The ancients spoke of “faith seeking understanding”. Need this always be interpreted in terms of rational understanding though? What of intuitive understanding? Is this not desirable also?
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Curious Christian 
Yes it isn’t, no. 🙂
By ‘intuitive knowledge’ are you referring to a priori concepts, or direct experience, or something else? Or do you mean appealing to other kinds of intelligence than just the analytical? To my mind it still must be rational in that it is the best explanation and is not demonstrably contradictory. Something like Christianity should also be holistic, on it’s own premises, so should be integrate with all our kinds of intelligence (incl. relational and aesthetic).
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Epistemological kind of question, really.
My friend in New Zealand just completed her PhD after doing a Masters on collaborative creative arts stuff and she describes many “ways of knowing”… ground-breaking work on the subject, since she has added over a dozen to the usual text book list.
I really love Romans 12 where it talks about ALL our body’s constituents harmonising in worship, whilst being unconformed to outside influences, that would interfere with our ability to live freely and sensitively to each other, as the Creator designed and desires.
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Actually I think part of this issue is what constitutes ‘rationality’ in this day and age. Remember that ‘the rationalists’ in Western philosophy were by and large religious thinkers. Today’s hardcore empiricism, which is calls ‘rationalist’, actually is not rationalist at all. What it puts enormous stock in is what can be quantified and measured. But this approach leaves many yawning gaps in the modern outlook, not least of which is that ‘reason’ itself is understood as the chance outcome of blind evolutionary forces.
Go figure!
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