Reviewing a prominent religious thinker's magnum opus is no easy task. Imagine a fourteenth-century reader entrusted with the job of reviewing the Summa Theologica for a bimonthly folio-review. Or a mid-twentieth century reviewer attempting to sum up the gist of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics in a page or two. It would be difficult, in either case, to convey the subtlety of argument, the depth of engagement with tradition, and the sheer intellectual scope of the project.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that a reviewer of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief faces a similar challenge. Plantinga's book isn't quite as long as Aquinas's or Barth's, but at just over 500 pages it brings to a hefty 1,000 the page-length of his Warrant trilogy (the first two volumes were published with Oxford in 1993). Like these other tomes, Warranted Christian Belief is the product of decades of effort, retraced steps, refined argumentation, prolonged meditation, and conversation with other philosophers and theologians. Moreover, like the Summa, Plantinga's book is meant to be accessible to the uninitiated (though there is some question whether Plantinga is any more successful than Aquinas was in this regard). And as in the Dogmatics, portions of Plantinga's book are published in small print; here the author addresses nitpicky questions that specialists might raise about the large-print points he makes for the general reader.

Unlike Barth or Aquinas, however, Plantinga has an eminently winsome writing style—down-to-business but also witty and at times playfully sarcastic. For example, Plantinga quips in the opening chapter on Kant that the apparent inconsistencies in Kant's writings are "all part of his charm," concludes that (despite Kant's protestations to the contrary) there is nothing in Kantian philosophy to prevent us from thinking that some of our concepts apply to God, and adds (for good measure) that "after all, it is not just a given of the intellectual life" that Kant is always right.

Later, Plantinga opens a discussion of twentieth-century postmodernism with what he apparently takes to be an epigram that fits the movement—namely,

What is truth?
—Pontius Pilate

He also includes a helpful analysis of the term "fundamentalist" used as an insult, first considering candidates like "sonovabitch" and its Southwestern synonym "sumbitch," moving on to consider variants such as "stupid sumbitch" and "fascist sumbitch," and finally concluding that "the full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use) can be given by something like 'stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.'" Few, I think, will want to quibble with this fine piece of conceptual analysis.

Witticisms aside, the book is to show that one can be "warranted" in holding theistic and even specifically Christian belief, even if one is a "sophisticated and knowledgeable contemporary believer aware of all the criticisms and contrary currents of opinion." This, in some sense, has been the aim of almost all of Plantinga's work.

His first book, God and Other Minds (1967), was an attempt to show that belief in God is at least as rationally acceptable as the belief that other people have mental states. When I see Russ hopping around and holding his bloodied right toe after stubbing it against a rock, I will probably form the belief that he is pain (rather than worrying about the possibility that he and everyone else is an automaton and that I am in the unfortunate position of being the only one who ever feels pain). Plantinga's claim was that there is about as much evidence for this belief in other minds as there is for belief in God, and thus that if the first sort of belief is rationally acceptable (as we all agree), then belief in God must be rationally acceptable too.

By the early 1980s, Plantinga's focus was less on evidence for and against belief in God's existence, and more on the alleged requirement that there be evidence for such belief if it is to be rationally acceptable. Together with other religious epistemologists working in the broadly Reformed tradition (including some of his colleagues at Calvin College, where he taught for many years before moving to Notre Dame), Plantinga adopted the position that certain sorts of beliefs, among them theistic ones, can be acceptable even if we don't have evidence to back them up. Belief in God, as Plantinga put it, can often be "properly basic."

Warranted Christian Belief is a sustained variation on this theme. Plantinga's intent is to identify and rebut what he calls the de jure objection to theistic belief in general and to the "full-blooded Christian belief" articulated in the great creeds. The de jure objection, he says, must be distinguished from the de facto objection. The latter is that we have no good reason to think that theistic belief is in fact true; the former objection sets aside the question of truth and claims that, in any case, theistic belief is not somehow permitted or acceptable for twenty-first-century cognoscenti.

After discarding a number of ways to flesh out this de jure objection, Plantinga suggests that the only really serious candidate is the charge, leveled most prominently by Marxists and Freudians, "that [theistic belief] doesn't originate in the proper function of cognitive faculties successfully aimed at producing true beliefs." Instead, the objection goes, religious belief is the result of a subconscious wish-fulfillment faculty, or perhaps it is the opiate with which the petty bourgeoisie is maliciously seeking to stupefy the masses. Plantinga's conclusion, then, is that the really substantive charge against theism is not that it is clearly untrue (how could anyone demonstrate that?), but rather that "theistic and Christian belief lacks warrant."

