This is an ambitious book covering the work of a long and remarkable career. Richard Swinburne, who turned 90 last year, retired from his post as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford over 20 years ago, but happily has shown no signs of retiring from philosophical thinking and writing. There could be many defensible approaches to a body of work as rich and wide-ranging as that detailed in the valuable bibliography provided (11 pages of works by Swinburne and a representative summary of secondary literature, pages 367–381 of this book), and what follows is not intended as criticism of the approach taken here. It’s worth, though, being clear which choices have been made.

The book is principally an account of Swinburne’s major works commending the rationality, and the rational defensibility, of theistic and then more specifically Christian faith. That distinction, between ‘bare’ theism and ‘ramified’ theism, informs the basic structure of the work, with the former allocated four and the latter five of the numbered chapters. An introductory section (‘Life, Works and Philosophical Foundations’) gives us 14 pages of personal and intellectual biography, followed by some description of the philosophical context within which Swinburne’s work was initiated, and a descriptive overview of his major publications. The ground plan of the main parts of the book are sketched here: each succeeding chapter will deal with one particular element of the project in philosophical theology that has constituted so much of his life’s work, starting with an account of the work in question, describing the philosophical ‘framework’ it manifests and its key philosophical arguments and positions, and then proceeding to a discussion of theological application. This done, each chapter turns to some brief critical engagements with the matter under discussion, and some responses to each.

Those familiar with the order in which Swinburne’s major works in philosophical theology were initially published may be surprised to see that although the first two volumes of the initial trilogy The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God and Faith and Reason form the matter for discussion of Chapters 1 and 2 as expected, the third is actually held over to the very last chapter of the book. The (perfectly sensible) justification for this is found on page 339, where it is noted both that even the first (1981) edition of the work was ‘on specifically showing the rationality of Christian belief and faith’ (thus belonging more obviously with the material on ‘ramified theism’), and that the second (2005) edition was able to take into account the results of the tetralogy of books more directly concerned with theological and doctrinal themes. The remaining two chapters of Part 1 are on two topics, evil (Chapter 3, on Providence and the Problem of Evil) and the metaphysical and moral nature of the human person (Chapter 4, on Mind, Brain and Free Will) which round out the treatment of ‘bare’ theism whilst clearly pointing towards themes, including that of faith and reason, to be taken up in Part 2.

The second part of the book proceeds to tackle in turn each of the books of the sequence engaging in philosophical discussion of aspects of Christian belief (The Christian God, Responsibility and Atonement, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy) before the concluding chapter on Faith and Reason. Those wanting an introduction to Swinburne’s work may well be interested in just the areas covered, and for them the shape of the book will have significant merit. We may note, though, that the book is principally an introduction to the philosophical theology of Richard Swinburne – a fair enough decision, not just given likely audience but also Swinburne’s own motivations in many of the areas of philosophy to which he has made contributions – and that the shape of the work prioritizes critical comment mainly from those with particular interest in the philosophy of religion. This isn’t universally the case – the chapter on Mind, Brain and Free Will (Chapter 4) does contain some discussion motivated directly by the philosophical arguments on that work published in general philosophy journals and concerned with issues in the philosophy of mind – but it’s a consequence of the approach adopted that a serious and direct critical engagement with (as Swinburne himself notes in his preface to the book) his specific and rather controversial views is somewhat suppressed. Swinburne’s contributions to the philosophy of science, to the serious analysis, assessment, and advocacy of unfashionable positions in the philosophy of mind, and so forth, might well incline even those given to skepticism regarding the possibility or significance of any serious constructive work in the philosophy of religion to regard his philosophy as deserving of respect and critical engagement on a number of fronts. The main title of the book under review, then – A Rational Faith – gives a proper sense of the focus.

