h thereby
becomes the outgrowth of =that= kind of reasoning. That is, the faith that
begins as an attitude of willingness toward the will of God, through which
attitude the eyes are touched into a vision of the character of God, such a
faith comes into and continues in an active submission to that will through
the normal functioning of reason.

This shows the vital difference between reasoning and rationalizing, and
the relation of each to faith. The effect of reasoning on faith is
constructive, while that of rationalizing is destructive. And the heart of
the difference between the two traces back, in the last analysis, to those
two kinds of vision. The rationalist, unyielding to the touch of God on his
vision, sees only natural facts, and even then he sees them only partially
and wholly out of relation to the spiritual revelation of God in the Bible
and in Christ; and thinking that he sees discrepancies between the facts in
the natural realm and the statements of Scripture, his =reason= leads him
to reject the Bible as infallible and inerrant, thereby making faith in the
God of the Bible utterly impossible. His reasoning powers are simply
functioning normally when he concludes to reject the statements about the
facts that to him are entirely unseen which do not seem to agree with what
he sees. His trouble is not with his reasoning powers but with his vision.
Refusing to see what he is passing judgment on, his method of inquiry is
rationalizing.

But the believer, utterly yielded to God and therefore seeing Him through
anointed eyes in both the written and the living Word, thus seeing the
infinite perfections of His character, is led by the normal functioning of
the =same reason= to accept and act on the bare Word of God without further
evidence, because the evidence he sees is all the evidence he needs. It is
perfectly reasonable, therefore, for Him to accept all that such an One
says in His Word, waiting for the partial and apparently contradictory
knowledge in the natural realm to be corrected into harmony with the Bible.
And his reasoning powers are simply functioning normally when he accepts
the Bible as infallible and inerrant, for this attitude is based on what he
sees. The entire difference between the rationalist and the believer is a
matter of vision. The reasoning powers of each simply act in view of what
each sees.

This is why reasoning is never out of harmony with faith, while
rationalizing always is. Fo