The Coherence of Christian Theism
27
Conclusion
In Part III it has been my concern to show that Christian theism is coherent where “coherent” is understood to mean “containing or entailing no contradictions.” My objective in doing so was not to show that Christianity is in fact true but to gain rational permission to examine the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. This was a point discussed in the Introduction. There I noted that if it could be shown that Christianity lacked internal coherence we would have the strongest possible epistemic justification for rejecting it. And in that case any historical evidence purporting to authenticate its founding miracle would need to be met with profound skepticism. The purpose of Part III was therefore to “clear the air” by showing that, whether or not the evidence will show Christianity to be probably true, a priori reasoning shows its claims to be possibly true.
The structure of Part III is the most intricate of the entire argument. And since it forms an important part of the background knowledge against which we will be examining the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, I think it would be helpful to briefly review what has been established in the previous seven chapters.
In practical terms "clearing the air" involved defending Christian doctrine against objections. The first objection arose from religious pluralism—the fact that there are many religions in the world all making competing claims. In reply to it I suggested that religious pluralism should be understood as part of the problem of divine hiddenness. Because divine hiddenness vouchsafes human moral freedom it is plausible that God would allow a multiplicity of world religions. But this also entails that, if he does reveal himself, it must be possible for a determined and conscientious inquirer to discover that he has done so. And so I concluded that whatever religion has, on balance, the greatest a priori coherence and the strongest historical evidence for a miraculous authentication is far more probably than not, and far more probably than any other, the special revelation of God.
This established the structure of the rest of the argument. In Chapters 21 to 26 I showed that Christianity has greater a priori coherence and in Part IV I will show that the strength of the evidence for its founding miracle is better than for any other claimed miracle in history—which means, recall, that the reply to religious pluralism will not be complete until the entire argument is complete.
It is also worth recalling that while Swinburne's arguments for the Incarnation and the Trinity were given with a view to establishing the general coherence of Christianity they greatly exceeded their brief by establishing the high prior probability of two basic Christian doctrines: Given human sin and suffering, it is highly probable that a morally perfect God will become incarnate; and given that God is all powerful and all loving, God is necessarily a Trinity. Just as knowledge of John’s criminal past and present indigence may prove him more likely to have committed a further crime prior to the discovery of his fingerprints at the crime scene, so moral reflection on the nature of God and the condition of man may suggest what God is like and what he is likely to do prior to our consideration of the historical evidence for the Resurrection. The arguments of Chapter 21 and 22 therefore provide a priori grounds for affirming the probable truth of Christianity prior to the historical evidence—since Christianity, of course, claims both that God is a Trinity and that God became incarnate.
Having set out the structure of my response to religious pluralism and defended two central Christian doctrines, I next discussed scientific and moral objections to the Bible and moral objections to the doctrine of Hell and found them all to be without warrant.
In Chapter 24 the claimed conflict between science and Christianity was shown to be false: Western empirical science emerged in Christian Europe and nowhere else and has been assisted throughout its development by prominent Christian theists. A Christian, moreover, is not required to accept on faith claims that are in conflict with science; per contra, the alleged conflict only arises from taking every sentence of the Bible literally—an approach promoted by modern fundamentalists but rejected by the Church. To explain this I introduced the Patristic Method developed by the Church Fathers and argued that a Christian can, and should, accept the rational and nuanced interpretation of scripture it allows and which comes down to us from the Church Jesus founded. And while a Christian is committed to the belief that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead, this is something than can be rationally assessed on the available evidence of natural theology and history: Claimed grounds for rejecting reports of miracles out of hand were also shown to be unfounded.
In Chapter 25 the claim that violent passages in the Old Testament are incompatible with the moral perfection of God was also shown to be unfounded. There I set out in much more detail the Patristic Method of interpretation introduced in the previous chapter and showed it to completely resolve the alleged conflict and also to be rationally consistent with basic principles used to interpret texts and also to have a valid historical provenance in the early life of the Church. And since there is finally no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without also accepting the interpretative method which the Church gave the world together with the Bible after claiming for the latter its unique authority, I concluded that there are no indefeasible moral objections against the Christian Bible.
It only remained to discuss the doctrine of Hell. This was the subject of Chapter 26. I began by acknowledging that the claim that God is all loving and the claim that God punishes his creatures eternally for finite offences are irreconcilable. However, I then demonstrated that this objection is based on a crude caricature of Hell that is quite different from what the Church actually teaches. Hell is not a physical location in which souls are actively tormented by God but an existential state that an incorrigibly bad person enters by freely and permanently rejecting the divine love. Hell, I suggested, therefore pays deep respect to persons: Faced with the incorrigibly bad, God does not force upon them a good moral character and he does not destroy them. God accepts the person they have chosen to be and provides a place in his created order for them to live out the reality of being that person. I concluded my discussion of Hell with the suggestion of Fr. Robert Barron: We must accept the possibility of Hell in view of human freedom but, in view of the outlandish love God demonstrated through the Passion of Jesus, we may also reasonably hope that it is empty.
So: We have seen that Christian doctrine is coherent; indeed, that two of its key doctrines have high a priori probability. I conclude that we have gained rational permission to examine the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. And this is the subject of the next four chapters.