Sijuwade is clearly an admirer of Swinburne’s work, and having set up an outline for the project he then seeks as faithfully as possible to expound the text and its significance without his own critical intervention, before in thumbnail summary introducing critics one by one. The critics may be reviewers of books, in which case a reference to criticism will be to a short review or critical notice from a journal; sometimes though references are to longer journal articles concentrating at greater length and depth on particular matters. Short reviews are rarely going to be sources of highly developed and penetrating criticism, and the approach of picking off critical engagement piecemeal, responding with a brief ‘what can be said against this view’, sits a bit uneasily with discussion of the work of an author famous for his commitment to the ‘cumulative case’. Just as cumulative cases can be decisive for rational commitment to particular beliefs, so allowing a body of criticism to build and interact might generate a more powerful negative case than that achieved by any one particular critical engagement, and it’s disappointing to this reader that the author didn’t permit himself the freedom to generate more compelling and rounded critique, noting, especially for the reader new to this body of work, why some of the views really are controversial. (It isn’t just fashion!)

Swinburne himself is a notably clear and concise writer, though the matters he deals with in his works are themselves of course complex and difficult, and Sijuwade’s exposition is inevitably rarely a satisfactory substitute for reading the work under discussion. Sometimes the expression may provoke misunderstanding for those unfamiliar with the broader philosophical conversations and who seek to follow the discussion very precisely. The standard of footnoting is rather variable, often directing the reader very helpfully to specific pages in books or articles but sometimes to very large expanses of text without further handholding (two pages of Géza Vermes’s book Jesus the Jew at note 1 on page 284; the whole two volumes of Ian Crombie’s An Examination of Plato’s Doctrines at note 10 on page 67, not all of which is relevant to the point being made about language!) The index is curious, and may be the result of partial human intervention on an auto-generated first pass. The entry for ‘Faith’ seems to refer to 265 of the 363 pages of text, whilst the three references to Bayesian probability, a very important theme in Swinburne’s work and in the book, miss the vital introductory discussion on pages 40–42 altogether. Both the more ample and the more minimalist approaches render the work less useful than it would otherwise be to someone coming to Swinburne’s work through it.

Some of the critical engagement with Swinburne’s work which is noted by Sijuwade comes from perspectives hostile to religious faith; much, though, is motivated, as Swinburne’s work has been, by a desire for truth, and a belief that a life of reason and a life of faith in God are at the very least compatible. Many of the critics, indeed, are fellow-believers. It’s possible for perspectives even here to be broadly sympathetic to the overall project, or to differ very sharply. It’s not always clear that those Sijuwade discusses among the critics are being read with appropriate regard for the moral seriousness of their purpose (or appreciation of what their purpose is; the introduction of DZ Phillips simply as a proponent of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’ on page 69 looks as though it reads Phillips from a perspective that Phillips himself might at least have wanted to have treated with greater nuance). Phillips would stand as an example of a particular philosopher regarding Swinburne’s approach to matters of religious faith as misconceived, and there’s no real head-on discussion of general methodology in the book under review of a kind such as to bring these perspectives into serious engagement so as to help the reader see what is at stake. Those unsympathetic to the ‘philosophy-first’ approach in matters of faith (a description Swinburne himself refers to in his preface, and to which Sijuwade commits in his exposition) may wonder at the specifically religious value of this style of philosophizing about religion and religious faith; I recall, though, one very bright undergraduate telling me, almost 30 years ago, of how reading Swinburne’s works had ‘saved my faith’. Another recollection is of a philosopher, who turns up as one of the more sympathetic critics in Sijuwade’s book, delivering a lecture at a philosophy of religion conference on a narrowly technical aspect of modal metaphysics. An unsympathetic audience member turned to me afterwards and remarked, as criticism rather than as question, ‘What did he think he was doing?’ ‘Praying?’, I hazarded in response, which received the blank stare I had rather expected. It will I hope be clear from this book, clear indeed even from the two pages of Swinburne’s preface, that in his case, too, such a thought might not be so very wildly off the mark.