The Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich is the senior minister at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City, and preached this sermon on June 3, 2007.

What I love about Rev. Guengerich’s approach to this topic of faith and reason and how they might come together is that he’s more interested in how our reason and faith cause us to live our lives in the world as we stand on the seeming divide between reason and religion, rather than advocating for one side or the other. See what you think.

The Dangerous Edge of Things

By Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich

Several nights ago, over dinner with friends who are not part of the All Souls community, my wife Holly and I found ourselves engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about religion. This seems to happen rather frequently when I’m around, though almost never at my instigation. With our friends—he’s a sardonic Jew, and she’s a wistful Congregationalist, both quite lapsed—we decried the appalling state of religion in the world. We wondered how people came to believe things that science tells us can’t happen, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection. We mused about whether Christianity could be reformed thoroughly enough to become gender-neutral and still survive.

Then the wistfulness set in, as the Congregationalist longingly recalled the power of the hymns and Bible stories of her small-town Christian upbringing. Maybe Thomas Jefferson was right, Holly remarked, when he took the New Testament gospels and a scissors, and literally cut out the miracles and supernatural elements, keeping the rest. The sardonic Jew objected. Every religion has irrational elements, he said; that’s what makes it a religion.

Not necessarily, I countered. Mystery and magic aren’t the same thing. I don’t believe in events that contravene the laws of nature, but some important elements of human life can’t be put into a test tube or under a microscope. He persisted: if you can’t prove something, it’s irrational. Mathematicians can’t prove the principle of addition, I responded, but that doesn’t make belief in addition irrational. And so it went.

An hour later, we paid the check and said good night. It had been a wonderful evening: engaging, provocative, even profound. It reminded me of the conversations people must have had to entertain themselves before radios, televisions, and the internet presented themselves as substitutes.

But the evening was more than entertainment. Without intending to do so, we had stumbled upon what I believe is one of the most important issues facing our world today: the difference between science and religion, between reason and revelation, between knowledge and faith. The usual way of parsing this relationship is to say that knowledge is based upon human reason, and that faith is based upon a supernatural revelation. For those who accept this dichotomy, the problem comes when reason and revelation clash, requiring that one or the other be given precedence. We live in a world roiled by this dilemma. Within this setting, my goal is to clarify what we mean when we describe ourselves as people of faith.

(Read on … )