Let’s Be Reasonable

God created us as reasonable creatures. To adopt rationalism is to make an idol out of reason, but for all that, we should still seek to be reasonable. The word alogos represents a failure at this place. In one place it is translated as unreasonable (Acts. 25:27). This is in the mouth of the pagan Festus while speaking to Agrippa. He thought it unreasonable to send a prisoner on to a higher court without specifying the charges against him, meaning that Festus appears to have had a better sense of justice than many Christians on the Internet. The same word is translated as brute in two other places, to much the same effect. Speaking of bloated false teachers, Peter says, “But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not . . .” (2 Pet. 2:12). The Jude passage is very close. “But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves” (Jude 1:10). In short, sin persisted in destroys a man’s capacity to make sense out of the world around him. Being reasonable in this sense is a moral issue.