Insanity?

It is often presumed that in order to believe that there is a God, that Scripture is an accurate record of this God’s self-disclosure, and that we know this God by faith and not by reason or our senses, is in and of itself a definition of insanity.  How can you believe in something you have not seen?  Why would you surrender your reason, senses, and all your being to believe that which is, at least in the eyes of the world, something imagined and not real?  It must be insanity!  Or is it?

Is it reasonable and rational to believe that all that you see and all that you do not see simply came into being as a series of unpredictable accidents rather than by design?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that man was the fruit of a once and never repeated since mutation?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that life is random and disordered – without design, plan, or purpose?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that society’s order of marriage, family, home, and community are mere choices and not part of mankind’s essential identity and being?  It is reasonable and rational to believe that children are an accidental consequence of this order and not the purpose and design of the home or that the lives in the womb are different in essence and value than the lives of those born?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that procreation is an accident of sexual desire rather than the intended purpose and fruit?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that male and female are imagined identities disconnected from or perhaps even alien to the genes and reproductive organs of the body?

That is the question.  Which is more unreasonable and requires more faith?  To believe what Scripture posits as the truth of our origins, the shape of our identities, and the purpose for our living or to believe the imagined answers given by science still open to change or feelings which have no basis in fact or a guessimate on the basis of observation?  You tell me.

Is it reasonable and rational to believe that mankind is basically good except for a few bad apples or bad moments or that sin has corrupted us all?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that because of some yet unexplained magic our bodies give out at different ages and for different reasons or that death is the natural outcome of a natural life or to believe that death has corrupted our natures and forced death upon us because of our sin?  You tell me.

Is it reasonable and rational to believe that death ends us randomly and is no respecter of persons or that death or that is a rude and disrespectful curse laid upon us – an unintended outcome of a intentional choice to be our own gods?  Is it reasonable and rational to believe that death liberates us to a vague and nebulous spiritual existence that is more than an imaginary reality but less than a physical one or to believe that God will raise us as once He raised Christ from death to life everlasting?  You tell me.

The reality is that it takes more faith and not less to not believe.  It is not weakness that compels Christians to believe in Scripture and in Jesus but a judgmemnt of what is real and true against what is not.  It is the most reasonable and rational thing on earth to believe in God and confess Him as Scripture and Creed confess.  Sure, it takes the Spirit working through the Word to bring forth this faith in us but it is not quite a war against earthly wisdom or knowledge.  It is, in truth, not the end of learning or the end of teaching to meet before the Cross and confess Jesus but the start of wisdom and understanding.  In the beginning, it was presumed by those outside the Church that the apostles were either drunk or disillusional.  They were neither.  They were addressing the world with the only truth worth of being called reason -- hidden in the foolishness of God.