Imperishable Inheritance

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling. But fancy is like, though contrary to, feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between contraries. One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no rule." (273-4)

This is one of my favorite excerpts from Blaise Pascal's Pensees. I find myself all to often framing my spirituality in terms of reason and rational thought. When I first found this quote I realized how short-sighted that perspective is, but I also realized that a spirituality focused on internal feelings is also incorrect. There must be a balance between rationality and feeling in our relationship with God.

He makes a good point that if we focus, much to our detriment, on only a rational approach to our faith then it will be void of a mysterious and supernatural element that is so important in our faith. God is presented in his word as having knowledge that far surpasses our own (Psa 139), and Paul says in a doxology: "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!" (Rom 11:33). Clearly, God cannot be constrained to our rational processes.

On the other hand we must not subscribe our religion to a life without thought and rational contemplation. We are made in the image of God with the intent purpose of having a relationship and understanding of the living God. The very fact that we are made with the communicable attributes of God such as love, having a will, and even reasoning itself so that we might understand who God is. The very revelation of Jesus in history is a testament to the fact that God wants us to understand who he is. God said to Isaiah, "'Come now, and let us reason together,' Says the LORD, 'Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool'" (Isa 1:18), and the Christians in Berea used their reason to examine the Scriptures to see if what Paul was preaching was true (Acts 17:11).

Blaise clearly says that we must have an absolute source of truth or else we will be relegated to an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings without knowing what is true. God has not left us alone in this regard! Let us examine the Scriptures with persistence to know the living God, but let us not reduce God to our own fabrications and consign him to exist in our own perception of who he is.