By any standard, Richard Swinburne's contribution to analytic philosophy of religion and philosophical theology has been immense. His trilogy on the philosophy of religion and his tetralogy on philosophical theology will remain standard works of reference for the foreseeable future. In these books, he has set a formidable standard for future work in these twin fields. But in addition to this academic output, Swinburne has written two more popular-level works, which sum up the larger projects he has been engaged in. The first of these, Is There a God?, considered many of the issues that he had tackled in his work on the philosophy of religion. He has now produced a more popular-level treatment of some of the key themes in his work on philosophical theology, entitled Was Jesus God?
In this book we find familiar themes: the Swinburnian argument for the overall probability of a number of claims made by Christian theologians, here shorn of its formalized Bayesian trappings, but clearly present nonetheless. The major theological concerns of the work include the divinity of Christ; his incarnation, atonement, and resurrection; the role of the Church; the Bible; and the prospect of heaven. These are matters he has tackled at a more technical level in books like, Revelation, Responsibility and Atonement, The Christian God, and, more recently, The Resurrection of God Incarnate. But here, as with his earlier popular work, Swinburne attempts to set out his stall for a broader audience. The result is, I think, a very helpful addition to the literature that will commend itself to those teaching undergraduates, many of whom will find this ‘Swinburne-lite’ volume to be a useful point of entry into his work in philosophical theology.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Swinburne sets out a priori reasons for thinking that the central claims of Christianity are true. His approach to these matters depends on a ‘moderate’ probability that there is a God. That is, on the basis of evidence from the natural world around us and from human religious experience, he presumes that the existence of God is probable, but not necessarily that it is more probable than not. Then, in the second part of the book, he gives a posteriori reasons for thinking that the teaching of holy writ, the Christian church, and the Christian tradition regarding the life and work of Christ, when taken together with the a priori claims of the first part of the book, constitute good grounds for thinking it ‘very probable’ that Christ was God incarnate, and that he did perform the acts scripture, the Church, and tradition ascribe to him.
The first chapter sets out the concept of God in brief. Swinburne presumes that God is a single person, in keeping with Western theism, although this is complicated later on in the book when he considers the doctrine of the Trinity. Of course, the version of this Western theism to which we are treated is the one that Swinburne has elaborated upon elsewhere. There are aspects of his position that are controversial, such as that God does not know the future actions of significantly morally free creatures like human beings, or that God has obligations which He must fulfil, or that God is in time. The resulting (Swinburnian) version of theism is quite different from that of traditional, classical Christian theology. For, on Swinburne's reckoning, the precise future outcome of God's relationship with individual human creatures is not something God can know in advance of events as they unfold in time.
This idea, made popular in recent times through the advent of open theism, is a very strange view for an orthodox Christian like Swinburne to take. For orthodoxy holds that the tradition of the Church plays a formative (arguably, fundamental) role in Christian theology. And the fact is, some of the most prominent historic orthodox divines have reasoned that God does know the future, even though He does not predetermine the significantly morally free acts of human creatures (e.g. St John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa, II. XXX). Yet Swinburne offers no explanation of the eccentricities of his own account of the divine nature in this volume.
Chapter 2, ostensibly about divine love, actually defends the doctrine of the Trinity. Swinburne defends the Augustinian idea that God has no ‘thisness’ – He has no property above and beyond the property or properties of His essence that individuates Him. Yet God is triune, the divine persons being individuated by properties above and beyond those they share. Each of the divine persons is said to be metaphysically necessary, but only the Father and the godhead as a whole are said to be ontologically necessary. The distinction seems to mean that the Son and the Holy Spirit may depend upon the Father for their existence, whereas the Father (like the godhead as a whole) depends on nothing for his existence. In which case, amongst the divine persons only the Father exists a se (from himself). The other divine persons exist per aliud (from another). Yet the Godhead as a whole is said to exist a se.
Unlike his remarks about the divine nature in the first chapter, Swinburne is keen to relate his comments on the Trinity in the second chapter to thinkers in the tradition. The a priori argument for the Trinity that he deploys has precedent in the work of several classical theologians. Swinburne aligns his version with Richard of St Victor. His account yields a divine society, a ‘personal being’ where different divine persons have their own sphere of influence in order to preclude a conflict of will between the distinct persons in God.
There are many contemporary theologians who support such language of a ‘social’ Trinity. But this reviewer is distinctly uneasy with language that allows the possibility that a divine person could will something contrary to the will of the other divine persons in the Godhead. Taken together with what he says about God's lacking thisness, Swinburne's model of the Trinity here seems to mean that a given instance of the divine nature is God. The reasoning goes like this: God lacks thisness, meaning here, God is what He is in virtue of His properties; each divine person is God (a deliverance of Christian theology); so each divine person is what He is in virtue of His properties; and each divine person is God. The individuation of divine persons is down to the property or properties an individual divine person has that are essential to that divine person, and are not shared with the other two divine persons. So it looks like ‘being God’ is a kind essence, that is, a property an entity has provided it exemplifies a certain nature, rather like ‘being human’ is a property an entity has provided it exemplifies a certain nature. It is not an individual essence, since what individuates the divine persons is some property or properties over-and-above the kind essence ‘being God’.
Swinburne defines tritheism as ‘the belief that there are three independent gods’ (28). But what more is needed on Swinburne's reckoning for the persons of his Trinity to count as independent gods? Presumably, they would need thisness. The upshot of this is that God is a society of divine persons, each member of which exemplifies the requisite kind essence in order to count as an instance of God. However, they are not distinct gods because the kind essence in question is individuated by further properties in a given individual essence (the essence of a particular divine person) not something ‘underlying’ its properties.
