My wife is a straight-line thinker. That means she keeps her train of thought from beginning to end while logically following the idea to its inevitable conclusion.

    Me, I’ll wander along several detours in my mind, exploring little side trails, but somehow like a parachutist drifting over a field, I miraculously – eventually – land on the target, arriving with bursts of insight that seem like revelation.

    She thinks like an engineer. No detail gets lost. She sees the cause and its effect and can track the details and all their chronology. I seem to paint a picture on a canvas with curves and colors going every which way that finally coalesce into a picture that makes perfect sense. But apart from considerable effort, I can’t tell you how I arrived at that conclusion nor easily repeat the process.

    Thinking straight is an important ability. Although my thinking processes work differently than hers, whenever I am preparing to teach a subject to a class or preach a sermon in a church I first put on my teacher’s hat. I begin preparing an outline. Using that tool, I can lay out the facts step by step to show my students not only the conclusion but its justification as well. I want folks to see the evidence for something and be able to reason with me so they can believe it as well. It is important to know why we believe a thing to be true. Faith requires reasoning.

    As a Christian leader, I’m appalled that people mindlessly adopt a position without ever knowing why they believe it. Is it enough for a Christian to say, “I was taught that at church so it must be true?” I don’t think so. The rules of dogma can’t produce living faith like the words of Scripture can. “Let every man be fully convinced.” An unexamined faith is a weak faith. Skeptics will undermine your faith if you don’t have a well-reasoned foundation for it. For example, if you believe Jesus arose from the dead, you’d better be able to state your case. What’s your evidence?

    The modern worldview divides faith from reason. The modern worldview is called scientific rationalism. It holds that that science and reason belong to the known arena while faith belongs to the spiritual or unknown realm. Even in church, we unconsciously adopt this way of thinking. It colors our perspective about everything. This mental fog is the climate we grew up in. I disagree with this way of thinking because it is wrong when it comes to the Bible. But skeptics who deny God like it.

    By contrast, the Hebrew people of the Old Covenant and the Christians of the New Covenant believed and behaved from a viewpoint that God could be known. In their thinking, the natural world and the spiritual world both operated using faith and reason.

    Historical evidence is an example of a good way to use reason in order to come to faith. The famous agnostic philosopher Malcolm Muggeridge of England came to faith after studying how Christians died as martyrs under Caesar’s persecution. The facts convinced him to convert. Our Bible is deeply rooted in history. It is not a book of myths or fables. It was rooted in the reality we know to be true. Its prophecies came to pass and its personalities really existed. For example, many of the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ resurrection died painfully but without fear, still testifying they had seen a Man raised from the grave. The evidence was so overwhelming that they accepted death rather than renounce what they knew was true.

    From my study of the Bible and from years of knowing God, I’ve seen enough evidence (including miracles) that I can sincerely place my trust in Jesus and feel safe about the future.  And that’s not a blind leap of faith… it’s perfectly rational.

    Ron Wood is a writer and minister. Email: ron@touchedbygrace.org.