Faith and "Reason"

"Too often when [Christians] weary of . . . censorship, they rebound with the insistence that 'faith' (which may spring from and depend upon tradition and authority about the real and the good) be granted a place next to 'reason.' Nothing I say here should be understood to deny the wisdom of the hallowed alliance of faith and reason. But in the current climate, reliance on that formula risks conceding what need not and should not be conceded. Another procedure is called for. The citadel called “reason” must be attacked and shown to be false. In recommending this procedure, my aim is not to court either nonsense or nihilism. Christians must be realists--critical realists-- both as to what has been created and revealed, and as to the respective places of good and evil. What must be corrected, if the Christian believer is to return from exile on terms he or she can live by, is the Enlightenment's unrealistic fallback position, according to which in the human head--or pineal gland?--there exist two black boxes, one for faith and the other for reason, the two of them jointly exhaustive of human access to the real and the good-- with faith fit for private life and simple people, and “reason” for public life and law faculty.

What Christians must insist upon, albeit in their differing dialects and accents, is that each of us rational humans goes out from her or his interiority to embrace the real and the good, across the whole spectrum of human living and hope, through an intelligence (the term I prefer to 'reason' because it refuses to carry the Enlightenment's freight) that performatively combines and commingles elements of (what later get labeled) 'faith' and 'reason.'"

-Patrick Brennan, Book Review, 16 Journal of Law and Religion 667 (2001).