Prudence and Populism
Body
“Edmund Burke warned that in poorly ordered democracies, ‘moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors.’” - Law & Liberty
As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“Edmund Burke warned that in poorly ordered democracies, ‘moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors.’” - Law & Liberty
“… the most troubling element in [contemporary American politics] lies beyond our mere partisan differences. It involves a distinctive politics of passion that could, if left unbridled, lead to the ruin of our experiment in republican self-government.” - Law & Liberty
“From prophecy to apocalypse, from parable to origin story, the Bible speaks in a language brimming with imagination. For those with imaginations, let them imagine.” - Christianity Today
“Today’s atheists insist that religion and Christianity are necessary because they provide the emotional crutch for difficult times. But Lewis’ journey provides a different picture. Who do you think is right?” - Intellectual Takeout
Unless you reason outside the box of human reason, you can forget about understanding the Jesus of the Bible. Only those willing and able to break the constraints of common experience and human rationalism can hope to make any sense of Jesus’ life and ministry.
“I wish to briefly introduce author David Bentley Hart’s argument—which may seem shocking to some—that reason also requires faith.”
“Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions [is] based on previous talks given to students and businessmen” CT
Read the series so far.
In this article on the roles of faith and reason I want to turn to examine some biblical passages which, I think, really help us to understand why reason must be driven by faith. The first of these comes from the Garden of Eden.
Although we do not have a protracted narrative of all that went on between the serpent and Eve, we do have everything necessary for us to learn what God wants us to learn. The culmination of the devil’s temptation of the woman was in the words, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5). Of course this was a lie. No one could know good and evil like God without being God. But the promise of “being like God” was what did it.
Read the series so far.
As we further consider whether reason should be categorized separately from faith as properly functioning independent of it, I cite the example of an article by Harold Netland entitled, “Apologetics, Worldviews, and the Problem of Neutral Criteria.”1 In Netland’s 1991 article we see an able but, I believe, misguided critique of presuppositionalist John M. Frame’s epistemology as set forth in his book The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. The overall burden of Netland’s complaint is clear, there must be some mutually shared neutral criteria that all people, whether Theist, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Humanist, or whatever, can use to judge each other’s positions.2 It is the possibility of this neutral ground that Frame, in common with other biblical presuppositionalists (including the present writer) denies.
Read the series so far.
Having brought into the discussion the necessity of divine revelation as the presupposition of faith, we are faced with the question of how reason relates to this revelation. My answer to this question will have to be provisional for now. I hope to post separately on this subject in the future.
If faith truly appropriates the truth about God then it is clear that it can have no proper function apart from divine revelation. As “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), it responds to matters above the reach of the inductive sciences (1 Cor. 2:10, etc). Hence, from a Christian point of view, it is essential for man to have proper faith if he is to know his creational environment fully.
Discussion