I do agree with you when you say our lives should be lived with a combination of logic and emotion… but only with the correct application. Logic is logic and emotion is emotion. When combined they can have four out comes 1) It’s true but it is necessarily incorrect- An example would be the ancient age of the earth to a Young Earth believer. 2) It’s true and its necessarily correct – An example would be the Bible was written by many people. 3) It’s false but is necessarily correct – An example would be 2 of every animal on earth could have fit in the arc. 4) It’s false and necessarily incorrect – An example would be, as often told, a man could live inside of a whale (the necessarily incorrect is that the whale was described as a “big fish”). Indecently, these outcomes came to me as I’m typing this letter… thanks for making me think through this! I’m usually a bit of a scatter brain… taking information in and trying to make heads or tails of it.

Now you might say “but you are missing the key ingredient” – faith. True enough. However, the illogical becomes logical and the emotional becomes irrelevant when applied through faith. Examples might be a believing donkey can talk is only possible through faith… the illogical becomes a logical necessity. Another example might be God ordering the Israelites to slaughter all the Midianites and take only the virgins. Emotionally, this is irrelevant through faith. In your letter you wrote “My God is big enough to blend emotions as well as logic to always do the right thing”. Forgive me, but killing innocent men, woman and children is emotionally appalling and logically sociopathic… among other things. Both, the illogical and the irrelevant lend no gratitude to truth and in this case, is dangerous and a violation of common morality.

I hope you don’t mind my posting this. It is something to which I have a lot of strong convictions… and have yet to hear a strong argument against. For me it comes down to freedom…logical and emotional. To be obligated, commanded really, to interpret logic and emotion through a pre-determined view is an unfortunate position to be in. In every case I have ever read, had a discussion about, or listened to; the outcome is the same – the faithful, who unfortunately have the burden of positioning from faith when using logic and emotion to support their believe system; will ultimately end up in God in the gaps or logic by necessity.

There is a saying… “Don’t miss heaven by a foot; the distance from your heart to your head”. I suppose the saying could be said in another way “To get to heaven, you MUST suspend logic and discount emotion”. Pretty tough row for the common Joe.

That was an accidental syllogism. Nevertheless, the statement is historically verifiable. Logic/rationality was not promoted to a supreme empistemological resource until the enlightment.

BTW, I am trying to suggest that we should abandon logic/rationality. But I do not believe logic/rationality is any more reliable than experience, tradition, emotion, etc…for all of these epistemic resources are employed through the lenses of our fallible minds. I believe all of these resources are valuable along with a few others, especially to include the Christian community.

Thanks for the continued dialogue.

Grace and peace,

Rex

“Logic and rationality as it seems to be used in this discussion is a product of enlightment epistemology, therefore we cannot claim it is essential to analyzing God’s revelation because God’s revelation existed prior to the enlightment era.”

That sentence is a logical argument consisting of a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion.

John

Logic and rationality as it seems to be used in this discussion is a product of enlightment epistemology, therefore we cannot claim it is essential to analyzing God’s revelation because God’s revelation existed prior to the enlightment era. Second, whatever logic/rationality we employ (and we must employ) does not operate apart from our flesh. That is to say, that we are human and therefore our logic/rationality is never infallible. It was completely incomprehensible to the majority of first century Jews that God was operative in Jesus of Nazzareth. Likewise, it was also incomprehensible to most first century Gentiles that a god (whom we know as The God) would incarnate and then be crucified and resurrected. If we were to employ logic/rationality as we know it from the common mind-set of first century Jews and Gentiles, we just may end up denying the redemptive work of God in Jesus Christ. Let’s remember, that it was experience not logic – the experience of witnessing the Holy Spirit come on Pentecost, the experience of Saul being confronted by Christ on that road to Damascus, the experience of seeing the Holy Spirit indwell the believers of Cornelius’s household, etc… – that illuminated what the scriptures had revealed concerning God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ to both Jew and Gentile.

I have had similar discussions like this concerning the idea of wisdom. I served in a church where the elders were exchanging God’s wisdom for conventional/secular wisdom. The two wisdoms are drastically different. That fatal mistake led them to de-power the gospel by their exclusion of the homeless and people of minority ethnicity. Their use of logic and conventional wisdom coupled with their fear of people different from them allowed them to twist the scriptures in a way that justified the mistreatment of the poor and racism in the church.

Grace and peace,

Rex

1. Righteousness is impossible without rational behavior. That was the point of my first post. An irrational God is, by definition, an unrighteous God. If God’s speech or actions are ever unsound or invalid (hence, irrational), then He is not God. Logic does not transcend God; rather, He is the standard of truth, and as such the “rules of logic” conform to Him.

2. Logic does not discover truth, logic is merely a tool of analysis that can be used to analyze revelation and discern error. When God invites us to, “test all things, hold fast that which is good,” is He not asking us to use logic to analyze what is revealed to “prove” or “test” whether it is true? How else would one analyze God’s revelation today apart from the use of logic? This does NOT mean that the Bible is a lifeless, emotionless book. What is means is that the Bible is a consistently true book, and such can be proved.

Perhaps an interesting study for all concerned with this topic would be: what tools of analysis has God given to us, that we may truly know Him? I would submit that personal experience is NOT a tool of analysis… it is a form of revelation.

You say that, “God has blended emotions with perfect reasoning.”

Are you saying that God sometimes sets aside His perfect reasoning and instead acts irrationally as a result of emotion, or are you arguing that God makes perfectly reasonable choices that also happen to be emotional choices?

Said another way, can a human being trust God to always act rationally, even when His actions are instigated by, say, anger or love?

Incidentally, there is a world of difference between the statement that “God is a God of logic only,” and the statement that, “God always acts rationally; that is, consistent with the rules of logic.” I honestly don’t know of ANY brethren who would conscientiously try to defend the first statement with its implications (there may be some, but I have not found them), but I know quite a few who have staked their eternal destiny on the implications of the second. What do you think?