Theology's Epistemological Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response (Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology)

One of the biggest challenges in Christian theology, as I see it, is to clarify what it means to know God. If God is out there and interacts with humans by way of the Spirit, revealed truth, and the incarnation, how does the truth value of what is external to us enter our minds and become redemptive? Must all knowledge be filtered through a justification process in order to become true knowledge or is there something in the work of God's Spirit and Word and person of Christ which exists outside of this requirement?**Caveat, for the fundamentalist or evangelical concerned about the theology of Karl Barth: I also have problems with the error that we call "neo-orthodoxy" and treat it as a serious error. Even so we should note that Barth was not wrong about everything. In this discussion there is much to commend Kevin Diller for discerning about Barth's theology. At the same time the reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga has been of great use in, among other things, separating naturalism from evolution for a better understanding of science, and other projects of benefit in dealing with the question of human capacities in light of evolutionary ideals. His targeted epistemological apologetic has shown itself quite valuable.The book contains several threads and is not a simplistic discussion of human knowledge of God. You will need to commit an extended amount of time time reading it. Mr. Diller is thorough in his understanding of both Barth and Plantinga.Both Plantinga and Barth parted with the Enlightenment project and (esp Modernist) assumption of the high capacity of humans with respect to knowing God. By separating from the position which raises human capacities apart from sin and the fall it appears that both Barth and Plantinga share something important about the need for a revelation centered view of a knowledge of God. Of course while the particulars of Barth's position are problematic for many of us the principle is sound, that a knowledge of God is found first in revealed truth rather than in reason a starting point for reaching God.The effect here is to contrast Barth & Plantinga not only with the Rationalists but also with the Rationalist movement within evangelicalism. Though Mr. Diller does not spend extensive time on Molinism his argument is clear. The language is instead couched in a challenge to the epistemology resulting from a Molinist/Rationalist approach in evidential epistemology/apologetics. (The evidential approach by its nature begins with reason and the starting point for approaching God, a position contrary to the reformed position but quite popular today in the works of some popular apologists.)One might boil down the question to this: Can I know God by knowing (x) about God? In this Barth and Plantinga separate either wholly or largely from not only the evidential approach but, by obvious implication, from natural theology. This leaves the revelation of God up to God and not up to the human capacity to find God. Barth rejects natural theology entirely while Plantinga notes some place for it, though not such a place as to allow Reason its desired starting point.For those who wish to engage in Christian apologetics, this book is a necessary read. There are those in the evidential camp who seem to think that the mind is enough, that the place of Christianity in the public square can be settled by reasoned approach to information. These people might ask themselves what is the place of revealed truth if Reason is adequate? If as a result Reason is not sufficient then at what point does Reason step aside? Is this when humans either decide so or when one makes a leap of faith? Such a structure for apologetics fails to give way to revealed truth. If God in Christ through the Word and Spirit touch the heart and redeem, who initiates this action? This distinction is critical to a proper apologetic and proper evangelism, so the question needs to be answered. Mr. Diller deals with this and he does so in a way that should help the evidential apologist deal with difficult questions.

Knowledge of God is a human possibility only by the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. (Karl Barth)Barth performs something of a semantic magic trick with the above statement by creating the illusion of meaning with undefined connotation words. When Barth, a professing Christian, employs the words "God" and "Jesus" he lets his readers infuse those words with meanings that more or less correspond to what the Christian Bible says about God and Jesus. That is not how Barth himself is actually using the terms. A better way to read the above statement is: "Knowledge of Entity X is a human possibility only by the self-revelation of Entity X in Being Y" and the only thing you can ever know about Entity X is what Entity X directly reveals to you through ineffable mental events.Barth does not and cannot say anything that is objectively true about Entity X or Being Y. He can only reflect upon his own ineffable mental events received from Entity X, and while his reflections on the events include the words "God" and "Jesus," those terms do not necessarily correspond to how they are used in the Bible.Author Kevin Diller attempts to buttress Barth's neo-orthodox theology with Alvin Plantinga's Reformed epistemology. The main problem is that there is no point of contact between the two when it comes to knowledge of God because Barth and Plantinga use the word "God" in completely different ways. Plantinga means the God described in the Christian Scriptures while Barth means the entity that produces ineffable events in Barth's mind and, from Barth's perspective, there is no way that Plantinga's God can be compared or contrasted to Barth's entity. Moreover, for all anyone can know, the cause of the mental events occurring in Barth's brain is not the God of the Bible but the fanciful workings of Barth's own imagination, or a delusion, or perhaps even some malevolent spirit entity disguising itself as an angel of light. No one can say for sure, not even Barth himself.For Plantinga, epistemological warrant supporting belief in the truth of the propositions of Scripture comes from the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit who conveys to the believer a basic sense that what the Scriptures say is true (at least as to what the Scriptures say about the broader concepts of the gospel of Jesus Christ). Diller wants to extend this warrant, not to belief in the truth of Scripture, but to belief in the existence of an entity that causes ineffable events to occur in one's brain and that the mental events are the entity's disclosure of itself to the person experiencing the event. This supposed warrant would not extend, however, to any rational description of the event that the experiencer might come up with upon reflection. In other words, neither the experiencer nor anyone else would be justified in believing that what the experiencer has to say about the entity's self-disclosure is true.Any information obtainable through Barth's theology is incommunicable, which raises the question of whether incommunicable information constitutes knowledge at all, and whether it is meaningful to speak of epistemological warrant for an incommunicable belief. In the end, Barth's theology cannot find warrant in Plantinga's epistemology.