Dr. Joseph Boot defines apologetics as defending the faith with gentleness to glorify God, rejecting evidentialism that treats Christianity as a hypothesis rather than a presupposition. He critiques human reason's neutrality, citing Kierkegaard and Harry Blamire to argue that without Christ-centered transformation, believers adopt secular idols like Marxism, creating a chaotic cosmos of brute facts. Ultimately, Boot asserts that truth relies on Scripture's self-attesting authority, concluding that faith demands decisive obedience because the barrier is not rational reach but hardened hearts refusing God's sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Gentleness in Defending Faith00:03:02
I do recognize some of you from last year, and it's been great talking with you also at our table.
So, thank you.
My task for this first session this morning is to talk about presuppositionalism and apologetics.
So, before we begin, why don't we just say a word of prayer together?
Our Lord and our God, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts Be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
Open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
Forgive us our sins, Lord, we pray, for Christ's sake.
Amen.
So, one of the critical issues, one of the critical subjects as we think about.
Christendom 2.0 is, of course, the presentation and defense of the faith.
Giving a defense.
Now, the requirement to get fit, which is literally what 1 Peter 3 15 is all about, to get fit, to be ready to prepare ourselves to give an apologia, an apologia, a defense of the faith, is memorably set out by the Apostle Peter.
To the church as a whole.
But honor the Messiah as Lord in your hearts.
Always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.
However, do this with gentleness and respect, keeping your conscience clear so that when you are accused, those who denounce your Christian life will be put to shame.
So we know that's our task, it's a task for all of us, but the Way we go about that task has been a matter of discussion, of debate, and of dispute.
And I want to say to start with that what's most important to keep in mind, taking seriously this calling as an act of obedience, is that this is ultimately about the glory of God and the extension of his kingdom.
So, notwithstanding the importance of a trustworthy methodology in apologetics, Our primary concern is a faithful witness to the gospel.
It's not about winning arguments with other Christians over apologetic strategy.
We can have those discussions, but the primary concern is the extension of the kingdom.
The Mandate to Witness00:02:02
We're surrounded by people in a culture that do not know the Lord.
The clamor and the noise of our diseased culture seeks to distract people.
From confronting themselves in the silence.
There's a lack of silence in contemporary culture.
People need to face their hopeless condition before God.
And so, with gentleness, with respect, we have to offer a reason, even in the face of opposition, so that the quiet, convicting presence of the Holy Spirit will still hearts before Him and His word can be heard.
Now, regrettably, having said that, amongst many Christian people, the apologetic mandate is often misunderstood.
It's misapplied, and that leads often to ambivalence, to reticence, even hostility to the task of defending the faith.
I'm slightly distracted by the bright light, and you may be distracted by the bright light on this salmon jacket.
It's not a mark of low testosterone, it's actually a mark of very high testosterone because you need great security in your masculinity to wear a coat like this one.
Thank you.
Now, the misunderstandings tend to arise principally because people think that apologetics is concerned with establishing the truth of Christianity by human reason.
By direct rational proofs for God, various forms of theoretical and scientific demonstration, which allegedly verify.
Reason Within a Worldview00:12:00
Christian belief beyond a reasonable doubt before the bar of human reason.
Now, I think the difficulty there is that that perspective attempts too much and accomplishes too little.
It places an impossible and unsustainable burden on human theoretical reasoning and at the same time actually fails to challenge unbelievers at the religious root of their rebellion against God.
In the tradition of Augustine and Anselm, I think the first modern Christian thinker to specifically identify this problem was the Danish Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, a great critic of rationalism and romanticism in the 19th century.
And he said this If one were to describe the whole orthodox apologetic effort in one single sentence, but also with categorical precision, one might say that it has the intent to make Christianity plausible.
To this, one might add that if it were to succeed, then would this effort have the ironical fate that precisely upon the day of its triumph, it would have lost everything and entirely quashed Christianity.
To make Christianity plausible is the same as to misrepresent it.
What did he mean by that?
Well, because biblical Christianity cannot be made plausible.
Plausible to human beings within any other paradigm than the one which begins with faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, Christianity to the unbeliever always looks implausible.
