christian living on Rationality

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propos...

Every one of our sinful actions has a suicidal power on the faculties that put that action forth. When you sin with the mind, that sin shrivels the rationality. When you sin with the heart or the emot...

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

The only reason for doing the right thing is that it is the right thing to do; all other reasons are reasons for doing something else.

The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words ri...

You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.

Everything we do proceeds from a decision of will, involves our intelligence and perception, leads to emotional reactions or experiences, is approved or disapproved by the conscience, and is registere...

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

One needs to be right before getting righteous.

"Righteousness," within the lawcourt setting-and this is something that no good Lutheran or Reformed theologian ought ever to object to-denotes the status that someone has when the court has...

There is a television show that has one of those beginnings that stick with you long after you’ve seen it. And it starts like this…A man, dressed like a cowboy enters an ultra sleek Miami club, lookin...

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

Biblically, the word righteous means approved by God. It’s something God judges as good or right. To be self-righteous, then, simply means we’ve met that standard in our own eyes. As we’ll see, this i...

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting point to go on into a living relationship - and not as ends in themselves.

Discernment is an increasing capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and activity of God—both in the ordinary moments of our lives and in the decisions we face.

Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason.

Those who are Biblically righteous are “right with God and therefore committed to putting right all other relationships in life.

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prin...

The basic human drive is the desire for the Good.

Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.

But to deviate from the truth for the sake of some prospect of hope of our own can never be wise, however slight that deviation may be. It is not our judgement of the situation which can show us what ...

If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither.

[T]here is no goodness that is not bodily and realistic and local.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue h...

Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather it is telling the difference between right and almost right.

The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.

Many people live righteously for selfish or misguided reasons. If you are striving to please God, examine your motives today.

Nothing makes one so dizzy as human reasoning, which sees everything from an earthly point of view, and does not allow illumination from above. Earthly reasoning is covered with mud. Therefore, we hav...