So why can faith and reason coexist?

I'm neither a catechist nor a theologian, so anything I say on this subject should be taken with a whole block of salt, never mind a single grain. But it's a fascinating thing to ponder, and after reading the bible and the wise reflections of Fr. James V. Schall and Fr. Joe Fessio, this is what I think:

Jesus is the Answer.

Seriously.

Christians believe that Jesus is "true God and true Man." We also know from the gospel accounts and the testimony of the early church that Jesus was and is not irrational. It follows, then, that the Triune God in whom we have faith must be reasonable. That conclusion is reinforced by the fact that Genesis says of us what it says of no other creatures: that we who can reason are “created in the image and likeness of God.”

There are other ways to reach the same conclusion about the character of God, and the pope talked in that Regensburg Lecture about one of them, which comes from the introduction to the gospel according to John, where it says "in the beginning was the Word." It doesn't say "in the beginning was the [bleat/scream/cough/giggle/grunt].

Even without knowing much about the Greek concept of Logos, or reading John’s account in its original language, you can tell from any translation of the syntax involved that the passage strongly implies some kind of primordial coherence. Conveniently for this argument, the ability to think coherently depends on reason.

I bring all this up because theology matters, and never more so than today, when a suave despot can pray openly before delegates at the United Nations for the return of the “Twelvth Imam” while doing everything possible to hasten that return, which (oddly) seems to depend at least in part on whether the Iranian government can enrich uranium.

With rhetoric about “infidels” flying around and a so-called “Islamic Bomb” on the horizon, conversation about God can’t be relegated to dorm rooms, coffee shops, and pulpits. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State probably wishes that we all had ruby-crusted slippers and a ticket back to some mythical place where Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists tells them to do whatever it is they do behind closed doors far away. Sadly for that organization, all President Jefferson actually did was reassure the Baptists of his time that the First Amendment kept the federal government from establishing a national church. As Mark Levin has pointed out, two days after writing to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson attended church services held in the House of Representatives.

In other words: faith in the public square? No problem. In fact, it’s a good idea, as more than a few of the Founding Fathers said. But now we must sort through mutually incompatible statements of faith while we strive for peace. Over against the Christian notion of faith and reason as analagous to “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,” Fr. Schall characterizes the Islamic notion of God as making reason superflous, because God is pure will. I don’t know whether that summary (which Ryan Anderson echoes at First Things) is correct, but it certainly squares with what I've read elsewhere. Islam is big on divine sovereignty, and apparently its conception of divine sovereignty works to the exclusion of all else, which is why Allah is not "bound" to avoid even self-contradiction.

From a Christian point of view, the problem with thinking of reason as a kind of shackle that God transcends is that you arbitrarily limit the virtue of God by foreclosing the possibility of His having perfect reason to go along with perfect will and, importantly, perfect love.

A Muslim can do something "because God said so." A Christian may rely on divine authority as well, but he or she has an additional responsiblity rooted in the Christian understanding of God's character: as Peter wrote in his first letter (specifically, 1 Peter 3:15), the Christian must "Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope." He writes that knowing that you can make room for reason without in any way shortchanging faith. My favorite example of that comes from Luke 7:1-10, which tells the story of the centurion whose words every Catholic repeats in celebrations of the divine liturgy:

When he had finished all his words to the people, he entered Capernaum.
A centurion there had a slave who was ill and about to die, and he was valuable to him.
When he heard about Jesus, he sent elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and save the life of his slave.
They approached Jesus and strongly urged him to come, saying, "He deserves to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation and he built the synagogue for us."
And Jesus went with them, but when he was only a short distance from the house, the centurion sent friends to tell him, "Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof. Therefore, I did not consider myself worthy to come to you; but say the word and let my servant be healed.
For I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes; and to another, 'Come here,' and he comes; and to my slave, 'Do this,' and he does it."
When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him and, turning, said to the crowd following him, "I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith."
When the messengers returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

That is certainly a story of faith, but if you look again at the centurion's understanding of authority, you notice that he asks Jesus to "just say the word" because it is reasonable to expect anything Jesus says to have an effect.

If the omnipotence of God permitted even self-contradiction, as some (all?) Muslims seem to say, then, by Jove, it requires self-contradiction, which means it’s not really omnipotence, because it’s imperfect. And that, in turn, means we’re not talking about God.

Jesus, for Christians, is the living refutation of that kind of thinking.

But I must stop now, because I’m not competent to go further, and this is deep water we’re in.

(updated with the centurion example)