The Life of Christ as Rationality Par Excellence

To say that creation is ordered is more than the claim that material things follow consistent physical laws—it is the claim that the world operates according to a moral order. This has been the claim made by Christians from the Apostle Paul to Thomas Aquinas to even Alexander Campbell. What is good in the world is not arbitrary.

Aquinas in particular gives us language to help understand this idea: morality is a reflection of the mind of God, of Divine Reason—and it is this Divine Reason that governs creation and directs God’s providence. Crucially, this governing is not like a king who periodically intervenes and adjusts things as needed; rather, it is more like how the rules of a game govern its play, and in turn players participate in that game. Similarly, we humans participate in Divine Reason. When we act morally, when we do right, we are living with the grain of the universe, and when we deviate, we live against the grain.

An acknowledgment of this truth is all natural law theology amounts to. It recognizes that the actions we call ethical are also the things it makes sense to do in the created world. We show self-control when we eat because gluttony is damaging to the body; we choose to be courageous on behalf of our friends and community because, in addition to endearing us, it prolongs the life of those relationships. In other words, natural law teaches that Divine Reason—the schematic by which our reality is constructed and operates—is our paradigm for living.

Such an emphasis on the reason of nature or the rationality of ethics can be, understandably off-putting. It seems oppressively logical and lacking organic human attributes. And association with Aquinas does not help—few Christians write as systematically and dryly as the great scholastic theologian. There is no romance in talk of order and reason, none of the warmth that seems at the heart of the gospel.

Yet, Aquinas’s talk of Divine Reason gestures at what is already proclaimed in Scripture’s concept of the Logos. This idea, in the first chapter of John, connotes law and logic and even reason too. It is the very Word of God, spoken at the beginning of time—the utterance “Let there be…”—that brought the cosmos into existence and ordered all of creation. More than the agent by which the creative work is brought about, the Logos is the guiding principle around which all nature is oriented and directed.

Likewise, the Logos, as a profession of who the Son of God is and what he has done, instructs us regarding our ethics. This is a truth from above and from below. For just as Divine Reason provides the pattern for existence in creation, so too does the Logos, in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, provide our perfect example for life in the world. We follow the paradigm laid out by the new Adam, who, even as he radiates God’s glory, demonstrates for us how to be most fully and truly human. Only by Christ do we know how we ought to live.

In connecting the Son to the logic governing creation, it suddenly becomes clear that Christ’s life is the totality of reason. In being perfectly aligned with the moral order of the universe, Jesus reveals his identity as Divine Reason—yet he is not flatly rational. Christ is bodily. He tells stories, makes people laugh, takes detours when he walks, cries over relationships, does things for no obvious reason—and he humbles himself unto death. But the point is: not that he is not rational, but that what is rational must be defined according to him. He is the Logos, the embodiment of Divine Reason. Moreover, I think this casts in new light what thinkers like Aquinas had in mind in their emphasis on reason: not some sort of cold Kantian rationality but rather a conception of reason as the pattern laid out by Christ and reflected in all the beauty of created reality.

As Christians, this is our claim: that Christ, the Logos, the Son of God, is the clearest representation of God’s will and the sum of all revelation. He is the paradigm of rationality and the means by which we understand the logic of nature. He is our guide for life in creation.