Weekend Reads: To hunger and to know

Elijah in Jerusalem: A Novel

By Michael D. O’Brien

I hesitate to review on this site a book blurbed by no less than WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky, whose recommendation appears on the back cover, but Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem: A Novel (Ignatius Press, 2015) is worth reviewing (and reading) on its own merits.

Nineteen years ago, in Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (also from Ignatius Press), we last saw Father Elijah—a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who through a series of providential encounters has become a Christian and a Roman Catholic bishop—coming into Jerusalem to call the Antichrist to repentance. Nonetheless, O’Brien delays that climax until the very end of this novel. In the meantime, Elijah has a moving conversation with a porn producer, a hilarious encounter with a woman who writes books about what Jesus revealed to her (unexamined by ecclesiastical authority, naturally), and a brief chat with a newly ordained priest. I won’t give away any more of the plot, but suffice it to say that the book feels very short, and yet it couldn’t have ended any other way.

Read back-to-back, the gap between Father Elijah and Elijah in Jerusalem is evident. References to al-Qaeda have given way to ISIS. A sly Gandalf allusion (to the films, not Tolkien’s novels) signals that though Father Elijah still ostensibly inhabits the late 1990s, his creator has moved on. But the narrative voice is unchanged. O’Brien still renders holiness beautiful.

In his preface, O’Brien discourages readers from taking his work as a secret key to surviving the end of the world. Its purpose, rather, is to encourage readers to “hunger for the living word of God in sacred Scripture.” That it does.

The epigraph is Christ’s lament, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” (Matthew 23:37). But the way events play out, the epigraph could have been His counsel of peace: “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 KJV).

Knowledge and Christian Belief

By Alvin Plantinga

Is Christian belief rational? That’s the question that philosopher Alvin Plantinga pursues relentlessly through Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans, 2015), a 126-page summary version of his 513-page Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000). Both books are exuberant examples of Christian rationality. Whether you are a skeptic or a believer, Knowledge and Christian Belief will help you think straight.

Plantinga argues that many of our beliefs are not the product of discursive reasoning. Sense experience is not a premise from which we infer the existence of objects. It does not make sense to say, “I am being appeared to in a complex fashion. Therefore, a horse is in the backyard.” Instead, we believe that in the real world a real horse exists in a real backyard because humans have particular faculties designed to give rise to true beliefs. We are designed to acquire knowledge. (Virtually everyone believes this, says Plantinga.) Thus, the sense experience that says “horse” is the occasion of our forming a belief about the presence of a horse. Beliefs “arise in these circumstances; they are not conclusions from them.”

The human faculty that gives rise to belief in God is called the sensus divinitatis, literally “sense of deity.” According to Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx (“F & M,” Plantinga calls them), this sense is designed to give rise to false beliefs that help us cope with a harsh world. But, Plantinga points out, such an objection can only be sustained if God does not in fact exist. If God is real, then the sensus divinitatis does in fact give rise to true beliefs, thus clearly making it a faculty directed to the acquisition of true knowledge.

Plantinga deftly answers objections, using erudite arguments and entertaining examples and nicknames. He proves that for Christianity to be irrational, it would have to be false.