Faith and rationalism are mutually exclusive in the spiritual realm. Rationalizing and doubting are first cousins when the Word of God is involved.
Satan was the first rationalist on earth, and Eve fell when she accepted his reasonings about the Word of God in the place of simple faith in that Word. For Satan raised a question about the Word,—“Yea, hath God said?”—and thereby opened the way for incipient doubt, and then he reasoned Eve into accepting a “common sense” interpretation of what God had said, which proved to be an outright denial of His Word. And look at the consequences—indescribably terrible—of rationalizing about God's Word instead of believing it!
But rationalism did not stop there, for ever since that day all men without exception have been natural-born rationalists. For it is perfectly natural to all men to rationalize about God's Word, but it takes a miracle of Divine power to make any one willing to believe it.
These two attitudes toward Scripture are forever irreconcilable. In the nature of things, they can never be harmonized. The believer in the Word and the rationalist take two utterly divergent paths that cannot possibly reach the same goal.
[p 57] The program of the rationalist is to arrive at an understanding of spiritual truth over the pathway of reasoning that is apart from faith. That of the believer is to arrive at it over the pathway of reasoning that is founded on faith.
The program of the rationalist is to harmonize the Word of God with his conclusions. That of the believer is to harmonize his conclusions with the Word. The program of the rationalist is to become a critic of the Word and sit in judgment on it. That of the believer is to let the Word become his critic and sit in judgment on him.
These are certainly reasons enough why the believer and the rationalist can never travel together. For the believer is walking by God's estimate of him, while the rationalist is walking by his estimate of God, and these paths go in opposite directions.
If you sit in judgment on some portion of God's Word and determine that it is reasonable, and that since it commends itself to your judgment it is therefore acceptable and you will believe it, that is not faith in the Word but in your own reason. You have surrendered your intellect to your own conclusions but your heart is far from God. Faith in the Word is surrender to it without passing judgment on it.
And yet surrendering one's mind to one's own conclusions about God is precisely the thing that passes for faith in God on the part of those who have lost their old-fashioned, evangelical faith while they were in the Schools, and yet come out with what they describe as a more intelligent and rational faith in God and the Bible. In their desperate attempt to survive the wreck of their orthodox faith, they have [p 58] reasoned their way to conclusions about God that harmonized with what they were taught in the Schools; but the God they arrived at was the god of rationalism and not the God of Revelation.
They will say to the orthodox man, “You and I go by different pathways, but we both arrive at the same God.” But this is eternally impossible! For there is only one pathway leading to the true God, and that is not followed by reasoning one’s way out of a shattered faith, but first by believing one’s way out of darkness into light, and then by believing steadily on in that divinely imparted faith which always shatters the reasonings and conclusions of the rationalists.