About Enquiry
Susanna Newcome’s principal work, An Enquiry into the Evidence of the Christian Religion (1732), is an important one because it anticipated and answered future Enlightenment Criticisms of Christianity. Her first edition was published in 1728, but when Matthew Tindal’s book Christianity as Old as the Creation came out in 1730, Newcome purposefully updated and expanded her section on general and special revelation in 1732 in order to answer his theories, and challenge what became known as the Deist Controversy. However, her work is not only an answer to Christian Deism, but is a valuable work of Christian Apologetics in its own right.
Argument of An Enquiry
In the preface, Newcome lays out her four main enquiries concerning Christianity: the evidence for God (a First Cause of mankind), that mankind’s ultimate happiness is reliant upon his acceptance of God, the rationality of God revealing Himself, and the vehicle of revelation being the Christian religion. She appears to be influenced by her contemporary, John Locke, in her approach in that she asserts that there is no proof of God a priori (Locke’s denial of innate ideas), and claims that one can a posteriori logically reason to a First Cause that shares the attributes of the God of the Bible, due to the evidence available to us. A First Cause on which mankind is continually reliant, and that revealed Himself not only generally through nature, but specially as well through Jesus Christ and the prophetic Scriptures.