Renascentes Musae: Kilcrease on Faith and Reason

09 August, 2010

Kilcrease on Faith and Reason

Readers of renascentes Musae will certainly be interested in Jack Kilcrease's disentangling of the sometimes conflicting, and nearly always mis-represented, data on the role of reason in the theological anthropology of the Wittenberg Reformation: whipping boy or useful friend? His post is aptly titled "Luther on Faith and Reason: A Primer."

2 comments:

Steve Gehrke said...: I do second that this was an excellent post,even if I'm not sure I comprehended all the nuances. Certainly as a science and engineering professor I often run into a certain skepticism among the theologically conservative that such disciplines can be compatible with theological orthodoxy. In fact, I find that education in math and science help curb heterodoxy, at least in the applied sciences and engineering. Theoretical scientists do sometimes try to substitute a scientific materialist worldview for a religious one (they're the ones who get the press), but this is not inherent in scientific education or vocation. Rather it is as you and Dr. Kilcrease note, a matter of keeping faith and reason in their proper roles and relationships.; Tuesday, 17 August, 2010
Dr. Jack Kilcrease said...: Steve-

I would agree that one need not be a materialist to be a scientist. I think I would go a step further and state that science without a intelligent divine ordering the universe makes very little sense. For the world to be discernible, one must assume consistent rules to creation that we can discern that are the product of a designer. Secondly, one must also assume that our minds must reflect the divine mind's plan for creation to a certain extent, otherwise we could not process the data which we receive from the external world. Melanchthon and Gerhard describe this as a sort of inner light that is left over from the destroyed imago dei.

This is one of the reasons why materialism as a philosophy to my thinking doesn't work- basically at all! At the end of the day, it can't account for how science knows anything.

BTW, thanks for reading the blog.; Wednesday, 18 August, 2010

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How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh). That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. "The rebirth of the Muses," or, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born." That was Reformation-Era code for the kind of university reform that accompanied the Reformation, a revitalization of higher education that eschewed the scholasticism of the Late Medieval world for a bracing encounter with the classics, the literae humaniores, of both the pagan and Christian world, along with the intellectual tools needed for such study: the ancient languages (classical Greek, classical Latin, and Hebrew), rhetoric & dialectic. This blog is devoted to searching for and articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for Lutheran higher education on the basis of Wittenberg Christian Humanism and to imagining what renascentes Musae might look like in 21st-century North American confessional Lutheranism. Need we mention it? Opinions expressed by an individual author are not necessarily those of all authors. Not only that--if we can't vouch for one another's opinion--it goes without saying that authors also speak on their own behalf and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions that employ them.