A Rational Faith

Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to Lowell Bennion’s understanding of religious education. Inspired by Christian modernists and the thought of Max Weber, he argues why Latter-day Saints should pursue an education. The chapter explores his carefully developed hermeneutics of reading scripture and interpreting divine revelation in which revelation is continual and a rational faith is possible. Since both secular and spiritual ways of knowing depend in various degrees on both faith and reason, which need each other, he was confident that harmony was possible. He insisted that a deliberate integration of religious ideas and values into the full range of disciplines and ideas in the academy and in the entirety of lived experience would make faith viable in the modern world.