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The rationality of faith

By Peter Sellick - posted Wednesday, 16 January 2008


The popularity of the anti-religious tirades of Dawkins, Dennett and Hutchinson bear adequate testimony that such is the prevailing view of at least that part of the public that reads non-fiction.

While these authors give comfort to the persecutors of faith, their criticism is spectacularly weak in that they classify all religions to be the same and are blind to the many benefits that Christianity has given to the world.

These authors flourish because of the fragmentation of Christianity into myriad pieces many of which are quite laughable. However, it must be born in mind that this fragmentation was largely due to the modern thinkers who proclaimed the new age of reason. If every man is his own orthodoxy this means that Christianity has as many forms as there are believers.

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An examination of the belief of individual believers will not necessarily reveal the existence of a rational tradition. This is predictable given the decline in theological culture that has occurred over the last few hundred years. From being the queen of the sciences in the universities, theology is most often not represented at all in Australian universities. Theology is deemed to have lost its object and therefore to be defunct.

While this is a complex story in itself it is enough to say that the atheism derived from the Age of Reason has profoundly missed the point. The Christian God is not the God of Newton and Clarke who exists as immaterial substance but the God who is revealed in the history of Israel and of Christ.

If we did have a robust theological culture that projected itself into the public square what sort of rationality would it demonstrate?

If the rationality of football is based on the premise that winning is better than losing and that of medicine that health is better than disease what would be the shared premise of the Church?

I have noted that Les Murray places a dedication “To the Glory of God” in the frontispiece of his collections of poems and it seems to me that such a premise is basic to the rationality of the Church. This is the shared presupposition that is the foundation for the rationality of faith, that all we do is for the glory of God. Such a foundation has the power to include all other traditions of rationality, even that of football, and to preserve them from the idolatry that tempts them all.

The rationality that is particularly demonstrated by Christianity, while affirming other traditions of rationality, will always point them towards a horizon that they themselves cannot contain.

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Unfortunately that horizon has to suffer the cuts of a thousand qualifications in order to make clear what is meant, so crowded has this category become. Every utopian thinker has his own version so it is better to cut to the chase and to state as clearly as possible what this horizon is.

The biblical view is that it is an earthly reality (this side of death) in which the truth of God will be written on every heart and confessed by every tongue. This will amount to God dwelling with his people as described in the somewhat lurid texts of the book of Revelation.

There are many, mostly poetic, descriptions of this future reality in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. They range from descriptions of a reality in which spears are turned into pruning hooks, in which the child shall play over the hole of the asp and the lion will eat straw like the ox to the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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