Yes. You appear to be what William Abraham calls a “hard rationalist,” while I am a “
soft rationalist.”
- There is good historical reason to believe that the first-century rabbi called Jesus of Nazareth acted in very weird ways for someone who appears to have been a remarkably wise and good person. (i.e., the “liar, lunatic, Lord” argument, though it is commonly given far too “hard rationalist” a form.) The Christian tradition’s explanation of this weird behavior is that Jesus was the incarnation of the divine Logos, and that the human Jesus’ trusting relationship with God mirrored an eternal relationship between the Logos and the Father. This is weird, but weird in the same way the historical Jesus appears to have been weird—weird in the way that observable reality is repeatedly weird.
- Christians over time, including myself (though being a doubting, hesitating kind of person, I can’t claim that my own experience is terribly compelling) have experienced God’s presence in our lives in a way that Christian tradition describes in terms of the Holy Spirit–the living breath of God, personal in the same way God the Father and the Son are personal, but one Being with them.
- The idea is just beautiful, and beauty is the best reason for believing anything.
- The Trinity makes sense of the statement “God is love.”
- It posits both unity and plurality in God, and thus accounts for human intuition and experience of the divine better than either a “simple monotheist” or polytheist account does.
These are just the first five reasons that come to mind. They don’t stand well as isolated arguments–the point I’m trying to make is that historical and rational and experiential considerations all reinforce each other (and/or clash with each other–there are reasons not to believe in the Trinity, of course, though from my perspective very few to believe in a strictly monotheistic, non-Trinitarian, non-incarnating, transcendent Deity). The many other reasons for trusting both Scripture and the Church are also an indispensable part of why I believe in the Trinity–in fact, the witness of the Church, as I said in my earlier post, is the primary reason.
I must decline to go through all my beliefs and list all my reasons for believing in them. That would just take too long! Indeed, listing reasons in this way really doesn’t describe anything very adequately. A better way to put it would be this:
I have been taught certain beliefs from childhood. As I grew up, I challenged these beliefs. Some of them came to seem very unconvincing (dispensationalist eschatology, for instance, or a strictly invisible view of the Church, or the sinfulness of drinking alcohol). Others continue to compel me. My reasons for believing what I believe are narrative. I don’t start out by compiling a list of pros and cons. I think this is a very bad way to arrive at any important belief. Rather, you start where you are, and you challenge what you come to see as needing challenging.
Yes. It’s not either/or.
The Church is trustworthy for thousands of reasons (and untrustworthy for hundreds). But again, just to list a few, they would be:
- The witness of the earliest Christians to the resurrection, which gives me plausible reason to think that God has really broken into history in a very strange way.
- The consistency and beauty of the development of Catholic faith from radical, apocalyptic Judaism, assimilating elements of pagan thought and creating an intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual synthesis combining the strengths of both Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. I.e., as a Catholic Christian I can have both Isaiah and Plato. And if Isaiah and Plato are not both more or less right about the things that matter most, then it seems hardly worthwhile to think about anything at all. Or, more broadly, as I said above, Catholic Christianity manages to combine elements of monotheism and polytheism. Rather than a weakness, this seems to me to be an almost unbeatable strength.
- The examples of sanctity produced by the Church.
- The Church’s survival in spite of the conspicuous lack of sanctity of many of its leaders.
- The persistence of the radical witness of Jesus within an institution that often seems to have betrayed that witness.
Of course each of these could be expanded on, and I could go on listing other factors all night.
Edwin