Until you've got the lens of the Word of God on your nose, a starting point rooted in the Lord Jesus Christ, the faith appears implausible.
From the biblical standpoint, the unbeliever doesn't merely have some erroneous beliefs here and there.
They exist in untruth.
They're unregenerate.
They exist in untruth.
Orthodox, rationalistic, and evidential apologetics neglect to take proper account of what Scripture says about the condition of fallen human beings, the nature of the creation order under a curse, and the character of God's self revelation in Christ, who shatters all the assumptions and expectations of human reason.
How can human reason account for the eternal God manifesting himself fully in the temporal historical form of the man Jesus Christ?
This also leads, this assumption about apologetics where it's misunderstood leads to, I think, unwarranted beliefs that before anyone can seek to defend their faith, their intellectual development and their relevant knowledge base must be highly advanced.
Their capacity to follow and retain lengthy chains of reasoning tightly honed.
So I hope that in the course of this lecture, we may get past some of those misunderstandings that you don't have to be.
A brilliant philosopher to defend your faith.
So let's think about the governing assumptions for a minute of a presuppositional method.
So I've said the important thing about apologetics is winning the lost.
There are debates about how to do it.
And obviously, being asked to talk about presuppositionalism means that there's a distinction between that view and other views.
What are the governing assumptions of the presuppositional method?
Well, before summarizing the particular apologetic challenge we're facing, let's mention a few of those.
The first.
It is to notice that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere.
The autonomy of human reason is an illusion.
There is no such thing as a neutral view from nowhere.
Human understanding, human reasoning, is a tool that can cut in various directions.
That's why, by the way, there are so many schools of thought competing in the various academic disciplines.
And they all claim to be logical and reasonable.
They all claim to be rational.
But there are multiple different perspectives.
Laws of thought, even though laws of thought are God given, do not ensure that our beliefs and assumptions are true.
Laws of thought work on our beliefs.
Logic may help us reach valid conclusions and show the implications of our assumptions, but it doesn't supply us with the premises, with the beliefs with which to begin.
This means that reason is far from being neutral or independent or absolute.
It's not a framework, it's not a paradigm.
It is always constrained by the world and life view, or what we might say the plausibility structure within which a given individual is operating.
So, even on its own terms, reason can never function as an independent final arbiter, as a final court of appeal.
To settle disputes between completing claims.
Because the justification of any worldview is happening within that paradigm.
It's happening within that framework.
So a presuppositional apologetic actually focuses on an internal critique of an unbeliever's worldview on its own terms.
When we engage unbelieving worldviews, we're internally criticizing and showing how it.
Collapses under its own weight.
If what it says were true about the world, it collapses.
And then we're inviting people to put on the lens of the Word of God and to see the explanatory power of biblical faith and how it accounts for the failure of these competing views as well as providing the truths that make the rich diversity of human experience intelligible.
But it does so within the structure of the Christian faith.
Over the years, I've done lots of debates on the existence of God.
I never pretend that I'm starting as a neutral, objective observer, seeing where the neutral facts might lead.
Because that would be a lie.
All the facts are created facts, governed by God.
Secondly, this leads us to the importance of the concept of world and life view in Christian apologetics.
Something that, again, Classical forms of apologetics have typically ignored, sometimes even denied.
Simply put, a worldview is a framework, it's a structure of understanding, some people say a paradigm, that rests on certain foundational beliefs, certain basic faith commitments.
And no human being is without one.
They may not have analyzed it, but no human being is without a set of assumptions through which they are looking at the world.
Now, non Christian perspectives would all regard the basic Claim of Christianity that the eternal God is manifest in the temporal manifestation of a man, the Lord Jesus Christ, dying for sin, raised to life in power and glory, as implausible.
As implausible.
For it to become plausible, one's worldview and thinking has to be transformed by the reality of Christ.
A person's, and this is a more technical term, but a person's epistemic position has to be changed.
Epistemic epistemology, where we stand in relationship to knowledge, has to be altered.
A new faith commitment for understanding our life and world is required.
And where that change is not taking place, people simply take offense at Christ.
You know, there is no way, even in apologetics, around the offense.