"Warrant" is that property of beliefs which, when combined with truth, produces knowledge. It's obvious that true beliefs alone don't count as knowledge: If I form a belief that the name of the tallest man in South Bend must be Murphy, because I once met a very tall man of that name who hailed from South Bend, this belief will not count as knowledge, even if it happens to be true. I am not "warranted" in holding it. In order to answer the de jure objection to Christian belief, then, we need a working account of warrant.

This is where the first two volumes of the trilogy come in: Plantinga devoted the first one, Warrant: The Current Debate, to an assessment of the other leading analyses of warrant on offer in the field of epistemology, concluding that none of them is adequate to the task. In particular, he sets aside "evidentialist" conceptions of warrant according to which a belief is warranted just in case one has good evidence for it. In the sequel, Warrant and Proper Function, he provided his own "Proper Function" theory of warrant as well as a defense against various objections. In this third volume, Plantinga recapitulates and refines his theory, and then puts forward two models whereby religious belief, in particular, can be warranted according to that theory.

The first model is what he calls the "Aquinas/Calvin model" of theistic belief-formation; the second is the "Extended Aquinas/Calvin model," which concerns specifically Christian belief. The bare-bones A/C model deals only with belief in God's existence, combined with the disposition "to love him, trust him, see his beauty and glory and loveliness." So although it is named after two prominent Christian writers, this model (unlike the Extended one) is intended to apply to Muslim, Jewish, and other theistic belief as well.

Central to both A/C models is the existence of a certain disposition or cognitive mechanism in the human mind—Plantinga follows Calvin in calling it the sensus divinitatis—which can be "triggered" in a variety of circumstance to produce beliefs about God. Most of the circumstances Plantinga lists involve the perception of "glories of nature"—both the sublime and the beautiful. But there are other circumstances, including the experience of great suffering or evil, in which the sensus may also be triggered. Thus Plantinga stands with the Savage in Brave New World who insists that "Belief in God is natural!" over against Mustapha Mond, the World-Controller, who claims that religion is merely a product of (bad) social conditioning.

As noted above, Plantinga's overall theory of warrant involves the application of the notion of "proper function" to our cognitive faculties. A belief has warrant only if the faculties that produced it were functioning properly, designed to acquire truth, and operating in an environment sufficiently similar to the one for which they were intended. So, for instance, the faculty of vision would produce a belief that does not have warrant if the eyes were malfunctioning when the belief was formed, or if they were operating in an environment where light travels in radically curved paths. Plantinga thinks that something analogous is true of the sensus divinitatis: only when it is functioning properly in a good environment will it produce warranted theistic belief.

Plantinga goes on to note that (according to the models) sin and its social consequences have damaged the sensus and made our cognitive environment more or less inimical to the formation of theistic belief. This dysfunction restricts the workings of the sensus such that in many people it produces false beliefs about God or even breaks down completely. It is this part of the story that is apparently supposed to explain the existence of the variety of religious beliefs which are inconsistent with Christian belief, as well as the existence of atheism.

The Extended A/C model is then brought in to show how Christians, in particular, can achieve wide-ranging "knowledge of God," in spite of sin and its cognitive, volitional, and affective consequences. On this model, God, in response to human sin, has "instituted a plan of salvation: the life and atoning passion and death of Jesus Christ, the incarnate second person of the Trinity." God then arranged for the production of Scriptural writings that reliably testify to this salvific activity on God's part, and God also sent the Holy Spirit to work in human hearts and minds, repairing the damage and removing the impedance to the sensus divinitatis caused by sin. This in turn allows the regenerate believer to come to knowledge of Christian truth—she comes to "grasp, believe, accept, endorse, and rejoice in the great things of the Gospel."

Plantinga describes the "Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit" that plays a central role in the Extended model as yet another belief-forming process—one which, though supernatural in origin, satisfies all of the conditions (on Plantinga's theory, anyway) for warrant and thus can produce knowledge. So according to the Extended model, a Christian's belief in the basic teachings of Christianity can (if true) amount to knowledge, even in the presence of sin.

In the 1980s, Time magazine christened Plantinga one of the world's "leading philosophers of God." With the publication of Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has put any lingering doubt to rest. It is a magisterial work. It is also a classic articulation of the movement in religious thought which, for the last two decades or so, has gone under the rubric of "Reformed Epistemology." Plantinga helped to found (and name) that movement during his tenure at Calvin College in the 1980s. There have always been, and still are, some important differences between Plantinga's views and those of the other leading Reformers, Nicholas Wolterstorff and William P. Alston. In Warranted Christian Belief (which is dedicated to Alston), Plantinga duly notes some of these differences, thereby adding to its value for those who want to understand the movement as a whole.

