Menssen and Sullivan are two former agnostic philosophers who converted to Christianity. They should, therefore, be cognizant of the concerns of agnostics and the sort of apologetic strategies that agnostics might find appealing or convincing. This book is not written for agnostics but uses the hypothetical agnostic inquirer as foil for their meta-level inquiry into Christian apologetics.
The book begins with a dismissal of natural theology. Menssen and Sullivan contend that conventional apologetic approaches of first providing arguments for God’s existence, then for Jesus and other fundamentals, and only latterly turning to divine revelation (i.e. the Bible) is unlikely to prove convincing. This is because the principle objection to belief in God, the problem of evil, can only be countered by an adequate theodicy that justifies present suffering as a temporary expediency against the surety of everlasting blessings. Such a theodicy cannot be established by natural theology (that is, by reason alone) but is necessarily grounded in divine revelation. So the authors argue that a convincing apologetic must start with divine revelation. They reason that the proposition “God has revealed himself” can be considered directly without first considering the proposition “God exists” because the latter proposition is embedded in the former. They give examples of other embedded propositions that are investigation in this way, such as “a planet is affecting the orbits of Uranus and Neptune”, which presupposes the proposition “a planet [Pluto] exists”.
Having established this rationale for this immediate consideration of divine revelation, Menssen and Sullivan spend the rest of the book articulating how one might assess the claims of any particular text to be a divine revelation by considering a number of possible objections to divine revelation. As far as I can diagnose their suggested approach is as follows. We would be justified in taking a text as divine revelation if this was the best explanation of putative facts made by that text. The example they give is moral values, which, they argue, cannot be explained under atheism and are best explained by divine revelation. Though they are generally coy about working through their approach with reference to the Bible, they would argue that the Bible provides the principles on which to ground morality and this justifies its claim to be divine revelation.
This book is heavy-going as it is saturated with philosophy, some of which is extraneous to the argument being presented. Indeed one feels that the major moves in the argument could have been argued far more succinctly.
Whilst I agree with the authors that the problem of evil is a significant stumbling-block for seekers and that a full theodicy requires divine revelation, reason can at least demonstrate that evil is not logically inconsistent with God’s existence. In any case, seekers are unlikely to approach Christianity in such a granular way – even while focusing on natural theology, the seeker will be aware of Christianity’s other claims. Menssen and Sullivan seem to undermine their claim about the priority of divine revelation since they begin by seeking to demonstrate the probability of there being a God through the cosmological argument.
I think there is some value is the suggested route for justifying a text’s claim to be divine revelation. The explanatory power of the Bible as a ground of moral values is powerful and could form part of a cumulative case for its divine origin. However I wonder if, by itself, it is convincing. Whilst the seeker may appreciate the need to ground morality in something and whilst s/he may perceive the high moral principles given in the Bible, s/he may also be perturbed by examples of gross indecency, vice and malice displayed within the narratives of the Bible. S/he may also object to some of the Bible’s moral principles if they disagree with the social norms of her peers.
Menssen and Sullivan have undertaken an important project in a serious philosophical consideration of divine revelation and its role in apologetics and epistemology. However, though there are some useful insights here, I think further work is needed.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)