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Reviewing a prominent religious thinker's magnum opus is no easy task. Imagine a fourteenth-century reader entrusted with the job of reviewing the Summa Theologica for a bimonthly folio-review. Or a mid-twentieth century reviewer attempting to sum up the gist of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics in a page or two. It would be difficult, in either case, to convey the subtlety of argument, the depth of engagement with tradition, and the sheer intellectual scope of the project.
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that a reviewer of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief faces a similar challenge. Plantinga's book isn't quite as long as Aquinas's or Barth's, but at just over 500 pages it brings to a hefty 1,000 the page-length of his Warrant trilogy (the first two volumes were published with Oxford in 1993). Like these other tomes, Warranted Christian Belief is the product of decades of effort, retraced steps, refined argumentation, prolonged meditation, and conversation with other philosophers and theologians. Moreover, like the Summa, Plantinga's book is meant to be accessible to the uninitiated (though there is some question whether Plantinga is any more successful than Aquinas was in this regard). And as in the Dogmatics, portions of Plantinga's book are published in small print; here the author addresses nitpicky questions that specialists might raise about the large-print points he makes for the general reader.
Unlike Barth or Aquinas, however, Plantinga has an eminently winsome writing style—down-to-business but also witty and at times playfully sarcastic. For example, Plantinga quips in the opening chapter on Kant that the apparent inconsistencies in Kant's writings are "all part of his charm," concludes that (despite Kant's protestations to the contrary) there is nothing in Kantian philosophy to prevent us from thinking that some of our concepts apply to God, and adds (for good measure) that "after all, it is not just a given of the intellectual life" that Kant is always right.
Later, Plantinga opens a discussion of twentieth-century postmodernism with what he apparently takes to be an epigram that fits the movement—namely,
What is truth?
—Pontius Pilate
He also includes a helpful analysis of the term "fundamentalist" used as an insult, first considering candidates like "sonovabitch" and its Southwestern synonym "sumbitch," moving on to consider variants such as "stupid sumbitch" and "fascist sumbitch," and finally concluding that "the full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use) can be given by something like 'stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.'" Few, I think, will want to quibble with this fine piece of conceptual analysis.
Witticisms aside, the book is to show that one can be "warranted" in holding theistic and even specifically Christian belief, even if one is a "sophisticated and knowledgeable contemporary believer aware of all the criticisms and contrary currents of opinion." This, in some sense, has been the aim of almost all of Plantinga's work.
His first book, God and Other Minds (1967), was an attempt to show that belief in God is at least as rationally acceptable as the belief that other people have mental states. When I see Russ hopping around and holding his bloodied right toe after stubbing it against a rock, I will probably form the belief that he is pain (rather than worrying about the possibility that he and everyone else is an automaton and that I am in the unfortunate position of being the only one who ever feels pain). Plantinga's claim was that there is about as much evidence for this belief in other minds as there is for belief in God, and thus that if the first sort of belief is rationally acceptable (as we all agree), then belief in God must be rationally acceptable too.
