To Know Divine Revelation, We Must Understand How Faith and Reason Work

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To fully understand and get to know Divine Revelation, how “God reveals himself and his plan of salvation for mankind in history through words and deeds, which began in creation, culminated in Jesus Christ and ended with the death of the last Apostle John” , humans need to understand how faith and reason work. Through history faith and reason have been presented to humanity in different ways; sometimes as two separate branches, which are independent and do not interact at all, and sometimes both complementing one another. Faith and Reason work together so that God’s plan of salvation reaches humanity and saves us from original sin, by knowing this mankind is able to know the truth about the world and about themselves.
Faith and reason work together in order to understand the divinity of God and reality. As Pope John Paul explained in Fides Et Ratio:

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves”.

In order to understand how reason complements faith it is necessary to know how each works separately. Reason is “the mode or act of thinking; by extension it comes to designate on the one hand the faculty of thinking and on the other the formal element of thought, such as plan, account, ground, etc.” With reason humans have the power of the intellect to know universal truth. Thanks to reason humans are different from animals, as Aristotle once said “men is a rational animal”, without reason we would not have the capacity to know the truth. Reason is something that men and women have i...

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... has faced many obstacles through history, some of these obstacles where the heresies, "a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas," against faith and reason. Fideism and rationalism are the names of these heresies that attack the belief on how faith and reason work together. While fideism states that a man can understand God’s divinity completely without the use of reason, rationalism says that God does not exist and that the beauty of the world is caused by the theory of evolution. The Catholic Church has rejected these heresies teaching that, “there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.”
Faith and Reason complement each other, they help men understand reality

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