A Heart in the Door

Tozer was an intellectual, but he parted company with the modern intelligentsia over the limits of reason. Since the Enlightenment, the dominant thinkers have elevated man and his reason to the loftiest of pinnacles. The logical extreme of Enlightenment thinking declared that truth can only be perceived through reason. And concomitantly there are no limits to where man can go through the pursuit of reason - especially if the methodology is “scientific.” Tozer granted that we can learn much from reason. But knowledge of God and the human spirit and the soul can be grasped only through the Holy Spirit. In short, some truth can be grasped rationally and naturally but much truth can only be discovered and understood supernaturally through God’s Spirit and what He chooses to reveal. Tozer Put a fine point on his theory of the validity of knowledge this way: “I am not anti-reason. I’m not against human reason. I am just telling you it’s a mighty limited tool to work with. [God] is above human reason and He is above human science. The application of reason to matter, natural law, that’s science and that’s all science is.

Above all Plato and Aristotle share a commitment to reason as critical to our moral, political, and spiritual lives and to reason as nourishing us in our innate desire to understand. “All human beings,” Aristotle remarks at the opening of the Metaphysics, “desire to understand.” This coupling of the striving of desire with the goal of seeing things as they truly are is what is perhaps most characteristic of the Greek philosophers we have here discussed. Philosophy is understood by both as one of the fundamental modalities of the desire to understand.

No domain can have a monopoly on reason, except via abuse… I am a rationalist in most of my life - like everyone! But I am not a rationalist if reason is defined as an ingredient only found in science. This restrictive definition is not reasonable.

As they walked afterwards back up the cold lanes to Hampstead, Keats and Dilke had a ‘disquisition’ in which we might conjecture Keats touched on habeas corpus, wonder, uncertainty and fear; Shakespeare and gusto; the ‘feel of not to feel’… All of these topics dovetailed with Hunt’s idea that imagination was a ‘passive capacity’. As Keats picks up the story in his letter to his brothers: ‘at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean the Negative Capabiliity, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’

But according to the Bible no one is neutral in the process. We are all by nature rebels against God and we do not want to submit. The Bible itself indicates that the heart of the difficulty is not in the alleged doubtful character of the evidence presented in the Bible (the evidence for the resurrection of Christ is particularly pertinent), but in the doubtful or rather sinful character of us who read it. Moreover, our sinfulness infects our reasoning, so that we come to the evidence with corrupted standards for judging it. Even if the Bible is genuine, we want to judge it rather than submit to God. We want to remain in charge of our life (autonomy), including the life of reasoning. Our desire for autonomy, and the conception of reasoning that goes with it, need changing.

Indeed, it’s a mistake even to think of reason as neutral, in the sense of being independent of any philosophical or religious commitments. As we saw in chapter 1, all systems of thought begin with some basic premise-some ultimate principle that is regarded as self-existing or divine. Reason is merely the human capacity to reason from those starting premises.

When reason fails, the devil helps!

The naive concept of faith as blind assent arose from an equally naive and philosophically disreputable theory of knowledge, according to which one knows a thing best by detaching oneself from its use and setting aside personal biases in order to form an idea that corresponds to the thing. The correspondence theory of truth necessarily regards particular “interested” modes of engagement—for example, desire—as inimical to knowledge. Though this theory of knowledge as detached reflection appeals to our cultural prejudices, formed as they are by an unreflective scientism, it is a relatively modern notion that has been thoroughly dismantled by the phenomenological tradition. Knowledge depends on and is conditioned by both our historical-cultural situation and in the context of certain practices. (Of course, this is only novel for the secular philosophical tradition: the historical contingency of knowledge has been recognized in the theological tradition since at least St. Irenaeus, and St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the importance of bodily practice in his virtue theory.)

If we were to unchain God from the artificial strictures of preconceived rationality that reduce him to an object that either can be known and grasped like other objects or, alternatively, is completely unknowable, and if we were to allow reason to find its conditions in this unchaining, we would have to find ourselves believing in God by virtue of the compelling force of revelation’s own rationality, its capacity to illumine the meaningfulness of existence.

And if God is God, this rationality would emerge out of the faith by which one places their entire existence at God’s disposal in an attitude of complete surrender and total trust in the unconditional goodness of such a posture, taking the orientation of one’s life from this absolute starting point.

The Hebrew Bible calls this conception of truth emeth - that which is solid, firm, reliable and can be trusted with all one’s weight. Such a religious rationality is wild and daring, but it is no monster. Perhaps it is the paragon of sanity itself. What but an ultimate divine word is capable of bearing the immeasurable weight that we sense our lives to bear and of which we find time and again nothing less is worthy? What else can provide the ultimate horizon of intelligibility within which the world and our humanity find the satisfaction of truth worth living?

…we may say in summary that [the chief mark and element of insanity] is reason used without root, reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper first principles goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.