As you can tell from my content I’ve recently been distracted from my epistemological studies that I outlined here. At first I wasn’t too sure if the distraction was worth it. But now, at my snails pace, I’m nearly complete with my initial reading of Reason and Revelation by Emil Brunner. This book was important for me because I wanted to see how a careful, honest thinker dealt with the challenges of faith and reason. It is understood by most that faith and reason are distinct methods of arriving at knowledge about the world. There are, of course, many problems that one is confronted with depending on how you define these terms. Defining the terms is a challenge unto itself (do you use faith and/or reason to define the terms?), but I won’t talk about that here. Maybe after I get through a second read of the book I’ll be able to talk intelligently about it. What is clear though is that Brunner does not limit the acquisition of knowledge using reason alone. Yet, he attempts to avoid totally divorcing faith from reason and the associated “leap into the void” kind of knowledge. While these quotes don’t contain the full context of what Brunner is arguing they are a decent window into how he views the inability of reason alone to “know everything” and the false ideas of the conflict between faith and reason.

Faith is aware of the higher rationality and the higher actuality of the truth of revelation, and is ready to maintain this; but it is also aware of the impossibility of asserting its validity within the sphere which the autonomous human reason has delimited for itself…The autonomous reason believes that this impossibility shows the untruth of the claim of revelation; faith, however, sees in every such demand for proof the consequences of an original perversion in the actual process of knowing, of the claim of our human reason to a false autonomy.

Reason has nothing to fear from genuine faith, nor has faith anything to fear from from the right use of reason. All conflicts between “faith and reason” are sham conflicts, which are caused by the fact that they have exceeded the limits of their respective spheres; either they spring from claims to revelation which are only in part due to real revelation, an in part to the confusion of revelation with human conceptions of revelation, or they are due to rational assertions which do not arise from reason, but from the misuse of the autonomous reason.

- Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (The Westminster Press, 1946) 213.
My goal is to complete the text by week’s end and resume my epistemological pain. We’ll see how that goes.