Who are the key rationalist thinkers who have impacted Christianity and do you know of any good books on this issue?

Kant?
Bacon?

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Richard
CofE
UK

Start with Plato, then read up on the neo-Platonists. As for true rationalists, it is a hard category because there is overlap, but I'd included Aquinas and DesCartes too.

Gordon Clark's Thales to Dewey is a good place to start. I haven't completely read Sproul's book The Consequences of Ideas, but it looks like it would give a helpful background too.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

rationalism in a good sense or in a bad sense?

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J. B. Atken
John Knox PCA
Layman, M.A. student at Louisiana College

Good question, I assumed in the bad sense, more or less.

St. Augustine, and subsequently all Christianity, was profoundly influenced by neo-platonism and Plotinus. Augustinianism/ neo-platonism are sometimes called rational mystic philosophies.

Thomas Aquinas is usually considered an empiricist. I suspect though that these epistemological generalizations are overly simplistic and anachronistic. Rationalism v. Empiricism was a 17th and 18th c. debate. Thomas thru Aristotle e.g. believed the primacy of experience yet held certain propositions to be self-evidencing knowledge while memory of past events mere opinion.

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*Peter Gray* Elkins Park RPCNA

"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. " Mk 9:24
"The greatest thing we can desire, next to the glory of God, is our own salvation; and the sweetest thing we can desire is the assurance of our salvation. In this life we cannot get higher than to be assured of that which in the next life is to be enjoyed. All saints shall enjoy a heaven when they leave this earth; some saints enjoy a heaven while they are here on earth." Joseph Caryl

Right you are. I hesitated to include Thomas Aquinas as a rationalist, except that I remembered his theistic proofs seemed to place reason above revelation--or at least acknowledged that reason could get you a long way before you needed revelation.

I agree that there are many nuances to the term "rationalism."

Both to be honest.

I think Nancy Pearcy is excellent, see http://www.gnpcb.org/sites/total.truth/

and here http://www.veritas.org/3.0_media/presenters/49

I would have thought that Darwin, Marx and Freud have had an influence for bad on Western Christianity (LIberalism, I would argue, is ancient Gnosticism).

For all that, there is nothing new 'under the sun' (the rationalist approach which results in nihilism).

Two key questions we ignore at our peril are
1. Is it right?
2. Is it true?

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Independent Reformed Baptist Church (NE England, nr. Durham)

Archbishops of Canterbury:
1. St. Anselm
2. Thomas Bardwardine

Had a great deal of influence in advancing a positive type of rationalism in England.

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Thomas Yeutter,
Mason, MI
Member St. Patrick's Anglican Church, Comstock, MI

Ezra 7:10 For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach its statues in Isreal.