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Reason is not a way of understanding the scriptures.

The only way to understand a passage of scripture is to read the plain words under the Holy Spirit.

The age of anointed apostles has been over for 1900 years.

Its not so difficult unless you want the word to support something humanistic, as the catholic church intrinsically demands, which the word of God cannot do.

Surely there is benefit to deep learning in Scripture and in the culture and history of the era, and that being so, it is worth consulting those who are knowledgeable. In addition, some theological controversies get settled, and experience helps to reveal both error and truth. Over twenty centuries or so, that provides a substantial basis for Christian theology. Or at least that is the Catholic view.

The fundamentalist Protestant view though has every person read Scripture and interpret and apply it for themselves. This makes for dozens of Protestant sects with an endless variety of teachings and a susceptibility to odd doctrines and enthusiasms.

Moreover, fundamentalist hostility to reason and science leads to the discredit of Christianity and its estrangement from large areas of modern life, especially from the educated elites who apply reason and science on a routine basis.

In contrast, Catholic teaching sees natural law as engraved by God on every human soul. That natural law enables human reason to discern good from evil, truth from lies. This natural law is complemented and made whole by divine law as known to us through revelation, Scripture, and Christ's life and teachings.

From this perspective, human reason can draw upon natural law to amplify what Scripture teaches. Thus reason, when properly employed, bolsters Christian faith and practice. Indeed, natural law and the capacity to discern good and evil helps open pagan hearts to Christian teaching.

I find it an extraordinary and distressing contradiction that a fundamentalist Protestant missionary would appeal to reason and natural law to convert pagans in loincloths in a jungle, but Protestant fundamentalists at home in the developed world harshly scorn human reason as having anything worthwhile for Christian faith.

Is it any wonder that Christianity is failing in the West when it today rejects reason and science, which are the basis for some of the highest accomplishments of Christian civilization?