Book Review: Theology's Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response

Abstract

Theology's Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response. By Kevin Diller. Downers Grove, 111.: IVP Academic, 2014. 352 pp. $38.00 (paper).Theological realism, often beleaguered by postmodernist and postliberal thinkers, is staging a bit of a comeback. In one comer, Reformed philosophers of religion, such as Alvin Plantinga, have meticulously chipped away at modern Enlightenment skepticism to articulate a rational defense of belief. In the other comer, some scholars have retrieved Karl Barths commitment to the objective character of revelation. In this impressive study, Kevin Diller, associate professor of philosophy and religion at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, has woven together insights from these seminal Reformed thinkers to articulate a revamped paradigm for critical realism in theology.Such a convergence is not self-evident. When Plantinga and his colleagues have interrogated Barth, they typically have highlighted critical differences-say, over Barth's supposed denial of a sensus divinitatis in human nature and his trenchant attack on natural theology. Diller remains undaunted: he argues that both Barth and Plantinga, although adhering to different methods, both strongly affirm that revelation is sui generis-that God's special revealing action alone is the basis for knowledge of God among finite and sinful human creatures. These two scholars, Diller argues, offer an alternative to the extremes of fideist credulity and agnostic skepticism. This combined Barth-Plantinga proposal seeks to address what Diller considers to be the fundamental dilemma afflicting epistemology: Christian theologians are required to adopt a high view of theological knowledge while also maintaining a low view of the unaided capacities of the human knower to secure such knowledge. To use the biblical imagery, theology must acknowledge itself an impoverished earthen vessel while daring not to diminish the value of the treasure it confesses (p. 17).Part 1 articulates the main lines of this synthesis, which Diller labels theo-foundationalism. Revelation, he argues, is a personal, self-bestowing gift of Creator to creatures in the illuminating and personal transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Knowledge of God depends neither upon philosophical proofs nor upon natural human capacities; it is objectively real, both cognitive and affective in scope. Unlike modern subjectivists, Diller insists, both Plantinga and Barth view revelation as mediated to concrete communities of faith. Since God is both the author and the content of revelation, it is rendered truly in human speech while remaining intrinsically inexhaustible. Finally, theological epistemology, while independent in its source and authority basis, is not incongruent with general, non-religious theories of knowledge from philosophy or the human sciences. …