ABSTRACT
The Fathers of the Church offer reflections on what it is that leads us to hold that Christianity is divinely revealed, but they do not make this question into a distinct subject of investigation. It is in the Middle Ages that the question is first addressed independently and explicitly, and that different answers to it are debated. This means that the medieval and modem periods are extremely rich in resources for the consideration of this question, far too rich for it to be possible to give a complete account of them within the confines of this book. What will be attempted here is not such an account, but rather a focussing in on one question, whose answer will be seen to be the key to an understanding of the rationality of Christian faith. This issue is the role of the motives of credibility in faith. ‘Motives of credibility’ is the term that theologians have coined to refer to the publicly available evidence, accessible to believer and unbeliever alike, that can be used to support the contention that the Christian message is communicated by God. The fact that these motives are accessible to both believers and unbelievers means that they cannot include evidence whose acceptance would presuppose faith. Thus, for example, the claim that the Christian message is true because God has spoken it could not form part of the motives of credibility, because its acceptance presupposes faith (although it could be a conclusion established by these motives). By ‘Christian faith’ I mean the virtue of Christian believers by which they believe the Christian gospel, the virtue that is an essential part of the Christian life, that is pleasing and acceptable to God, and that is conducive to (or actually brings about) one’s salvation. This specification is necessary because it can be maintained that there are different sorts of faith in divine speaking. The devils, for example, are said to believe and tremble. Their belief, as we shall see, has been thought by many theologians to be different from the virtue of faith possessed by Christian believers. If it is different, its relation to the motives of credibility will not be a final goal of our investigation; what we want to know about is the connection between the motives of credibility and the faith of Christian believers.
