PARK: THE DEBATE In our summer issue, Duncan Park urged SoF to rethink its hostility to Evangelical Christianity and enjoy what he called “religion in the mode of passion: the evangelical experience”. The concept of “a reasonable faith”, he wrote, “is nonsense: you might as well talk about a reasonable orgasm”. Replying in the same issue, David Boulton wrote: “Where reason sleeps, monsters breed... To write off reason is to choose to be unreasonable: to denigrate the rational is to embrace the irrational... Head and heart, reason and passion, are not mutually exclusive.” Below, PHILIP KNIGHT and ANNE PADLEY [page 24] join the fray.
Reason and Faith The Cherry-Cake Option here is much in Duncan Park’s "Tani “Love in an Evangelical Climate” with which I wholly concur but I suspect that he presents evangelicals more as he would like them to be than how, in fact, they actually are. David Boulton’s response, “Where Reason Sleeps, Monsters Breed” is pertinent on this point. However, I disagree with the apparent assumption, shared by both writers, that a reasonable faith must mean a rational faith.
By “rational” I mean a quality attributed to our mental or intellectual capacities that formulates principles by which we must decide between various human options. By a “rational faith” I mean a faith that is directed by the dictates of these mental principles.
Duncan Park rejects the idea of “a reasonable faith” because he associates “reason” with the rational proofs and arguments that these principles favour. Faith, he argues, cannot be described as reasonable because it cannot be accounted for in terms of these principles. In relation to these principles, Duncan tells us, faith appears “daft”. “It cannot be proved, improved or disproved by argument”.
Religious faith is not a branch of rational philosophy.
I agree with him. A Mr. Spock figure would have no cause to be religious and no passion to understand “The distinction between head and heart, intellect and passion, reason and faith has created an interminable problematic throughout Christian history”. it. Religion is rather, as William James said, centred in our “passional nature”. My salvation, damnation or total indifference are matters for faith and non-faith, not matters for logic or rational argument. Faith cannot, by its nature, be decided on intellectual grounds.
However, against Duncan Park, this need not imply that particular expressions of religious faith are inappropriately described as reasonable. I shall explain why in a moment.
David Boulton also equates “reasonable” with rational. He identifies reasoning with a faculty that, among other things, is able “to choose between faith in this and faith in that”.
We know we have done _ something reasonable when we know “we have exercised our minds”. For David, reason is mental. It exists in our heads and is head of our passions.
Without its guiding principles a passionate faith is blind and dangerous.
David Boulton also refers to “the widening rift over the last two centuries between faith and reason”. This rift is indeed wide. In fact, both dispositions have fallen off opposite ends of the table. The decline of traditional religious faith is well known to us all, but perhaps less well known is the total collapse of Enlightenment faith in reason. Few philosophers today would be prepared to follow Descartes or Kant in a quest to define and explicate the principles that are supposed to guide the rational mind through the labyrinth of our passional choices. In fact, many philosophers have closed the book on a realist philosophy of mind. The head contains the brain and is as organic and as passional as the heart. It does not contain ready-made universal rational principles that are designed to keep our passions in check and on the right path.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as thinking but it is to say that thinking is not on one side of the metaphorical distinction between head and heart which David seems happy to continue to promote.
Here we come to my main point: we need to drop this metaphorical distinction because it is responsible for the confusion of “reasonable” with “rational”!
The distinction between head and heart, intellect and passion, reason and faith has created an interminable problematic throughout Christian history. Do we follow Origen or Tertullian, St. Thomas Aquinas or St.
Francis of Assisi, the scholastic or the mystic, Descartes or Pascal, Hegel or Kierkegaard, Royce or James, David Jenkins or Billy Graham? Should religion lead with the head or the heart?
Traditionally there have been two answers to these questions. One answer is the either/or option in which we choose one, either head or heart, and stick by it, I suspect that Duncan prefers this option. The other answer is the both/and option in which we try for a synthesis.
David’s closing paragraph suggests that he prefers this alternative.
However, there is a third option.
This third option suggests that we create a new distinction. It is best explained if we imagine a sponge cake topped with eight evenly spaced cherries set in soft white icing around its circumference. If we _ initially intend to cut the cake once, down the middle, each half will have four cherries. However, if we turn the cake through 90° and then cut the cake in half the cherries that would have been on opposite halves of the cake, had we cut it where we initially intended, would now find themselves on the same half.
William James recommended that whenever we encounter an interminable distinction leading to interminable disputes we should simply make a new distinction. That is, we should cut the cake, so to speak, at 90°. Former foes will now see themselves as allies and former allies will become foes. If the new distinction is successful it will be because we now see ourselves, under the new distinction, with more allies and less foes.
Unlike our religious either/or and our religious both/and options, this third option ceases to cut the religious cake down the line marked out by the old realist philosophy of mind that separates head from heart, what we might term the rational/irrational line. Instead, this third option will cut it at 90° down what we might term the reasonable/unreasonable line. This line separates off the intolerant from the tolerant on both sides of the old distinction: the fanatic and fundamentalist from the compassionate and the broad-minded; the exclusivist from the pluralist; the obliterator of otherness from the sympathiser with otherness; the authoritarian from the latitudinarian. Now the champions of the closed systems of the head are on the same side as the champions of the heart’s unfettered emotionalism, while the tolerant open-minded and the tolerant open-hearted can celebrate together, on the same side, their shared “reasonable faith”. Their reasonable faith is not a synthesis of passion and reason but a mutual acceptance of difference. It is not marked by a continual issue of vetoes against each other but a willingness to learn from each other. No emotional monsters here, no intellectual thugs either; such creatures are on the far side of our new distinction. On its near side faith and reason go hand-in-hand.
As with all distinctions, perhaps we should not just regard this new one as a distinction between classes of people but between qualities displayed in us all. Each of us would then have the responsibility to find ourselves more on the tolerant and less on the intolerant side of this new distinction. If we take this responsibility seriously we can indeed claim that ours is a reasonable faith.
Philip Knight is a teacher of religious education and lives in Canterbury.