Reason and Revelation: a Virtuous Cycle?
One might be pardoned to think the science vs. religion, or better, reason vs. revelation controversy is purely a modern one. Indeed, in the European Enlightenment, much emphasis came to be placed on our faculties of reason, on our ability to discover truth ourselves. Religion came increasingly to be seen as something irrational, even anti-rational, and having to make place for more rational pursuits in our quest for truth.
Perhaps in contrast to our perception though, the debate is as old as time (so to speak). In the second century AD, we find a Christian and a Greek philosopher debating the same issue. The parallels with our modern times are interesting: in the West, the debate is often played out between Christians and non-religious humanists who come out of philosophical streams deeply inspired by Greek philosophy.
According to the Christian, called Justin Martyr, Christianity is divine, while philosophy is human. Thus, philosophy is to be judged and sifted by Christian revelation, not the other way around. His stance towards Greek philosophy was very positive nonetheless, and he claimed that the highest truths of philosophy were almost identical with those of Christianity.
Justin’s contemporary Celsus was a Greek philosopher and an opponent of Christianity. He caricatured Christianity as being completely irrational (“Do not ask questions, only believe”) and saw an unbridgeable gulf between Greek philosophy and Christianity. Although he attacked a straw-man, the question he posed to Christians was nonetheless a poignant one:
They claim that divine revelation is validated as such by its transcendence of common reason; but there are many rival claimants to revelation — if we may not judge their claims by reason, are we to throw dice to discover which is right?
So which is to judge which? Does revelation trump reason, or should it be the other way around?
Related to the distinction between reason and revelation is the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Common reasoning goes like this: the more we can explain something using reason, the more it belongs to the natural world, and the less revelation, the less the supernatural is needed as an explanation, until finally it is obsolete. God only lives in the gaps of our understanding so to say.
Supposedly, before we knew what lightning was, we thought that it came from God, that it was supernatural. When we discovered how lightning works, we transferred it to the natural domain, and we no longer needed God to explain lightning.
Similarly with the Bible. Today, through historical, textual, archaeological and cultural research, we know much more about how the texts of the Bible arose, how editors and scribes adapted, compiled and edited texts they had received from generations past, how these texts are in some ways similar to those of the peoples around the ancient nation of Israel, etc.
Now that we can explain to a much greater extent how the Bible arose, we are then inclined to draw the conclusion that it is now firmly part of the natural category, and that we can forget about the idea of there being special revelation in the Bible, of God being involved in its making.
But this kind of reasoning depends on the arguably false dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. It betrays a lack of imagination, an inability to see how man and God, natural and supernatural, reason and revelation might interpenetrate and cooperate.
I suggest that instead of seeing revelation and reason as opposing forces, we should attempt to understand them as complementary, as mutually informing. When we are presented with a claim to revelation in the form of scripture, a proclamation, or an experience, we will inevitably process and interpret it by means of reason. We cannot pretend that religious texts or experiences stand alone and that our ‘plain reading’ of the text gives us the true meaning, so our interpretation should be humble and open-minded. At the same time, we must allow the revelation we receive, as honestly understood through reason, to critique that reason in turn.
As an example, research into the historical Jesus has surfaced a Jesus who was much more political, “social” and Jewish than most of Christianity had come to think of him. This achievement of reason informs the revelation we have of Jesus, that is, it fills it out (or rather, it restores it). At the same time, the revelation of Jesus that we see in the scriptures critiques the academic tendency of some to reduce Jesus to only being a wise teacher or political activist, and to discard the more “supernatural” elements in the accounts of his life.
If we approach reason and revelation this way, the hope is that they can offer constructive critiques to each other, and that we can achieve a virtuous cycle that elevates both our reason and (our understanding of) revelation, our science and religion, closer and closer to truth.
