Are the Holy Spirit and Reason at Cross-Purposes? Part I

“…they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.”  (Romans 1:21)

To the question above, the answer is yes and no.  “Yes” in a positive sense.  And “no,” too, in a positive sense.  Now there are, I concede, certain aspects of Christian doctrine which seem to imply that both sides of the equation are in conflict with each other.  As a Lutheran Christian (and Pastor) I accept as profoundly true the teaching that apart from the work of the Holy Spirit no one can (or will) come to faith at all.  For example, with respect to the third article of the Apostle’s Creed (the Holy Spirit), Martin Luther’s explanation in his Small Catechism states, “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him.  But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel…”  A string of passages in the Bible support this contention, including John 15:16, 1 Corinthians 1:23 and 2:14, and Ephesians 2:1.  It is, however, Romans 8:7 which assigns the actual reason for the necessity of the Holy Spirit, namely, our sinful and therefore hostile and rebellious hearts.  Luther highlights this dark reality in his famous Bondage of the Will, “When a man is without the Spirit of God he does not do evil against his will, as if we were taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to do it…but he does it of his own accord and ready will.” (Luther’s Works, v. 33, p.64).  The fundamental human problem then is not truth.  It is that human beings are not the truth-lovers that we claim to be.    

It is therefore high time that reason and rationality be restored in Christian circles as God-honoring categories of thinking because they belong to God Himself, and that we assign the blame for unbelief to its actual cause (as I laid out above).  Reason is not the devil’s invention.  To echo C.S. Lewis, the devil can only pervert reason.  Christianity shouldn’t even settle with the notion that God invented reason.  It is God’s very nature to be rational (as we understand it in our limited way).  In John 1:1 the One whom we know to be Jesus Christ is called “the Word.”  “Word” in Greek is logos.  The word is pronounced just as it looks.  We get our words logic and logical from the very expression that opens John’s Gospel with respect to the Savior of the world.