Some will find this a little difficult to swallow. But what is particularly interesting is that Swinburne goes on to claim that his construal of the Trinity is in fact either the explicit doctrine of the Nicene Creed or how it has been traditionally, and uncontroversially understood (35). As he reads the Creed, the use of theos (God) denotes either a proper name, or a divine person. But, rather tellingly, he thinks that the Creed's affirmation that Father, Son, and Spirit are each God means they are ‘members of the same kind’, that is, divine persons, not the entity with the proper name, God. Certainly this would be consistent with his a priori doctrine of the Trinity. But whether it constitutes the traditional and uncontroversial way in which the doctrine has been understood in the tradition is another matter.
Similar concerns arise when considering the simplified presentation of Swinburne's account of the incarnation. Christ's human nature is a property of God the Son. His human consciousness is a way of speaking of those ‘semi-beliefs’ God the Son would hold were he a human person, though he is not (43). The ‘reasonable soul’ of Christ given in the catholic creeds he understands in an Aristotelian sense, as a form, not as a distinct substance. This is very strange, given that Swinburne has also maintained elsewhere in an updated version of Cartesian dualism that human beings are normally composed of a body and soul. If Swinburne is right about the incarnation, then Christ has a human body, but the human ‘reasonable soul’ he has is not a soul as such. It is not a distinct substance, but the property of a divine person. There are ways in which one can parse this to avoid unorthodoxy, e.g. that God the Son acquires the property of being the human soul of Christ at the first moment of incarnation. Still, the fact is that a great many theologians have not understood Christ's ‘reasonable soul’ in the way Swinburne does – despite his claim (49) that the bishops of the Council of Chalcedon ‘must have understood’ Christ's reasonable soul in an Aristotelian way. Apparently Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Edwards, and a host of other divines failed to notice this.
Chapter 4, on the atonement, rehearses Swinburne's well-known argument in Responsibility and Atonement. Atonement is a non-necessary act of God whereby He elects to sacrifice His Son as an atoning act. Human beings must align themselves with this act in order to benefit from it. And atonement includes the four components: repentance, apology, reparation, penance, for human guilt that is both objective and subjective in nature. Human beings are sinners; we inherit original sin (a sort of proneness to wrongdoing). But Swinburne rejects the concept of original guilt. Adam's progeny inherit his debt, so to speak, but not the guilt thereof.
The fifth chapter deals with morality under God. In addition to necessary moral truths, Swinburne speaks of moral truths made obligatory by God's command, including moral truths revealed through propositional revelation. But this body of revealed (moral) truth can be misunderstood. For this reason, a Church is needed to safeguard the right interpretation of doctrine, including the moral teaching of holy writ. This is a doctrine that the vast majority of Christians find uncontroversial (i.e. Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics). But many Protestants, including many Christian philosophers, for whom the sola scriptura principle is important, will have some concerns here.
The sixth chapter, which ends the first part of the book, offers an account of eschatology. Heaven is characterized as a reward for those who have made themselves good (81). Hell is a place where the unreformed will be sent. Swinburne suggests – rather tentatively in this volume – that those who are hell-bound may well be annihilated, rather that suffering everlasting punishment. Unlike Thomas Talbott, Swinburne does not think God would ‘re-format’ the character of those impenitent sinners who are bound for hell. They have shaped their characters through bad, significantly free, moral choices and changing that would be interference on the part of the deity.
I have spent much more time on the first part of the book than I will on the second. This is not because the second part is lacklustre, or otherwise inferior, but just because there are (to my mind) more interesting things to be said about the first part. The second part considers the evidence for the claims of the first part. It is here that Swinburne's use of probability comes to the fore, as he assesses the traditional creedal claims about the person and work of Christ. But, given his other theological commitments, he thinks it is important to say something about the Church as the means by which teaching about Christ life and work is preserved, and about the reliability of the Bible as the extant record of Christ's life and work. These are not appendages to his argument, but as in Revelation, important components for building his case that it is more probable than not that Christ was God.
As with his previous work, Swinburne raises a number of issues to do with the role of the Church and the nature of the canonical biblical material that repays careful reading. Although Swinburne does not focus on the claim that God speaks in scripture, he does argue that it is the divine authorship of scripture that is theologically important. This divine authorship is not necessarily the same as the views expressed by particular biblical authors. Swinburne pays closer attention to what the Fathers say on this matter, which makes for a more historically, and perhaps theologically, nuanced account, than that presented in some of the other chapters.
The method Swinburne adopts in this volume is of a piece with his earlier work. Some theologians may find it a strange way to proceed, adopting an a priori approach to Christian doctrine, setting out the parameters of what would most likely be the case before examining the evidence. But, to be fair to Swinburne, he is hardly the first Christian to adopt such a method (vide Anselm's Monologion). His confidence in what we can establish, independent of revelation, may seem rather too sanguine for some. I have indicated places where I think Swinburne's case is open to objection. But nothing I have said should detract from the fact that this is an accessible, readable introduction to what Swinburne thinks about central issues in philosophical theology, in which he has taken great pains to condense the reasoning of his more technical works without sacrificing the core ideas he wants to convey.
(My thanks to Professor Paul Helm for useful comments on an earlier draft of this review.)
