The following is a post I wrote ten years ago that has been buried on a tumblr account I once had. I thought I would repost it here (there are some grammatical errors present, but I’m too lazy to fix them).

Here is a short reflection on what I would like to call Theological Rationalism. 

In order to reflect upon what it means to be rationalistic; it is best to, at the outset, recognize that in my usage there is a difference between being a rationalist and being rational. The former smacks of an anthropology that is grounded in an intellectualism, meaning that a person or human being can be reduced down to their intellect or mind as their defining feature for what it means to be human (so an essentialism of the mind and its constituent properties)–what we might (and do) find in someone like Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology or even more pointedly in Rene Descartes’ epistemological (ontological) project of cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). This is the kind of anthropology that funds what it is to be a rationalist. I see this as distinct from being rational in that being ‘rational’ simply means that someone is reasonable (by whatever standards that might presuppose) in the way they think, communicate, and act; but being rational does not mean that someone’s ‘being’ can be reduced to their mind and its capacity to actively assign meaning to reality in an essential fashion.

With this distinction in mind, I would like to apply what it means to be a rationalist to theological practice and activity. For me in my experience as a Christian person, when rationalism is applied, as it is, in my North American Christian (and Protestant) context, is that we end up with a form of Christian Fundamentalism. I think the most stalwart and able representative of this kind of theological rationalism might be someone like Carl Henry. Although Henry was actually more informed and aware of his theological surroundings and history than who I really have in mind with this post.

In this post, I am thinking more of the kind of Christian I am most familiar with at a popular level. What happens for the North American Christian, often, is that all of their Christian identity can be reduced to one or two overarching totalizing meta-narrative or stories through which they compress and seek to interpret all else. In this way, they feel a sense of control, indeed even power over the circumstances of their life, and in particular, over their relation to God. The key to what I am getting at (without getting into some concrete examples) is to recognize that these kinds of theological rationalists have been trained and conditioned to think in this way; in other words, it is not that they are intentionally seeking to control their relation to God (although they are sometimes), it is that they have been sold a bill of goods that reduces God and his acts to their preconceived theological framework, which is based upon their own active intellect’s which believes that all of reality can be compressed therein. The emphasis then is placed upon their minds, and their capacity to provide propositional explanation for God, and all of the theological related to him.

The slavery enters into this situation at a very basic level; these theological rationalists believe that they are worshipping God, but who they are really worshipping is a construal of God and his acts which they have constructed and conjured up in a way wherein their understanding of God becomes the essential basis wherein God is assigned his being/person. The terrible reality of this is that this person is stuck in a vicious circle; because they might realize (at some point) that they are not living in a true refreshing kind of freedom, and so they desperately look to God for help. But this is the paradoxical problem, when they look to God, they have already denuded God of any Lordly and contradictory and transformative force in their lives, because they have captured God by the power of their own minds; they have made God contingent upon their capacity to explain God in the terms that their minds (and the history of ideas this associated with) have actively constructed, and all this in the name of God in Christ.

The only escape from this, from the absolutized subjectivity is to start fresh. It is, as Thomas Torrance might say, to engage in a dialectic and process of repentant thinking. It is to repudiate any kind of theological rationalism, and its anthropology, and to adopt a new attitude wherein the God who has revealed himself in Christ no longer is held captive by our own psyches and their desires to be comfortable and in control. It is to finally rest in the fact that God is God, and that he has contradicted all of our reason by way of the cross. Once we are able to renounce/repent of our wayward flesh made absolute; it is here where the theological rationalist finally will have the capacity to be theologically reasonable–and this, based upon a dynamic love of Christ that is not contingent upon me and my mind, but upon God and his relation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.