How Can We Trust Human Reason | Katherine Sonderegger
Channel: Henry Center
Date: 2019-01-07

Lecture Title - Right Reason, Fallen Reason

“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3) These words from Jesus’ high priestly prayer light up the darkened sky, the night Jesus enters, to face betrayal, arrest and death. These luminous words tell us that knowledge of God and of His Son is the supreme blessing, life eternal; and the acts of that night tell us that such knowledge is desperately far from us. How should we understand these two truths: that human reason can know God; and that reason fails to do so? It seems that humanity has been created to know God “by nature,” yet God’s very presence among us does not meet with rational faith but rather denial and rejection. What kind of reason is this? And what kind of nature? This lecture examines both.

Katherine Sonderegger (PhD Brown University) is William Meade Chair of Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary. She is author of a three-volume series in constructive dogmatics published by Fortress Press: The Doctrine of God (2015), The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons (2020), and Divine Missions, Christology, and Pneumatology (forthcoming).

The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issues—for the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Word—lay persons and scholars alike—for the sake of tomorrow’s church, academy, and world.

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