Anne E. Inman, Evidence and Transcendence: Religious Epistemology and the God-World Relationship (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), ix + 188 Pps., $35.00
Anne E. Inman is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, London Centre, and a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London. In this title, Inman critiques modern attempts to explain the knowability of God and points the way toward a religious epistemology that avoids their pitfalls. She contends that Christian apologetics faces two major challenges: the classic Enlightenment insistence on the need to provide evidence for anything that is put forward for belief, and the argument that all human knowledge is mediated by finite reality and thus no ‘knowledge’ of a being interpreted as wholly Other than finite reality is possible.
Inman notes that modern Christian apologists have tended to understand their task primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of one of these challenges. As examples of contemporary rationalist and postliberal approaches, Inman analyzes in depth the religious epistemologies of philosopher Richard Swinburne and theologians George Lindbeck and Ronald Theimann, and concludes that their positions are not satisfactory, because they cannot hold God’s transcendence in tension with claims to human freedom and knowledge. More precisely, within chapter one, Inman argues that Swinburne’s treatment fails to account for how finite humans can apprehend the infinite God, even though his treatment of epistemology is able to make belief in God’s existence plausible. As such, Swinburne fails to acknowledge the mediated-ness of all human knowledge. The second chapter addresses Lindbeck and postliberal approaches to epistemology. In part, she shows that for Lindbeck, the justification of faith is impossible. In fact, for Lindbeck, she claims that he views all religious epistemology as foundational (37). The third chapter extends this line of thinking into an analysis of Thieman’s antifoundationalism. In so doing, she asserts that Thieman essentially equates the defense of religious belief with a defense of divine revelation (51).
Chapters four and five study the theology of Schleiermacher and Rahner, respectively, with regard to religious epistemology. Although coming from different faith trajectories, Inman notes that these two thinkers have essentially the same position regarding the relationship between God and the world and its bearing upon religious epistemology. For each of these two theologians, God truly gives Godself in revelation. Both theologians are also foundationalist to an extent, as well (133–34). Having explored the theologies of Schleiermacher and Rahner in these two chapters, Inman now transitions to her constructive work, which begins in chapter six. Against rationalist epistemologies, Inman calls for a grounding of Christian faith in the claim that God is known in and through human conscious activity, as the ‘other’ that proverbially grounds the finite. She avers that once the creator/creature relationship has been appropriately understood, epistemology is understood to be quite different than how rationalists or postliberals depict it; the knowing subject no longer stands at the centre of the epistemological process (149). Instead, God once again becomes able to be seen the ground of all being and – subsequently – all knowledge. Only a self-evident notion of God as the first cause of existence, as expressed in the pre-modern conceptions of God, can adequately account for the existence of God and the Godhead’s transcendence (154–155). From this assertion, Inman arrives at the main contention of this book: only such an accounting of God’s transcendence can adequately treat anthropological freedom (155).
Following Rahner and Schleiermacher, this book contends, then, that God’s transcendence is the ground of both human freedom and epistemology. Inman herein contributes a nice addition to systematic theology. Within it, she argues that it is possible to do Christian apologetics in today’s world by addressing the need for evidence and the insistence on the mediation of knowledge. More strongly, she argues that not only is it possible, but it is downright necessary in order to be effective witnesses in today’s environ. She uncovers a sound account of human freedom and knowledge, and thus it is a worthy addition to systematic theology courses that intersect with epistemology.
Bradford McCall, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA