-selves is possible, if only ever in part.

Reason is essential to human beings. Reason is a tool by which humans negotiate the real world external to themselves and discover natural law. Human reason negotiating its way in an orderly universe is entirely predicated on theistic presuppositions. Reason and logic only make sense in the context of a theistic universe.

Faith and reason are joined in the scriptures. We are called by the scriptures to reason (James 3:17), to avoid contradictions (1 Tim. 6:20), and to assent to propositional truth (John 20:31).

Revelation comes from outside humanity, as God reveals something of Himself or His truth to human beings which they otherwise could and would not come to know. Reason apprehends God’s revelation. 

For Christians, the Bible contains a record of God’s revelation, a testimony to His self-disclosure. The words of scripture point toward the supreme revelatory event of Jesus Christ – His life, death, and resurrection. Jesus was Himself the discourse or Word of God to humanity (John 1:1-18), speaking God’s Word to humanity.

A favorite aphorism of fellow mainline Protestants, who frequently deny the possibility of propositional revelation, is that ‘God is love’ (taken from the New Testament letter of 1 John 4:8). That assertion of God’s essential nature and attribute is on its face a propositional statement. God is love is a proposition rooted in biblical revelation. Hence, the favorite axiom of those who deny or are ambivalent about propositional revelation is nothing if not revelation, and of the propositional sort, the very thing almost invariably denied by contemporary theology. Yet, there it is.

As a 21st Century Protestant, as a reasonable and reasoning human being who encounters God’s revelation of Jesus Christ in scripture, I affirm propositional revelation. The totality of 1 John 4 is a robust affirmation that the God who is love revealed Himself uniquely to humanity in Jesus Christ. Consequently, I affirm that God is love.