Assumed audience: Theologically-orthodox Christians, or folks interested in things that theologically-orthodox Christians think.
These claims by Webster on reason are, on the one hand, so thoroughly within the bounds of traditional Christian thinking that they barely need saying —
Like all other aspects of human life, reason is a field of God’s sanctifying work. Reason, too — along with conscience, the will and the affections — must be reconciled to the holy God if it is to do its work well. And good Christian theology can only happen if it is rooted in the reconciliation of reason by the sanctifying presence of God.
Christian theology, however, must beg to differ [with any claim that natural reason does not need to be made holy]. It must beg to differ because the confession of the gospel by which theology governs its life requires it to say that humankind in its entirety, including reason, is enclosed within the history of sin and reconciliation. The history of sin and its overcoming by the grace of God concerns the remaking of humankind as a whole, not simply of what we identify restrictively as its ‘spiritual’ aspect. And so reason, no less than anything else, stands under the divine requirement that it be holy to the Lord its God.
— and yet they do need saying, because for one thing all God’s truth is worth reminding ourselves of over and again and for another there are many ways in which the sanctification of reason can come under attack: by hositility and by neglect alike.
What’s more: I find the reminder a good help to my own heart, a reminder of the purpose for which God gave me the mind he gave me, and a call to the good work he set before me.