Quest for Trust: Answering Life's Inescapable Questions, The

The Quest for Truth: Answering Life's Inescapable Questions. By F. Leroy Forlines. Nashville: Randall House, 2001, xxii + 544 pp., $34.95.

Because the appearance of well-written, up-to-date, evangelical systematic theologies representing distinct traditions is relatively rare, the publication of Forlines's volume is highly significant. The work is a well-studied and well-argued defense of a non-Wesleyan Arminianism by the leading theologian of the Free Will Baptist Church. The author has greatly expanded and recrafted his earlier Systematics (Nashville: Randall House, 1975) into a new work. Though not indicated by the title, the book does function as a systematic or dogmatic theology except that the areas of pneumatology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, and eschatology are omitted and prolegomena is treated only briefly. Greatest emphasis is placed on anthropology, soteriology, and apologetics.

The work is designed to enable upper-level college and seminary students, pastors, and laymen to think through the Christian worldview. It is written with enough exegetical and theological material to serve as a textbook, but without the laborious detail, philosophical complexity, and polysyllabic vocabulary that tends to discourage the midrange reader.

Behind the author's "total personality" approach, which attempts to blend the search for objective truth with a passionate zeal (the author intentionally writes in the first person), are forty years of teaching systematic theology on the college level and ministering to the needs and problems of individual students. The author's years of study, reflection, ministry experience, decades of faithful Christian walk, and pastoral concerns, all come together to produce a book which is theological, pastoral, and apologetic.

The author first (chap. 1) presents his presuppositions (including inerrancy and premillennialism), his desire to present the basic truths of the Christian faith out of a heart for redemptive concern, and his approach that necessitates the interweaving of the academic, the practical, and the systematic in order to attempt to answer what he sees as the inescapable questions of life. He insists that truth will invariably touch four basic relationships: man's relationship with God, with other people, with himself, and with the created order.

Next the history of Western epistemology is traced briefly (chap. 2) from Copernicus to the postmodern era of doubt, ambivalence, and pluralism. The author sets forth four tests for evaluating a worldview in the contemporary setting: (1) Does it answer the inescapable questions of life? (2) Is there internal consistency? (3) Is there causal adequacy? and (41) Does it conform to that which is undeniably true? These tests are especially relevant in the postmodern intellectual milieu, which the author insightfully describes as a failed, but dangerous, experiment.

In contrast to secular epistemology is the author's bibliology (chaps. 3, 4). Included under general revelation is the fact that human beings, created in the image of God, are preprogrammed with a knowledge of what God is like. This revelation alone, along with special revelation that has been incorporated into Scripture (which is inerrant in the original manuscripts and must be interpreted according to the grammaticohistorical method), provides the much-needed answers to the inescapable questions.

The Scriptures point to a God who is personal, independent, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, holy, loving, wise, good and truthful (chap. 5). His single essence is shared fully by three persons (chap. 6).

At this point Forlines pauses to develop his four tests for worldviews (chap. 7), tests which are validated by both man's constitutional makeup and the theistic arguments. They demonstrate the reasonableness and the singular ability of the Christian worldview to meet fully the needs of both the human mind and heart.

This apologetic leads to the author's anthropology (chaps. 8, 9) in which dichotomy and traducianism are defended. Man came into being, not through evolution, but through the creative work of God which took place during six solar days (hence a young earth). Man is a person created both in the rational and moral likeness of God and is designed for relationships. Because of man's personhood and its resulting interplay of dependence, independence, and interdependence, Forlines argues that "influence and response" are more appropriate terms for describing the interaction of the divine in the human decision-making process than the more determinative "cause and effect."

Sin has caused a malfunction in the divine image in man, so that while the constituent parts remain intact after the fall (sin is transmitted according to the natural headship view), man no longer thinks, acts, and feels in a way that is pleasing to God. Although man may rightly be described as totally depraved, as a person he retains the power of choice, but his will can be exercised only within the framework of possibilities established by God; hence it is not an absolute freedom. Therefore, influence can be brought to bear upon his will but cannot guarantee or determine its actions. "Dead in trespasses and sins" means that man is cut off from communion with God, not that he is totally deaf toward God's communications.