You know that, don't you?
People have to go through the offense.
Jesus had to say to his disciples, Blessed is he who is not offended in me.
Do you want to go away as well?
We have to go through the offense.
We live in a culture that doesn't want to be offended, but we have to go through the offense.
People will take offense because they are constrained by prior life reviews from which they have to be liberated.
Greg Barnson put it this way.
Each worldview has its presuppositions about reality, knowledge, and ethics.
These mutually influence and support each other.
There are no facts or uses of reason which are available outside of the interpretative system of basic commitments or assumptions which appeals to them.
The presuppositions used by the Christian and non Christian determine what they will accept as factual and reasonable.
That's a fairly paradigmatic statement, actually.
The presuppositional view of human knowledge.
This makes clear that the choice is either or.
Barneson talked about pushing the antithesis.
Either a personal God or the empty void, or what Kierkegaard called the vortex, lies behind everything as the central principle.
Now, this doesn't mean that a world and life view is a hypothesis.
That we're simply testing, rather, it's where our thinking rests.
It's a kind of faith based certitude by which ideas are tested.
So we put the lens of the Word of God on and the claims of Christ, and we test everything in terms of that.
Again, according to the great critic of rationalism, Kierkegaard, he said a life view, listen to this closely, it's a little bit involved because it's in translation from the Danish, but a life view, he says, is certainty in oneself.
Whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships, a purely human standpoint, by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience, or whether in its heavenward direction,
The religious, it is found there in the center, as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true conviction that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Restoring the Christian Mind00:12:14
It's either the imminent or the transcendent.
And here is the.
Transcendent referent that later men like Cornelius van Til and Herman Doyverd called the Archimedean point for the Christian.
Remember Archimedes?
He's trying to find a lever and a position with which to raise the world, a position with which to truly understand things.
Here it is.
This is the transcendent referent in Christ that lies outside space and time in the eternal God, even though it's manifest in history.
So that's something of the Christian mind, but the problem we're dealing with today is the collapse of the Christian mind.
The immediate difficulty is that the Christian life view has collapsed in our time.
And not just in the culture, quite frequently in the world.
Some years ago, I was speaking in California, in the Santa Cruz area, on apologetics.
And after my lecture, I was taken out to lunch by a very nice young couple.
One of the questions they asked me with a smile was how long I had been an apologetite.
Which was a humorous question, but it highlighted a misperception of the real challenge that we're confronted with today.
We're confronted with the near total collapse of a Christian world and life view in the culture and often amongst believers.
And so it is not simply better techniques in evangelism that we need or smarter apologists, a kind of elite bunch of apologetics who will do the heavy lifting for us.
What we need is a recovery.
And in many respects, a discovery, a fresh discovery of what it means to think Christianly and to be Christian before a watching world.
The current reality is that the questions confronting believers in the West are qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from the questions we faced even 25 years ago when I began in the work of Christian apologetics, because there is no longer a shared understanding of reality that can undergird a common discourse.
The common discourse is hard to have now, isn't it?
You've got all these disparate groups screaming at each other.
Because the basis for that common discourse has eroded beneath us.
The plausibility structure based on Christian foundations has been eroding.
And so, for the first time in centuries, we can actually be talking with people, our own neighbors, whose basic religious presuppositions are antithetical to our own.
If you'd have told my grandparents that by the time their grandson or grandsons were having children of their own, that there would be 72 genders, they'd have thought you'd need committing to an insane asylum.
But this is where we are now.
These differing worldview starting points, as we've said, determine the kind of questions people will deem relevant.
To addressing the existential, socio cultural, and theoretical problems of life.
It's quite unusual these days to be confronted with a question, for example, unless you're talking to a Muslim, about the Trinity, or to be asked for five good reasons to believe in the historicity of the resurrection.
The pervasiveness of these unbelieving worldviews within the culture have had an impact on the contemporary church.
Now, there were cultural prophets who saw it coming, I think that's enough for that slide.
And there was a man made, an English thinker called Harry Blameyer back in the 60s.
He wrote a book called The Christian Mind.
It had a deep impact on me.
