It will be well, now, to return to the insistence of Christianity on the intelligibility of its world-view. The typical Christian approach was not Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdam, with its implication that revelational theism makes impossible all metaphysical and scientific knowledge. Confessedly based on revelation, Christianity delivers one from the need of a philosophy, as far as the interests of salvation are concerned, but, in that very deliverance, there is an implicit incarnational philosophy. Religious faith does not demand the cessation of reason, but lifts reason beyond the confinements of an intellect limited by finitude and darkened by sin. Christianity strenuously insisted on the rationality of its position; eternity would reveal the subrationality of any other view. Not only did the Christian message possess an intrinsic superiority in dissolving the perplexities of human experience, but, in the view of its proponents, it cast an immense light upon the persistent problems of philosophy. Christianity offered a solution to enigmas which had baffled Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the greatest minds in classic philosophy; it solved not only the religious problem, which Greek and Roman thought were impotent to solve but, in doing so, offered a thought structure which early Christians were convinced had resident, within itself, a self-consistent resolution of any problem that any philosopher – including later thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, James, or Dewey – might raise.
This confidence, of course, was born of the Scriptures. Rationality permeated the whole revelational view; at the beginning was “the Word,” at its center, the “Word became flesh.” So Christian apologists fearlessly solicited the reason. In fact, against that naturalistic tradition in philosophy which regarded man as only an animal, however much more subtle and complex, the Judaistic-Christian tradition was a constant protest; man’s animality unquestionably linked him to the natural order, but his rationality linked him to God. To be created in the divine image was, in part, to share in the divine rationality, thus being able to think God’s thoughts after Him. The meaning which the Christian found in the universe was not one imposed by man upon his environment; it was an insight into the divine plan and purpose in which all things have their source, support, and end. Hence, the most representative Christian thinkers, through the whole sweep of church history, were profoundly convinced of the intrinsic rationality of the Christian theistic world-life outlook.
From: Remaking the Modern Mind by Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1946), pp. 217-218.
Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry (1913-2003) was a member of the founding faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California (1947-1957) and founding editor of Christianity Today magazine (1956-1968). His magnum opus is God, Revelation, and Authority 6 volumes (Waco: Word Books, 1976-1983).
