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By the early 1980s, Plantinga's focus was less on evidence for and against belief in God's existence, and more on the alleged requirement that there be evidence for such belief if it is to be rationally acceptable. Together with other religious epistemologists working in the broadly Reformed tradition (including some of his colleagues at Calvin College, where he taught for many years before moving to Notre Dame), Plantinga adopted the position that certain sorts of beliefs, among them theistic ones, can be acceptable even if we don't have evidence to back them up. Belief in God, as Plantinga put it, can often be "properly basic."
Warranted Christian Belief is a sustained variation on this theme. Plantinga's intent is to identify and rebut what he calls the de jure objection to theistic belief in general and to the "full-blooded Christian belief" articulated in the great creeds. The de jure objection, he says, must be distinguished from the de facto objection. The latter is that we have no good reason to think that theistic belief is in fact true; the former objection sets aside the question of truth and claims that, in any case, theistic belief is not somehow permitted or acceptable for twenty-first-century cognoscenti.
After discarding a number of ways to flesh out this de jure objection, Plantinga suggests that the only really serious candidate is the charge, leveled most prominently by Marxists and Freudians, "that [theistic belief] doesn't originate in the proper function of cognitive faculties successfully aimed at producing true beliefs." Instead, the objection goes, religious belief is the result of a subconscious wish-fulfillment faculty, or perhaps it is the opiate with which the petty bourgeoisie is maliciously seeking to stupefy the masses. Plantinga's conclusion, then, is that the really substantive charge against theism is not that it is clearly untrue (how could anyone demonstrate that?), but rather that "theistic and Christian belief lacks warrant."
"Warrant" is that property of beliefs which, when combined with truth, produces knowledge. It's obvious that true beliefs alone don't count as knowledge: If I form a belief that the name of the tallest man in South Bend must be Murphy, because I once met a very tall man of that name who hailed from South Bend, this belief will not count as knowledge, even if it happens to be true. I am not "warranted" in holding it. In order to answer the de jure objection to Christian belief, then, we need a working account of warrant.
This is where the first two volumes of the trilogy come in: Plantinga devoted the first one, Warrant: The Current Debate, to an assessment of the other leading analyses of warrant on offer in the field of epistemology, concluding that none of them is adequate to the task. In particular, he sets aside "evidentialist" conceptions of warrant according to which a belief is warranted just in case one has good evidence for it. In the sequel, Warrant and Proper Function, he provided his own "Proper Function" theory of warrant as well as a defense against various objections. In this third volume, Plantinga recapitulates and refines his theory, and then puts forward two models whereby religious belief, in particular, can be warranted according to that theory.
The first model is what he calls the "Aquinas/Calvin model" of theistic belief-formation; the second is the "Extended Aquinas/Calvin model," which concerns specifically Christian belief. The bare-bones A/C model deals only with belief in God's existence, combined with the disposition "to love him, trust him, see his beauty and glory and loveliness." So although it is named after two prominent Christian writers, this model (unlike the Extended one) is intended to apply to Muslim, Jewish, and other theistic belief as well.
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