And he opens this classic with a fairly commonplace observation that the thinking of modern people has been secularized.
But he says that's not the primary challenge for believers.
This is what he said.
Tragic as this is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift.
But unfortunately, the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history.
There is no longer a Christian mind.
There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality.
As a spiritual being in prayer and meditation, the Christian strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non Christian.
But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.
He accepts religion, its morality, It's worship, it's spiritual culture, but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which relates all problems, social, political, cultural, to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy.
He said that in the 60s.
And it's interesting, even when you read that, you think, well, actually, because of the paganization of our culture, people are exploring things like meditation.
Don't give a great deal of thought to an objective moral framework that we're all agreed on.
We'll deal with that this afternoon when we talk about God's law.
As a consequence, it's not enough anymore to simply speak of equipping Christians to answer a few disconnected questions about their personal faith or respond to an isolated question about a Christian doctrine, as all we need is a couple of seminars on the five most popular objections to the faith, and all will be well for the church and Christian apologetics.
Let's just have a youth day.
And have the three top questions, and all will be well.
It's not enough.
We need renewal and reformation in terms of a comprehensive scriptural view of reality.
We need to be able to reformulate the questions of our time, explaining their religious roots and their meaning.
And that helps us deal then with the unbelievers' own queries and difficulties, whether they are real or imagined.
And that can only be done within the Context within the framework of a robust biblical world and life view.
Blamire understood this.
He says there is something before the Christian dialogue, and that is the Christian mind.
A mind trained, informed, equipped to handle the data of secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions.
The Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking, and Christian thinking is the prerequisite of Christian action.
You know, we have a lot of young Christians today, especially the younger generation, they want to get straight into action.
They're out there talking about social justice and engagement and everything else, but they don't have a Christian mind.
They can't have a Christian dialogue because they don't have a worldview constructed of Christian presuppositions.
And so their Christian action often ends up being Karl Marx baptized.
We have to have a Christian mind before we're capable of serious Christian dialogue and then careful Christian action.
Effective Christian apologetics today then requires a total Christian view of reality as rooted in Scripture.
Systematic unbelief being confronted by systematic belief.
In every sphere of life.
Now, what I'm not appealing for is a new kind of evangelical scholasticism, a kind of elitist intellectualizing of the faith.
I'm talking rather about relearning to think and live by the simple profundity of the word revelation of God in every aspect of life human identity, sexuality, marriage, family, law, politics, economics, philosophy, the arts, science, business, media, education.
And all things besides.
How do we give an answer in those contexts?
I began to ask myself that question about 15 years ago.
Where is the defense?
I was looking for it as an apologist.
Where is the defense of the Christian view of law, of education, of economic life, of political life, of the family, of identity?
I'd spend a lot of time talking about who was Jesus, why did he die, what about the resurrection, and what about evil and suffering?
Well, those are important, they're not unimportant.
But where was the defense of the issues where the attack was actually taking place?
Most younger people today in the universities aren't biblically literate enough to make objections that were made 30 or 40 years ago.
We need to then think Christianly.
Now, what I've said, this kind of programmatic agenda, a programmatic defense of a Christian philosophy of life, might seem a bit radical, a bit unnecessary, a bit over the top, even for this conference.
Roy Closer framed the question of the Christian skeptical of this kind of thinking in this way.
He said, an excellent Christian philosopher, he said this While one can articulate a Christian view of God, a Christian view of how to stand in right relation to God, and a Christian view of ethics, why is it necessary to articulate a distinctly Christian view of everything?
That seems like a fair question, doesn't it?
After all, isn't the faith we defend centered on the hope of heaven and afterlife and deliverance from an evil world?
Why must we defend a distinctly Christian view of everything since, on that basis, everything is not really very important?
Is there really a Christian way to boil an egg?
Besides, isn't it only areas of morality and spirituality that Christians and non Christians disagree with?
Isn't the vast majority of daily life essentially neutral?
Many Christians, of course, will agree that we should think about Christian things and themes.
We should be spiritual people, but surely.
There isn't a distinctly Christian view of everything.
And those questions themselves actually belie the collapse of the Christian mind.
