Reason to Believe

As we see in the gospel passage today, our Lord has the power to work what seems impossible, even to raise the dead. It is a testimony to faith that we believe the same power exists in our time and still works seemingly impossible things. However, regardless of how miraculous the works of God seem, and indeed they are miracles, it is important that we always seek to understand them in the plausible light of reason, though not to remove from them the essence of the miraculous. Never are the works of God such as to contradict reason. The works of the Lord, to the contrary, shed light on the ability of God to enlighten the hearts and minds of human beings.

It is important to grasp that so long as we insist upon seeing God in isolation of human existence and daily human life, the things of God will appear as contradictory to reason. So long as we place God in a static, non-reciprocal relationship with humanity we will rob ourselves of the experience of the Holy within humanity.

If the sciences have become divorced from God in our times, it is because we have failed to adequately describe the relationship between humankind and the Almighty as a dynamic and living aspect of life truly accessible to us in such a way that the truth of God does not fall within the realm of the improbable or merely contrived. If entire continents that were once the seat of Christianity have fallen into disbelief, it becomes important to ask exactly where theology has failed in terms of presenting God as a reality on par with, though qualitatively differing from, the realities of the sciences.

Certainly this topic deserves more than I able to give it in a brief blog post, but the Holy Spirit is speaking to us. It is our faith—Christianity—the belief in the one true God and Jesus Christ his Son, which still holds the key and that must hold the answer to transforming the face of the earth. I for one believe that the reign of Christ will never end. However, a certain duty lies with us—it is an evangelical duty; that is, one in which the burden is ours to take the message of the living reality of God to the world. We make God accessible to the world by living the reality that God is. We must remember that we are Christ’s body: we are members of God to the world.

In Christ, the living rational principle of the universe—that which makes intelligibility, language, and sentience possible at all—became human. We must accept that God's revelation within humanity was not an isolated incident. God is still in humankind working, thus the Apostle instructs us to strive for spiritual gifts. We are to seek the gifts of the Spirit by which we can make true knowledge of God accessible to the world. May he give us the wisdom both to communicate his reality and to understand and recognize that reality as being not uncommon among us.

Comments

[Anonymous]

Amen. Sometimes it seems that the world of Christianity is going backwards via neopaganism, egoistic hedonism.. earlier peoples bowed before a golden calf, etc, but how far have we not come, if we fall prostrate before a SUV, or worse, before the one who kills others to fuel that SUV?

We need Eucaristic Renewal, as you said in another post.