Christianity and Reason

"It has been said that Christianity brought a loss of nerve and a distrust of reason.  But one might argue that Christian revelation put an end to skepticism and gave men and women a new confidence in reason.  Whether one reads St. Augustine, who wrote that 'anyone who supposes that the senses are never to be trusted is woefully mistaken,' or St. John of Damascus, who said that the 'mind which is determined to ignore corporeal things will find itself weakened and frustrated,' under the tutelage of historical revelation, reason became more certain of its starting point, more confident, less abstract, and more purposeful.  Though respectful of its limitations, reason's scope was also expanded and enlarged.  That God was known in history, in the life of a human being, validated experience; it allowed Christian thinkers to appeal to the lives of holy men and women, especially the martyrs and the saints, and to the experience of the church, as testimony to the truth of God."

--Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven: Yale, 2003), 23.