They reveal the need for developing a presuppositional apologetic.
The fundamental confusion in those objections is equating thinking Christianly with thinking about Christianity.
This is how Blamire puts it.
To think Christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related directly or indirectly to man's eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God.
You can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most sacred things, the sacrament of the altar, for example.
Likewise, you can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most mundane things.
There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about Christianly.
The fact that many people are writing about things Christian is in itself irrelevant to the question whether there is still a Christian mind.
Do you see what he's saying?
We've got Christian bookshops today, we've got Christian authors, we can stack shelves with endless Christian books.
Plenty of people are talking about things Christian, and yet very often these books do not contain a Christian mind.
They look at all of this content, but not from the worldview of the Word of God.
Now, to establish this point biblically is important, otherwise, you might think, well, this is the gospel according to Job.
How do we know there is a Christian world and life view, a truly Christian mind?
Knowing God Transforms Knowledge00:06:51
Well, here's a good place to start the fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge.
Or the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The word translated foundation there, or beginning, literally means principle part.
Principle part.
Jesus makes the same point when he's rebuking the Pharisees, you'll remember, with their misleading interpretations of the law.
He says, Woe to you, experts in the law, you have taken away the key of knowledge.
What is the key of knowledge?
Well, it's the knowledge of God, especially through the Son, as revealed in the Word of God.
This is the heart knowledge that Paul calls having the mind of Christ.
And so the Apostle Paul directs us actually to Christ, Christ Himself, as the one who alone gives true understanding.
He says, By Him you were enriched in a few spiritual churchy things.
Sorry, did I misquote that?
By Him you were enriched in everything, in all speech and All knowledge.
In all speech and all knowledge.
Clearly, what Paul is saying is that knowing God through Christ affects everything, including all knowledge, not some artificially restricted ecclesiastical or churchy knowledge.
So, a little later on, he says, The Lord knows that the reasonings of the wise are meaningless.
Everything is yours, you belong to Christ.
And Christ belongs to God.
Don't spiritualize that text away too quickly into pious sentiment.
It means that every area of knowledge, every area of life in all creation belongs to those who belong to Christ.
Truth and life are not captive to the meaningless reasonings of unbelievers, to the emptiness, the speculations of the philosophers, Paul says elsewhere.
In fact, they know neither truth nor life as they should.
The implication of this is that though unbelievers know many things partially as creatures made in God's image, their knowledge of all things suffers from a critical lack.
Klauser puts it this way there is some kind of mistake with respect to every kind of truth and knowledge that can't be avoided if one does not know God, but can be avoided if one does know God.
Now, what's not being said here is that if you want a distinctly Christian view of quantum mechanics or the mating habits, Of the common cockroach or the functions, the physiology of the human heart, that all you need to do is look up the relevant verse in the Bible.
If you were to go in for heart surgery next week, and when you got in and the surgeon's putting his gloves on and putting his robes on, and they're just about to put the mask over your face, and you see him with a Bible in his hand flicking through and saying to one of the nurses, Where's that passage about the heart again?
Because I'm, what are we doing?
You'd be pretty concerned.
The Bible does not give us exhaustive or encyclopedic knowledge of all things and disciplines.
It doesn't intend to.
Part of the task that was given to human beings at the beginning of creation, according to Scripture, is to observe, discover, name created entities and their functions, to bring out the potentiality of creation by learning about God's laws for all aspects of created reality in light of His spoken word.
There was no point in the history of human beings where they were simply left to look at creation.
And learn and understand.
There was always verbal revelation from God.
Those two things together is what are important.
A distinctly Christian worldview and apologetic then rests not on finding a proof text for thermodynamics or heart disease in the Bible, but recognizing Jesus Christ as the religious foundation for all knowledge.
And that means taking full account of what Scripture says about God and His creation, about His law and redemptive work in history.
In all of our observations, in all of our thinking, in all of our theorizing and living.
That's the starting point for a faithful apologetic.
And then, of course, we aim to show the unbeliever that if they reject that biblical starting point, the biblical paradigm of creation, of a fall into sin, of redemption through Christ, of a consummation of all things, that paradigm of the scriptures, if we reject that, we make a perilous.
