Reason and the Reasons of Faith

Faith and reason are presently in crisis. This judgment, albeit controversial, constitutes the foundations of this project. The central danger of this crisis does not so much consist in the denial as in the banalization of God, whether as a fundamentally irrational claim of faith or at best as a purely regulative idea of reason. However, offering an account of the hope that is in us, and hence of the faith that gives rise to hope, requires on the part of Christian theology a rigorous intellectual effort, in short, the unfettered use of reason for the sake of faith in the God who is always greater than anything that can be thought. The point of such rigorous intellectual effort is not to offer a theological legitimization of reason as such, but rather to put reason to work theologically so that it comes genuinely to itself in realizing that God is and remains greater than anything that can be thought. Moreover, recognizing the limits and weaknesses of reason is possible only from a vantage point that deepens, broadens, and at the same time questions reason's horizon. Such a deepening, broadening, and questioning, however, always and only occurs reasonably, that is, through reason's own action.

The program of the present volume is to inquire into the reasons of faith in order to offer theological resources to constructively address the double crisis of faith in reason and reason in faith. We inquire, first, into the theological constitution of reason; second, into reason as one specific faculty of human being; third, into the significance of the philosophical shifts of modernity for theology; and fourth, into the importance of philosophy for theological inquiry.

Contributors: Alan J. Torrance; Bruce D. Marshall; Colin Gunton and Robert Jenson; Lois Malcolm; Mark McIntosh; Paul J. Griffiths; Reinhard Hütter; Ernstpeter Maurer; Carver T. Yu; Janet Martin Soskice; David Bentley Hart; Martin Bieler; Romanus Cessario; Charles Taylor