Plantinga’s Own Assessment of the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Alvin Plantinga discusses the relationship between the intellect and will in chapters eight and nine of WCB where he deals with that relationship with regard to the occurrence of faith that he outlines in the extended A/C model. According to Plantinga, faith involves both cognitive and affective aspects.

What does this mean?

Plantinga is endeavoring to make the point that faith is more than strictly an intellectual entity (i.e., that faith is more than just knowledge that God exists and assent to that knowledge). If sin has both cognitive and affective elements, so, then, does faith.”¹

It is not necessary to reproduce Plantinga’s discussion of the relationship between the intellect and the will here except to note that he explores various “dependency relations” in which either the intellect or the will has priority and he concludes that he cannot determine which entity has priority.²

In light of this I would label Plantinga a “concurrentist” with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will. Neither intellect or will has priority.
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Introduction

A few years ago Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga offered an account of how Christian belief acquires warrant (if, in fact, Christian belief is true) in the culmination of his series on warrant, Warranted Christian Belief.¹ Key to his discussion of warranted Christian belief is the presentation and explanation of what Plantinga calls the Aquinas/Calvin model (hereafter A/C model) and the extended A/C model.²

The A/C model is initially comprised of Plantinga’s version of the sensus divinitatis,³ which is then extended to include explicitly Christian belief with three elements: the Bible, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit and faith.⁴
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