Religious mistake that sets aside the principal part, the key of knowledge.
And that mistake will then misdirect one's total understanding, and it will eventually reduce all of life to meaninglessness and unintelligibility.
So let me conclude this section with don't get excited, I'm nowhere near finished, but just this section with a definition then of apologetics by the Best looking apologist in North America today.
Christian apologetics is the work of articulating, defending, and translating the Christian mind, conscience, hope, and imagination into all aspects of life so that the embodied Christian world and life view is set forth as true, satisfying, and full of meaning.
It's an art as well as a science.
Christian persuasion is an art under the guidance of the Holy Spirit as well as a science.
And that vision for apologetics integrated into normal Christian life is part of your priestly service and my priestly service to God.
Paul said that his ministry was for the defense and confirmation of the gospel.
We are to bring each area of life into relation to the gospel.
Procedurally, then, from a procedural point of view, the believer, armed with a Christian mind, Christian presuppositions, ready to defend and translate the faith into all of life, have set apart Christ as Lord.
Scripture as Ultimate Authority00:14:52
Not reason as Lord, but set apart Christ as Lord in their hearts.
And that includes a surrender to the authority of His Word.
As such, God's Word in Scripture becomes our ultimate criterion for truth.
Think about this.
If the reach of our reasons, Or, of our grasp of various external evidences, are more reliable and more authoritative to stand as proofs of that word than it's actually our thinking and our logical procedures that are the ultimate criterion for truth, displacing God's word, isn't it?
The reality is, nobody proves their most basic assumptions, their most ultimate criterion, their Archimedean point directly.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be their most basic assumptions, would they?
What you proved them with would be your most basic assumption.
Here's a tongue twister for you.
All arguments must begin with assumptions.
Therefore, it is impossible that all assumptions be based on arguments.
I'll give you 30 seconds to think about that.
All arguments must begin with assumptions, and therefore, it's impossible that all assumptions be based on arguments.
The ultimate questions of life always come down to religious authority, to a given faith.
Where does ultimate authority lie?
With the author of all things?
Or with me?
Or you?
Or Oprah?
Or Jimmy Fallon, or whatever it is these days?
Where does ultimate authority lie?
It's therefore important that we seek to defend faith in a manner that's consistent with our fundamental beliefs about God and His Word.
The very notion, actually, that God, the God about which I've been speaking, needs my feeble efforts to prop up his sovereignty and lordship, to prop him up on the face of it, is absurd, isn't it?
I do not establish the reality of the one who establishes me.
When Moses asked for God's name, He asked for a definition, effectively.
God says, I am who I am.
I am that I am, I will be who I will be.
You can't define me, Moses, because I am the source of all definition.
Human beings reason from existence, not to existence.
You analyze all of your thought, you will discover that you are reasoning from, not to, existence.
The Holy Spirit, through the scriptures, reveals to us the God of all truth, whose word is law, whose creation is meaning, and who knows the end from the beginning.
The only kind of word that such a God can speak is an authoritative and totally infallible word.
There's nothing new that can be brought to God's attention that will change his mind about something.
Oh, I didn't notice that one.
Oh, I let one slip my mind.
The Bible does not contain hypotheses, it doesn't contain scientific argumentation, it doesn't contain, as far as I can tell, any classical apologetic arguments.
It is the infallible Word of God.
Christ is.
Is the final word as God incarnate?
He is God incarnate.
By definition, then, without such revelation from the all conditioning God, there can be no ultimate objective truth, no absolute eternal reality.
There's only an endless series of human hypotheses and rationalizations applied to brute facts, that's uncreated facts in a chaotic cosmos that is impervious to true interpretation.
The facts of experience become, as Van Til said, like beads without a chain to give them unity.
It's like trying to gain knowledge.
Gaining knowledge is like an attempt to sew without fastening the ends and without tying a knot in the thread.
Greg Barnson puts it this way he says, For the Christian, every fact is created, preinterpreted, and divinely revelatory.
The unbeliever holds just the opposite.
One begins with the Creator and approaches the world thinking God's thoughts after him, while the other attempts to interpret experience by imposing abstract, formal, unifying principles on concrete, contingent, diverse facts.
