Now, one of the truths that reason can discover is
that God is a person, and the central claim of the Bible is that this Person
has not remained utterly hidden but has, indeed, spoken. As is the case with
any listener to a person who speaks, the listener to the divine speech has to
make a choice: do I believe him or not? The decision to accept in trust what
God has spoken about himself is what the Church means by “faith.” This decision
is not irrational, for it rests upon and is conditioned by reason, but it
presses beyond reason, for it represents the opening of one heart to another.
In the presence of another human being, you could remain stubbornly in an
attitude of mistrust, choosing to accept as legitimate only those data that you
can garner through rational analysis; but in so doing, you would close yourself
to the incomparable riches that that person might disclose to you. The strict
rationalist, the unwavering advocate of the scientific method, will know
certain things about the world, but he will never come to know a person.
--Robert Barron, Vibrant
Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism
