“And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away.” – 1 Corinthians 2:4–6
I was looking at the readings for the four Sundays before lent. I noticed that a theme (at least in the epistle lessons) was wisdom. Paul (and Peter in the reading for the transfiguration) do not talk about wisdom as a purely good thing. A distinction is made between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man. As you would expect, God’s wisdom is superior to man’s wisdom. As Christians, this is as it should be. We expect and want God to be wiser than we are. But it also might cause us to wonder where this line is between God’s wisdom and man’s. We want to be using the right kind of wisdom and we are ourselves, man, not God. I intend to preach on this theme in the Sundays before lent. Some of the topics I aim to explore are what it means to have faith as a foundation or to have reason as a foundation for your salvation. (Jan. 25) I plan to consider where we put our hope. Are we confident about the future because we have determined that Christianity is the most plausible explanation of the world or is our hope placed in God to save us no matter how implausible that may be (and are these two views mutually exclusive)? (Feb.1) I plan to consider what this means for us practically. How does it change what we do when we are running on the wisdom of God versus the wisdom of man? (Feb. 8) And finally I plan to look at the hope the Christian has for the future. As Jesus comes down from the mount of transfiguration and turns His face to the cross, where do we turn our face when our own cleverly devised plans fall through? (Feb. 15)
Most of these questions are parts of the larger question of ‘what does reason have to do with faith?’ This question was famously asked by the church father Tertullian about 200 years after Christ. He put it, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” (Athens, in this case, was a reference to philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Plato.) The church father Augustine, about 350 years after Christ, would conclude that one has “faith that seeks understanding.” By this he meant that reason helps the Christian to understand their faith. Luther, 1500 years after Christ, would put in his explanation to the 1st Article of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that he has given me my… reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.” Luther’s position here is that reason is a tool given to us by God, like our senses, that helps us to understand His creation.
In our culture today it seems that a lot of importance is placed on reason. The Christian understands that faith is important when it comes to God and our salvation. Yet it is not always clear where reason comes in. Some Christians have concluded that Christianity is almost exclusively built upon reason, going so far as to simply call it a philosophy. Some go the other way concluding that Christianity is built entirely upon faith and has no use at all for reason. However, the history of Christianity and, more importantly, the Scriptures are a bit more nuanced. When it comes to salvation faith is clearly most important. But reason or wisdom is not absent from God or from man. God has given us reason as a gift; a tool. It is worth thinking about how much we value this tool and how it can serve us as Christians, as members of the Body of Christ who have faith in Jesus for salvation.
Pastor Mehl