Evidence and Transcendence

Contents

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pp. vii-

Introduction: Current Challenges

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pp. 1-2

Over the last four centuries difficult questions have arisen in the area of religious epistemology. Christian apologetics faces two major challenges: the classic Enlightenment insistence on the need to provide evidence for anything that is put forward for belief; and the argument that all human knowledge is mediated by finite reality and thus “knowledge” of a being interpreted as completely other than finite reality is impossible or meaningless. Christian apologists...

Swinburne and Rationalism

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pp. 3-33

The philosopher Richard Swinburne is acutely conscious of the threat to religious belief, in particular Christian belief, posed by the argument that any truth claim must be justified or grounded in evidence. Dismissing the appeal to faith alone, he accepts the need to provide justification for Christian beliefs. Accordingly, he attempts to reassert the role of the metaphysical in religious epistemology by what he considers rational, even “scientific,” argument. The three elements of Swinburne’s defense of Christian faith are laid out in his trilogy: in The Coherence of Theism¹ he asserts the meaningfulness...

Postliberalism and Lindbeck

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pp. 35-48

Of the two, intimately connected epistemological challenges to Christian faith that are the topic of this study, the first stems from the view that it should be possible, through reasoned argument based on evidence of some sort, to justify belief in any truth that is professed. As indicated in chapter 1, Christian truths were raditionally grounded or justified in one of two ways. Certain truths, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, were accepted on authority, as having been revealed...

The Anti-foundationalism of Thiemann

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pp. 49-85

The first challenge to Christian faith with which this book is concerned arose from the Enlightenment and is, in that sense, a modern challenge. The second challenge, which forces the Christian apologist to recognize the mediation of all knowledge, is of more recent origin. It is part of the postmodern enterprise, which maintains a critical stance toward the thinking of the modern...

Schleiermacher and Absolute Dependence

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pp. 87-115

Michael J. Buckley in At the Origins of Modern Atheism has argued convincingly that a gradual separation of natural theology from metaphysics occurred beginning in the seventeenth century, with the rise of modern science and defenders of theism such as Lessing, Mersenne, and Descartes. For many ancient and medieval philosophers, there were questions about why anything whatsoever existed, questions about the “why” of being itself, which pointed to a completely “other” and transcendent cause...

Rahner’s “God”

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pp. 117-138

In portraying the consciousness of God as the permanent background to human conscious experience, Schleiermacher has provided a way of thinking about knowledge of God without compromising the notion that knowledge of God is radically distinct from knowledge of finite objects. It recognizes the infinite difference between the transcendent and the transcended, and yet allows for the claim that knowledge of God is mediated by the finite. The aim in this...

An Alternative Approach

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pp. 139-156

We now arrive at the question of how Rahner and Schleiermacher understand the relationship between God and the world. It is already evident that neither treats the world and God as parallel realities. Each in his different way has described the consciousness of God as the permanent background to human conscious experience. Rahner has explicitly stated that transcendental experience...

Notes

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pp. 157-172

Select Bibliography

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pp. 173-177

INDEX

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pp. 179-188