Donald Miller speaking with his friend Laura a while before her own conversion to Christianity:
I don’t think there is an explanation. My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.
-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p.54
Christianity is largely within the grip of rationalism. I have a lot of threads to pull together on this one and don’t have the time to do it today. Travis Prinzi at the Rabbit room explores a facet of it (related to myth and story) today. Augustine’s God was huge. However many times he said his God was even larger, Calvin’s God was actually a smaller then Augustine’s. The God of the Westminster Confession is even smaller than Calvin’s. God is plenty rational, but the whole world cannot contain him.