Reason and Religion

I'm currently reading Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics by John Warwick Montgomery (Trinity Press, 1978). A review of this book claimed that is contained the most comprehensive refutation of Anthony Flew's view on miracles, so I figured I would give it a try. While I'll need to go back and re-read Dr. Montgomery's take on Flew since he has the tendency to drift off into British verbosity, I'll shoot from the hip and say he fails to refute Flew because he does not use a consistent position for each of his two-fold arguments. On their own, they are strong positions. Together, they are contradictory and cancel each other.

But anyway, that is another topic. In the essay on Martin Luther and the defense of the "biblical faith", the subject of reason comes up. In defining Martin Luther's position on reason and revelation, he quotes B.A. Gerrish Grace and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 72-73:

"The Kingdom of Reason embraces such human activities as caring for a family, building a home, serving as a magistrate, and looking after cows. All that can be demanded of me by God in such a sphere of activity is that I should 'do my best'. The important thing not to overlook is that this Kingdom has its boundaries: the error of the sophists is that they carry the saying 'to do one's best' over into the regnum spirituale [spiritual kingdom], in which a man is able to do nothing but sin....For the Kingdom of Human Reason must be separated as far as possible from the Spiritual Kingdom."

Montgomery goes on to argue that Luther connected the two kingdoms with enough of a bridge to say that the Christian faith can be objectively argued. But I'm familiar enough with Luther's writings to know that Dr. Montgomery's view falls apart when Luther's moral views are examined, particularly his schizophrenic view of how a "Christian soldier" participates in war.

But there is glaring problem with Luther's (and therefore, the Protestant) position on reason. Garrish's treatment of Luther relegates certain worldly tasks to the kingdom of reason, where Luther presumes one only needs to 'do your best', and it cannot encroach into spiritual or moral matters. First, doing one's best is merely a pursuit of effort. If that is all God asks of such tasks as raising a family, then we could expect that simply doing one's best would be enough to produce good results. But as anyone knows who has tried to either build a house or raise a child, doing one's best is not enough. There is a, dare I say, moral quality to these tasks when they are done well according to certain principles. A well-built house will relatively weather the test of time and the elements. A well-raised child will have a relatively small therapy bill owed to his parents when he is an adult. Luther's position that the realm of reason only requires amoral effort is a joke. It smacks of the position of someone who spent his days praying in his cell as a good little Augustinian and never really held down a job, or raised a family.

So since the Protestant assumptions about the kingdom of reason and its amoral quality fall apart fairly easily, dismantling the notions of the spiritual realm where mankind can only sin is rather easy to do as well. If the realm of reason has God-given, discoverable, operational principles that are moral in nature (because things not done well in real life do hurt people, regardless of the level of effort), then we can assume with very little argument that the the suposed chasm between the physical world operating on reason, and the spiritual world operating on God's morality, does not exist. The spiritual kingdom where man is wholesale adjudicated a sinner doesn't exist. Otherwise, this adjudication would spill over into the realm of reason where morality is in operation, and no one would be able to ever build a house, raise a child, or milk a cow with any measure of success.

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