faith and intellect Quotes

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

I remember that the priest finally said to me, 'You wouldn't like to have a religion that makes things easy for you.' Now I know that both faith and intellect are components of religious belief.

It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.

Evangelicals have like millions of rules. And it's just, uh, we have sort of an accepted, rationalism within which we frame religion. And we think that belief, intellectually, is of the same as relationship. And in our Western family conversation, that's become an incredible impediment toward actual wholeness, where the heart and the head are aligned and relationship -- with not just God but with each other.

Faith is a function of the heart. It must be enforced by reason. The two are not antagonistic as some think. The more intense one's faith is, the more it whets one's reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.

The knowledge of this marvelous period has made faith far easier from an intellectual standpoint, and has enabled us to be more patient in waiting to see the truth, not as now