Tenchi
Member
Isaiah 1:18
18 "Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD...
Romans 7:25
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God...
More and more, I'm encountering Christians who don't know how to think well. This shows up particularly in their often very strange - and frequently totally false - notions about God's truth. Typically, these poorly-reasoned believers employ a common set of logical fallacies: non sequiturs (Latin for "does not follow"), appeals to the majority, appeals to authority, poisoning the well, ad hominem (Latin for "to the man"), Strawman arguments, mistaking mere assertion for explanation and justification, ad hoc reasoning, and moving the goalposts. When they try to interpret Scripture, their fallacious thinking leads them to ignore context, to assume that the root meaning of a word is always the intended meaning of it, to eisegete rather than exegete, to make leaps in reasoning about God's truth that don't follow from their premises, and to assume that the more arcane and unintelligble their ideas, the more spiritual they are. As you might expect, the ideas derived from this morass of deeply-specious reasoning is both astonishing and very disturbing! 18 "Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD...
Romans 7:25
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God...
Do you know what the Law of Non-Contradiction is? How about the Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals? Do you know what Modus Tollens and Modus Ponens are? Have you ever heard of a syllogism? All of these things are fundamental to basic reasoning, though fewer and fewer Christians know anything about them. As Christians grow increasingly oblivious to basic principles and rules of thinking, they are becoming much more vulnerable to the specious reasoning of false teachers who encourage their victims to see reason and logic as contrary to spiritual understanding. I've actually come across believers who believe that God speaks to them on a "spirit-level" that circumvents their mind, their faculty of reason, completely. Nonsense. Total nonsense. And extremely dangerous, too.
God has given us minds that are capable of reason and logic, and the laws of logic and principles of reason by which to do both. Reason and Logic, then, are not enemies of spiritual Truth but necessary allies of it. Our minds are essential to our understanding, our comprehension - spiritual or otherwise - and can't ever be truly circumvented in coming to any conclusion about anything. God acknowledges this in His word:
Matthew 22:36-38
36 "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
37 And He said to him, " 'YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.'
38 "This is the great and foremost commandment.
Acts 17:11
11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
Romans 8:6
6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
Romans 12:2
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
1 Corinthians 1:10
10 Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.
1 Corinthians 2:16
16 For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 14:14-19
14 For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.
15 What is the outcome then? I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also; I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the mind also.
16 Otherwise if you bless in the spirit only, how will the one who fills the place of the ungifted say the "Amen" at your giving of thanks, since he does not know what you are saying?
17 For you are giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not edified.
18 I thank God, I speak in tongues more than you all;
19 however, in the church I desire to speak five words with my mind so that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue.
Philippians 2:5
5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
And so on.
There are those who respond to all of this with statements like, "The life of faith is beyond reason!" Or, "The things of God are spiritually discerned!" by which they mean they don't have to subject their ideas about the Christian faith to any external, objective standard or scrutiny, or marshal anything like a well-reasoned basis for their beliefs and practices. So long as their thinking makes sense to them, nothing else matters. This is, of course, just the relativistic, post-modern currents of worldly philosophy revealing themselves in Christian thinking, one of the basic premises of which is that objective, absolute Truth cannot be known, if it actually exists at all. There is only "my truth" and "your truth," not The Truth. With this subjective, worldly conception of Truth in hand, Christians feel perfectly justified in drawing from God's word whatever "truth" suits them - and they do, concocting ideas about the contents of the Bible that are sometimes directly opposite to what it actually says.
The end of this road of illogic and bad reasoning is disaster. Just as one cannot reason badly in the physical realm without dire consequence, one cannot do so in the spiritual with impunity, either. But in the case of the former, the consequences are only temporal in effect, while in the latter, they are eternal. It is one thing to fail to properly think through a course of action and break a bone, or crash one's car, or set one's cat on fire; it is quite another to get wrong God's everlasting, divine Truth that is at the core of all Reality and determines our eternal destiny.
Proverbs 16:25
25 There is a way which seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.
