The Reasonableness of Faith by Diogenes Allen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 791 political and sociological problems. Barr's questioning of the real seriousness of the Church in exercising her own genuine biblical morality is pointed and sharp. In doing so, Barr is testifying to the prominence that has been given in contemporary culture to the ethic of responsibility over the ethic of conviction. The first makes its ultimate concern in the determination of rightness or wrongness the presence of agape in the personal empirical verifiable consequences of one's actions; the second makes the ultimate concern the principle or the rule with more or less indifference to the consequences. My own position developed in Christian Ethics For Today (Bruce-Macmillan, 1969) is that we cannot live on just one of these ethics c:onsistently, constantly and uniformally, but we have to live on both in dialectical tension. Conscience in this ethic of tension becomes then a response with evaluational knowledge and freedom of one person to the Person of Christ incarnate in other persons. The person is the communicating existent who stands at the convergence of a series of relationships arising from his encounter with another person or persons. It is the person who must resolve this dialectical tension that exists between the two ethics, the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction . This strikes me as the more genuine Christian ethic and defensible in the biblical evidence. At least it is more defensible than the situationalism of pure-act-agapism. ProfessoT of Moral Philosophy College of Business Administration Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701 THOMAS A. WASSMER, s. J. The Reasonableness of Faith. By DIOGENES ALLEN. Washington: Corpus Books, 1968. Pp. 160. $4.95. Is affirming the tenets of faith a reasonable act? It is to this problem that Diogenes Allen addresses himself from the context of contemporary British philosophy. It is no longer possible to present a rational proof for God's existence. Traditional arguments like those of Aquinas have not recovered from the critiques of Hume and Kant. For that matter, the very meaningfulness of propositions about God has been called into question. But to these challenges there have been thoughtful responses on the part of believers. Thanks to linguistic analysis we are more careful in our use of religious language. Logical positivism raises the more troublesome problem: are ultimate questions worth the asking? Ian Ramsey, Austin Farrar and English Thomists have endeavored to show that Christianity offers the most satisfying world-view or that the world as we know it points of itself to a Creator. Professor Allen prefers to side with John Hick 79fl BOOK REVIEWS in this discussion: theism can at best be a plausible option. But this is beside the point. Christianity is more a medium of salvation than an explanation of the world. In fact, religious questions cannot be a matter of disinterested knowledge, for if there is a God, this fact will affect my life. The necessary and sufficient ground for faith is that it satisfies certain needs in man. This is not to say that religion is purely a projection of personal wishes. Religion arouses and satisfies needs of its own, e. g., a consciousness of sin and a desire for a Redeemer. It is a matter of concern to the believer that the Redeemer he believes in really exists and is not just a figment of his imagination. Hence, faith implies a truth-claim and can, in principle, be falsified. Theology must preserve consistency in religious language and steer clear of contradictions both within the system and with the empirical world. On the other hand, faith is not just a matter of rational argument. Faith has its rationales, but even challenges that cannot be answered successfully do not in fact destroy the faith of the believer. This is because the actual ground for faith is the spiritual " nourishment " received from it, aside from any knowledge; needs are satisfied and that makes faith reasonable enough. Of course, not every need warrants every affirmation but only such as pass the " bizarreness test." The need must be neither ignoble nor irrelevant but properly relevant to the affirmation. Thus, to believe in a Redeemer in order to gain attention would be ignoble...