Reason

Every word that you speak or write as a theologian will be a product of human reason. What else could it be? As soon as you have put a moment’s thought into what you say, or as soon as you accept that what you say might be open to any kind of correction, you have already become involved in reasoning. It makes no more sense to ask whether your words are too much or too little the product of reason than it does to ask whether the words I am writing now are too much or too little the product of my typing. What matters is not the quantity, but the quality and kind of reasoning involved. The fact that ‘reason’ is the first of this book’s four main sections does not imply

that we think reason is somehow more authoritative than Scripture, or tradition, or experience. As we have explained in the introduction, we don’t find it particularly helpful to think of theology as an attempt to balance the claims derived from four different sources, and to get the priority among those four sources right. To say that theology is reasoning all the way through is not yet to say anything – whether positive or negative – about theology’s relation to the Bible, or to tradition, or to experience. Different qualities and kinds of reasoning will relate to Bible, tradition, and experience in very different ways. But what is reasoning? In order to provide an initial answer to that question, I am

going to begin with an analogy. Reasoning is, I claim, like the building of a child’s wooden railway. I’m thinking of the kind of railway that comes as a set of wooden track sections – straights, curves, junctions, bridges – ready to be fitted together into networks. My family is, I think, typical in having a rather random collection of pieces, some inherited, some bought. The attempt to make a coherent layout from them all (such that the train will be able to navigate the whole network without having to be lifted from the tracks), still more to make a complete layout (one that uses all the pieces and leaves no loose ends), is no easy business. You get a certain way through, and then realize that you do not have enough curves left to join the two remaining ends – so you take a curve out here and a straight there in order to free up an extra piece, only to find that now you have a spare junction, and nowhere to put it. Working towards a coherent and complete layout – if that is indeed what you want – is a complex process. You can’t simply start at the beginning, add the pieces one by one, and carry on all the way to the end. You have to experiment with a possibility, then unpick it a little and rebuild slightly differently, so as to respond to what that experiment has shown you.