Plantinga also usefully ties the work of contemporary Reformed epistemologists to that of their predecessors in the Christian tradition who have articulated, less precisely perhaps, a similar line on the nature of religious knowledge. He interacts with a host of figures, from Aquinas and Calvin to Thomas Reid, Jonathan Edwards, and even Cardinal Newman, in an effort to make it clear that his view has an impressive philosophical and theological pedigree. This is surprising inasmuch as contemporary analytical philosophers are infamous for taking an attitude toward history that amounts roughly to the view that "If anybody in history had a really important idea, I'm sure we would have heard about it by now. Therefore historical figures are not worth reading." Plantinga is a contemporary analytical philosopher, but he bucks the trend, and theologians and historians of Christian thought will be impressed by the historical and theological acuity on display in this book.

Even the best books, however, have their weak spots. In Warranted Christian Belief, most of the weak spots turn up in the section devoted to a discussion of "defeaters" for the two A/C models. Plantinga races, in fewer than 150 pages, through the threats posed to Christian belief by the existence of evil and suffering in the world, by the fact of religious pluralism, by the work of postmodern theorists, and by the discoveries of historico-critical biblical scholarship. Specialists, particularly in these last two fields, will not be content either with the brevity of the discussion or with the rather sunny tone in which Plantinga concludes that these two forces, despite having roiled countless believers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are not really able to make a Christian "feel an obligation, intellectual or otherwise, to modify her belief in the light of [their] claims and alleged results."

Another drawback to the overall project is that it is, in an important sense, an idealization. Plantinga appears, throughout the book, to be presenting models for how most theistic/Christian belief can be warranted and thus, if true, count as knowledge. Elsewhere, however, he claims that a belief does not have enough warrant to count as knowledge unless the belief is firmly held. This claim is important to his theory for a variety of technical reasons: for instance, it is supposed to make sense of the fact that we sometimes have weakly held beliefs—some memory beliefs, for instance—which meet all the other conditions for warrant and yet, intuitively, don't amount to knowledge.

But putting this together, it turns out that Plantinga's model of Christian knowledge will have very little application to real believers, even if Christian doctrine is in fact true. For, as Calvin himself says, there is always a measure of "unbelief in all men"; few honest people consistently hold their religious belief with a high degree of firmness. (Plantinga seems to admit this in noting that "even the best and most favored of us are subject to doubt and uncertainty.")

Can the Extended A/C model make sense of this fact? Perhaps Plantinga, in a really Calvinist mood, would suggest that such people have not received enough of the Holy Spirit's regenerating work vis-à-vis their sensus divinitatis. In other words, they haven't been sufficiently blessed to be able to believe them sufficiently strongly to have knowledge of them. Elsewhere in the book it sounds like the presence of unbelief should be attributed to the ongoing effects of believers' freely chosen sin. Such people hold the central tenets of Christian doctrine to some degree—but not firmly enough for them to enjoy warrant sufficient for knowledge.

Either way, it looks like Plantinga's models of religious knowledge will simply not apply to the beliefs held by many religious people. Of course, the models also show how theistic and Christian belief can be justified and rational on most accounts of these notions. But by placing the focus largely on knowledge, Plantinga valorizes an ideal which only a select group of people will be able to realize, at least in the ante-mortem.

Plantinga seems to concede all this, in a footnote, by noting that the models only depict "pure and paradigmatic instances" of religious belief. But it is not clear what sort of person, if any, Plantinga would consider pure and paradigmatic in this regard, and at what stage in their lives. Perhaps there are epistemic saints among us who don't struggle with unbelief—maybe they consistently hold their religious beliefs with the degree of strength sufficient for knowledge. And perhaps there are moments when an average theist is overwhelmingly aware of God's presence such that all shadow of doubt flees and the propositions which she once took on faith are held firmly enough to achieve the status of knowledge. But I suspect that the vast majority of believers, most of the time, will have to settle for something considerably less exalted.

In spite of these minor shortcomings, Warranted Christian Belief is a tour de force. If it fails to make a big splash in the philosophy community, that will only be because so many philosophers are already intimately familiar with Plantinga's views after years of discussing them at conferences and in journals. For the newcomer, it will be a welcome summary of an important movement, and for anyone interested in debates about the rationality of religious belief, a reference book for many years to come.

Andrew Chignell is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Yale University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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