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The Christian Belief In God
By Daniel Jenkins
226 pp. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1964. $4.75.

It has become increasingly apparent in recent decades that the testimony of faith to the reality of God and intellectual inquiry into the existence of God have moved in orbits so remote from each other that they do not seem to converge even when the inquiry yields positive results. The significance of this impressive book by Daniel Jenkins lies in the fact that it attempts to correct this divagation and establish a real dialogue between faith and the various forms of the inquiry. It is necessary first of all to remove the typical modern misunderstanding that faith pretends to have answers to all the questions and these answers are naive, primitive, and no longer tenable. True faith, and Biblical faith in particular, as Jenkins demonstrates, manifests itself in the realm of mystery, crisis, and tragedy which encompases human existence. It is not, as such, immune to inquiry. On the contrary, faith itself demands inquiry, as Anselm saw. Only, the inquiry must be focused on its proper object; it must avoid the error, which Anselm perhaps did not wholly succeed in avoiding, of transmuting the mystery of faith into a philosophical problem or a linguistic puzzle. If there is a danger of circularity, the alternative is the asking of foolish questions, which, as Kant pointed out, can only receive foolish answers.

Thus with regard to the theistic proofs, Jenkins argues, like Tillich and Jaspers among others, that despite their logical invalidity they have a significance as pointers to aspects of the encompassing mystery "which call attention to the possibility of the existence of God," or, as Jaspers put it more felicitously, "They are roads of thought by which we come to limits at which the consciousness of God suddenly becomes a natural presence." If their demolition exhibits our superior logical acumen, it may also betray the limited range of our sensibility as human beings.

Jenkins shows a refreshing and (for an Englishman) remarkable freedom from obsession with the linguistic and analytical philosophies which dominate the English universities. While he thinks their "fierce linguistic puritanism" should be welcome to theology, he sees in much of their work a danger of trivialization (as some one has put it, Not only are they fiddling while Rome is burning, they are taking the fiddle apart); yet at the same time he suspects in some of it, especially in that

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of Wittgenstein, an "existentialist" desire to construct islands of meaning in an ocean of meaninglessness.

Faith for Jenkins means Biblical faith, more precisely Christian faith. This is his cardinal position. He rejects the common assumption that faith in God must first be established on independent grounds before the specific attitude of Jesus can be of any interest to us. He takes seriously the humanity of Jesus as a man who had to face the question of the reality of God in precisely the same way as all other men, who had to struggle for faith in conflict with doubt, temptation, and dereliction, and whose faith was vindicated by God in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is pivotal for faith, but not in the sense that the Resurrection is something that Christians "have to believe." Faith is in the risen and living Christ who is present in his reality and power.

The inquiry which follows is addressed to the questions whether faith is not an illusion and how it comports with human tragedy, with suffering, and with the plurality of rival faiths. In broad terms, the question is whether faith opens men to reality, or merely to imaginary, partial, selected, or inconclusive aspects of it. This involves the abandonment of a traditional method of apologetics, which can still be met in some quarters, and which seeks to demonstrate that the Christian faith is the answer to human need; for though there is a sense in which this is true, there is a risk of its being said too glibly and in a manner which ignores the dimension of tragedy in life. Jenkins sees here a hangover from the idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century and suggests that it may be more prevalent in American churches than else where. He takes seriously the centrality of the cross and studiously avoids any type of argument that would, in effect, by-pass it.

Like everything Jenkins has written, this book abounds in thoughtful suggestion, and every reader will find it richly rewarding. It leaves in this reader's mind one uneasy question, to which he does not know the answer: How to account for the possibility of unbelief? The older preachers had a simple answer; they ascribed it to moral delinquency. But if this was too transparently Pharisaical, is there not a subtle Pharisaism in the constantly recurring suggestion of Jenkins that the answer is limited sensitivity to the mystery of existence, which, being translated, takes the form of triviality and superficiality? Readers of Reinhold Niebuhr can hardly have failed to notice that his highest term of praise for any writer is "profound." Have we shifted our Pharisaism from the moral ("Unholier than thou") to the intellectual plane?

No doubt the "simple faith" of past ages is largely a myth, as Jenkins points out. Faith has in fact been, as it should always be, its own severest critic. But the paradox, which can be discovered in the parish, is that

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simple faith can still exist, without being anachronistic, and can make its own "profound" impact.

This is not a criticism, but merely a question which the book has stirred up in one reader, who is grateful to it, not only for doing this, but for opening up neglected aspects of its theme in a fresh and stimulating way.

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey