This is a provocative book that covers considerably more territory than either its title or subtitle might indicate. In some ways, the main title is rather misleading, since here Trigg is concerned not just with ‘faith’ but also with ‘reason’ and the perennial contested relation between these two topics in both philosophy and religion. Indeed, it seems that reason is of greater significance for Trigg than faith, at least in this short volume. The immediate relevance of the book to the readers of this journal is that Trigg – emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick in England – is an Anglican layman and writes from a decidedly Anglican perspective. That is, following Hooker, the Cambridge Platonists, and even Locke, he holds a high view of reason and insists repeatedly that (religious) faith is not inherently irrational. A typical statement is that faith ‘can never go against rationality, but paradoxically it can sometimes leap beyond the normal scope of human reason’ (6). Likewise, he says, ‘Claims to divine revelation cannot be accepted at face value by any religion. There must be a continuing balance between faith and reason, even when humans reach out towards what appears to be inaccessible’ (39).
After a preface on the nature of faith, the book consists of seven short chapters, dealing respectively with the relationship between faith and reason, God, diversity, science, morality, law, and society. As the two quotations above bear witness, Trigg is not a thoroughgoing rationalist. That is, he accepts that there are genuine truth claims which exceed the capacity of the unaided human mind to comprehend on its own and also that it is acceptable for such transcendent truths to be received by humans in faith or trust if the source is deemed credible. Indeed, he says that everyone, ‘whether religious or not, ultimately needs some form of faith to give a direction to life’ (90). He thus defends the essential role of faith in human belief and ‘meaning-making’. Thus, he explores the related issues of divine revelation, structures of religious and epistemic authority, the power and limitations of empirical science, the need for affect and imagination, the similarities and differences between faith construed as psychological trust versus faith construed as theological virtue, the soteriology of ‘justification by faith’, and so on. But he is firmly convinced that we must maintain a strong view of reason as a universal human capacity to evaluate the evidence and reasons provided for a given belief, and he defends this view against powerful critiques such as those issued by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Wittgenstein, Kuhn and more recent postmodernists.
Trigg thus resists current trends toward subjectivism, relativism, pragmatism, fideism and identity politics. He does not accept that we are left without reliable access to truth and subject to various wills to power. Yet he also resists contemporary empiricists who insist that religious belief is inherently irrational because it cannot be verified by the current deliverances of scientific method. Again, Trigg’s traditional Anglicanism is on full display here, as he explicitly bases his optimistic understanding of human reason as a gift from God, the divine image in us, and the ‘candle of the Lord’ in the soul (see 16–18 and 39–44, although Butler is a curious omission from his genealogical account). Trigg contrasts this typically Anglican understanding of faith and reason with more pessimistic Protestant views such as those held by Calvin, Kierkegaard and Barth, as well as the various secular critiques noted above. But in so doing he risks having it both ways, maintaining a view of reason on religious grounds that secular thinkers have rejected while also rejecting the conclusions that secular thinkers have drawn on the basis of reason.
The closing chapters on morality, law, and society acknowledge that different countries have reached different arrangements on how religious beliefs are permitted or not, incorporated or not, influential or not, in regard to issues such as education, public policy, gender relations, and so on. Both here and throughout Trigg engages not just with Christianity but with Judaism and Islam, and occasionally other religions as well. The comparisons are often illuminating, if normally in Christianity’s favour. Trigg also offers a helpful defence of the essential role of institutions such as schools, unions, and other voluntary organizations in ‘standing as buffers between individual and State’ (99).
One of Trigg’s primary contentions is the need for vigorous public dialogue and debate, even when it comes to religious matters. He defends the public role for faith convictions to be expressed in secular democracies, but only insofar as they are shown to be compatible with shared standards of reason and morality (58). Everything thus follows from his particular understanding of Anglican epistemology and the extent to which readers will find it persuasive or not.
There is one major editing error, on page 77, in which the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is accidentally misquoted to say that Congress ‘shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or protecting the free exercise thereof’, when of course it should say prohibiting! So, the quoted statement says the exact opposite of the actual text, but I trust that most readers will be familiar enough with the American emphasis on ensuring freedom of religion not to be misled.
