Lesslie Newbigin’s book Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship is an attempt to recover Christian faith from Enlightenment captivity. The attempt to recover is also an attempt to restore. The theme emerges is the vein of St. Augustine’s example, “I believe in order to understand.”

Newbigin’s aim is to show that faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ is the fundamental determiner of all knowledge for those who have been redeemed. His aim is to critique the reason-centered epistemology that has characterized Western thought since the Enlightenment as he establishes a more ‘faithful’ explanation of faith.

Newbigin makes his case by deconstructing the modernist attempts at certainty. A primary figure in history is Descartes whose work in the 17^th century has been irresistibly influential in all modern thought. Descartes mission was to demonstrate that certain knowledge was within reach. Descartes dictum that resounds in sophomore dormitories throughout the West is “doubt everything.” He cleared the ground of everything until he was left with himself as a thinking subject, hence “I think therefore I am.”  Newbigin writes, “One can see that Descartes was building his new structure of indubitable knowledge on the foundation of skepticism, the skepticism that was the dominant intellectual clime of his time” (21).[1]

Newbigin turns Descartes’ axiom upside down when he shows that even doubt is dependent upon a faith commitment. It is possible to doubt one belief only on the basis of some other belief that I do not doubt (23). Faith is inescapable as the only sustaining force behind what we embrace and deny. Moreover, Newbigin makes the case that faith is actually a personal commitment. The claims of the Christian faith come as an invitation not to be scrutinized for its ability to be doubted, but to be believed or rejected.