Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Mather on Reason & Inner Light vs. Revelation

"There are mysteries in religion which we know not now, but we may know hereafter. Those men are strangers to Christianity who as so vain as to write, Christianity not Mysterious...Tis true, there is nothing in the Christian religion that is against reason... God who makes all truths will make no rules of reason that shall give any contradiction to them. Nevertheless, there are truths that go beyond reason; truths that soar above reason; truths which the faculties of our feeble reason cannot see into, especially as our fall form God has enfeebled and impaired our faculties." 1
"Reason is idolized, when men will set reason above revelation..when the light within becomes unto us a Christ and a God; when the natural conscience is advanced unto all the offices of our only Savior. A creature and one too that is darkened and wounded by sin, must not be deified." 2

1. Cotton Mather, Utilia (Boston, 1716), 260-261 from Richard Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism, Eerdmans, 1979, 52-53.

2.
Cotton Mather, Iconoclastes, (Boston, 1717), 18-19 from Richard Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather: Origins of American Evangelicalism, Eerdmans, 1979, 53.

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