04.09 | True & Rational
Acts 26
‘But Paul said, “I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking true and rational words.’
Acts 26:25
Andy didn’t believe in the resurrection.
This might not sound that unusual. But Andy was a vicar. He had been leading a church for many years. He preached regularly. He was committed to social justice. He had rhythms of prayer. He read the Bible.
And yet, Andy understood the resurrection to be nothing more than a metaphor—a Biblical parable, suggesting wider ideas of bad things being turned to good. Resurrection, he figured, is impossible, and therefore it cannot have actually happened.
I was staggered. Why would anyone do this job, if Jesus didn’t actually rise from the dead? What message did we actually have if Jesus was still dead? What was the point of all the challenges and obstacles of walking as a Christian, if all stories merely end in a grave at the end of it all? Wasn’t Paul right, that, if Christ has not risen from the dead, we are to be pitied more than all people?1
Andy, it turns out, isn’t alone. Many have soaked up, fully, or in partial measures, aspects of this worldview. In some measure, we all have. Christian renewal is the growth into faith, which assumes the possibility of the impossible and the reality of the invisible. Andy stood in a long line of people, who have looked at the Christian Bible, and read it through the lens of what has often been called ‘rationality’.
Miracles are not rational, they say. And so they cannot have happened.
A virgin birth is not rational, they say. And so it must just be a story.
A God who speaks to us is not rational, they say. And so He cannot do it.
Resurrection is not rational, they say. And so it must be a metaphor.
Paul stands before royalty and officials today. And he wants them to know something important:
I am speaking true and rational words.
He does not emphasise a mystical or fantastical Gospel, but a plain and honest reading of reality.
It is rational, he argues, to believe that God would be true to His promises. Why would He lie?
It is rational, he says, to believe that God can work miracles. What power could stop Him?
It is rational, he declares, to believe that God can raise the dead. For He created life itself in the first place.
There has been a separation of the ideas of rationality and spirituality in the days since the Enlightenment.2 It is assumed that we fall into one or the other: either rational or spiritual. Many believers walk around with the niggling suggestion that they are ‘irrational’ for believing what they believe. We can swallow the pill, assuming that faith requires the abdication of our rationality.
But Paul will have none of this.
I am speaking true and rational words.
There is a radically different alternative, where rationality and spirituality intersect. The Bible calls this faith. It is the measured assumption of a greater reality that that which is seen, and an honest appraisal of the cost and benefit of such a wager. It includes logic and observation, reasoning and philosophy. It reads history and forms informed conclusions. It reworks our worldview through the tangible, robust belief in an actual God who does actual things.3
Rationality is not the squeezing of a God who acts out of the Scriptures; rather, it is the expansion of our worldview into the truer and larger world of the Creator. Rationality includes the assumption that all that we see did not come about from some great fluke of physics, but from a deeply intentional Someone. Rationality realises that our anger at suffering grows from an intuitive understanding that suffering itself is an unwelcome alien in God’s good creation.4 Rationality recognises that a God who created all things is more than able to work miracles, keep His promises, and bring a dead man back to life. Rationality finds no reason for an empty grave other than the true fulfilment of Jesus’ own prediction. Rationality finds no reason for nearly all the apostles going to their deaths for their unshifting testimony that this Jesus truly did rise from the dead.
Do not be deceived, my friends. Rationality is not a dirty word in the church: we speak true and rational words. The invitation, for us, however, is into this greater rationality—where day by day we learn to see more truly the realities of the all-transforming, eternally-beautifying, promise-keeping, death defying God of wonders.
It is true. It is rational. For the resurrection is the truest reality.
Reflect:
God keeps His promises.
God works miracles.
God raises the dead.
Which of these do I need God to show me more clearly and truthfully today?
Ask Him to do so.
Pray:
Father in heaven,
Faith doesn’t always come
Easily.
Sometimes, it seems more rational
To doubt;
To fear;
To hide;
To critique.
And yet,
My Father,
I have set my way,
And my way is you.
Would you awaken this soul
To the rationality of reality,
And would you enliven my perspective
To know that in each moment,
And each event
And every breath of this life
My greatest and most unending reality
Is eternally you.
Father,
Reorder my thoughts,
And reorder my heart,
That I may live
In the Truth that gives substance to all truth.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Job 34-37 | Psalm 106:1-5
1 Corinthians 15:19
The very language of ‘Enlightenment’ assumes a progression from the muddle of matters of faith to the clarity of matters of pure materialism. Many in our age—Christians and not—are rejecting this view, finding in themselves both a measure of, and a desire for, a life that is greater than the sum of our atoms.
Certainly there are many times when God invites obedience without rationale. In such circumstances, we are required to act in faith according to the reality that we do not yet see. And yet, in such instances, the reality is still reality—whether we see or feel it. This is not irrational behaviour, any more than it would be irrational for a blind man to rationally believe in the existence of light.
Rather than, as Darwinism argues, an essential part of natural selection.