It's all in the name.

As I was thinking of exactly what to title this blog, I thought of all kinds of catchy titles, but none of them seemed to fit. At the Corner of Faith and Reason came to mind and so I decided to go with it. The title alone can seem to fly in the face of what we as a modern culture have become. Typically when we meet people we tend to think in terms of one or the other, but never both. Either we find that reason is the answer to all our problems, science becomes the new god as we tear through every aspect of our lives in an attempt to make sense of our universe, our world, but most importantly our lives. To this end we work so hard so that everything has its place, always to find that the answers leave us with more questions, in many cases it is the rejection of faith that causes more chaos. On the flip side of this we have those who have completely rejected reason, they have completely rejected most science and decided to rely only on faith. Often times within our religious circles this is the way we look out into the world, we run away from anything that seems like "science" or "logic" and focus in on only faith, and only our faith at that. Looking at things in this way leads to the title of this blog. Reason without faith leads only to chaos and depression as a person feels increasingly pointless. On the other side we see people of faith that reject everything else who are often times very happy but along with this are also often times misguided, and on top of this they are often misguided in the one thing they hold most dear, their faith.

Now to make myself clear, when I say that they rely on faith alone, I am not talking of salvation. As a Christian and a Lutheran I firmly believe in the three sola's, sola scriptura, sola fide, and sola gratia. Which means I believe in Faith Alone for salvation, that is Faith in Jesus Christ that has been worked in us by the Holy Spirit. Instead, what I am referring to here are those who refuse to see how reason can help us to understand the scriptures rather than destroy it.

These are the two extremes as we come to the corner of faith and reason. Those who reject faith fail to see that faith is the very thing that makes their position possible which seems like a paradox, and in a way it is. At the very core of science is theory, and even beyond, things that cannot be proven at least not now, we simply do not have the tools, and in some cases maybe ever. These things end up becoming accepted and believed based on faith. On the other hand, those who rely on their faith and reject reason fail to realize that reason is in most of their activities and even in how they understand the Bible to begin with. In order to read you must be literate, you must understand the logic of words and writing, to understand speech you must be able to understand inflection, words...etc. Everything they know relies to some capacity on logic and reason. The Corner of Faith and Reason, both are needed, God created us to think, He created us to have reason, and through the Holy Spirit He creates faith, the right faith within us, so let us start the conversation where it should be, at the corner.