If that sounds like a bit of a mouthful, just get some Greg Barneson and read his introduction to presuppositional apologetics.
But he's basically saying look, For the non believer, without the creator God who governs and rules all things, the world is just a chaos of brute fact, of uncreated fact that's emerged from the womb of chance, and the human mind must somehow rationalize for the first time the chaos that's out there.
But the unbeliever is unable to establish a relationship between the human mind and the chaotic facts out there in our experience.
This is all to say that the Bible's truth.
And explanatory power carries self attesting authority.
The Lord Jesus never appeals to Greek systems of logic.
He doesn't footnote any philosophers.
He doesn't quote any human authorities to support his claim.
It would be absurd for him to do so as both God and King, the Word made flesh, through whom all things were made, to whom all things belong, who says, Before Abraham was, I am.
Let me just consult Socrates to make sure that's correct.
His word is totally self attesting, and this is what caused and still causes such offense.
Now, in our apologetic efforts, we can legitimately speak about the text of the Bible seen through historical investigation.
We can point to ancient and plentiful manuscripts which show the accuracy of its transmission.
We can answer the questions of those who ask about textual variants.
We can point to Discoveries and archaeology to grab people's attention.
That's fine.
We can use evidences to grab people's attention, but none of this proves or demonstrates the Bible to be the Word of God.
Historical inquiry can only ever produce varying degrees of confidence in any specific event.
And sinful people are no more likely to accept God's revelation of Himself in history as they are to accept God's revelation of Himself in the Bible.
If they don't like it, in a few weeks' time, I'll be doing a debate on the resurrection around Easter time in a college setting in the UK, but I won't be offering 10 historical reasons to believe the resurrection as my fundamental argument.
Jesus was raised from the dead, but I cannot prove that unequivocally by human reason.
I believe it on faith.
I believe it.
And it's only by believing it that I can understand anything else.
Faith in the Word of God is our starting point then in apologetics, as in the rest of the Christian life.
Why would we move out of the normal Christian life and then suddenly, when we get into Christian apologetics, say, well, now we need to use a different form of authority?
This is the result, of course, of placing our trust in Jesus Christ rather than the epistemic.
Confusion of human beings and their empty reasoning.
We boldly and unapologetically stand on the word of God and presuppose the Christian worldview.
We submit a priori to the dependability of God's word.
I do not hold that the Bible is true after I've analyzed it and decided I think it's logical by my judgment or ethical by my estimation.
Or sufficiently supported by the most recent historical research.
The Lord Jesus says in John 17 17, when he prayed to his Father, Thy word is truth.
Psalm 119 declares, Thy law is truth.
That's our sure foundation.
Let me say something radical to you prayerful reflection upon the word of God by the Holy Spirit is our Archimedean point of departure in apologetics.
It's the word of God.
The work of the Holy Spirit and our prayerful dependence upon both the Word and the Spirit that is the point of departure for us.
And that contrasts with traditional views of apologetics that must first seek to prove God and the validity of His Word first.
Usually they try and prove some kind of abstract conception of theism, then move to try and establish that maybe Jesus was raised from the dead, probably.
And now might you please consider the Bible as the Word of God and Jesus' claims.
Van Til says, Traditional apologetics built into it the right and ability of the natural man, apart from the work of the Spirit of God, to be the judge of the claim of the authoritative Word of God.
It is man who, by means of his self established intellectual tools, puts his stamp of approval on the Word of God, and then, only after that grand act, does he listen to it.
God's Word must first pass man's test of good and evil, truth and falsity.
But once you tell a non Christian this, why should he be worried by anything else that you say?
You have already told him he is quite all right just the way he is.
The scripture is not correct.
Then the scripture is not correct when it talks of darkened minds, willful ignorance, dead men, and blind people.
With this method, the correctness of the natural man's problematics is endorsed.
That is all he needs to reject the Christian faith.
It's because of this that when the apostles are engaged in evangelism in the book of Acts and giving an account of the faith to the skeptic, we're told they reasoned with them from the scriptures.
Acts 17 17.
They didn't reason to the scriptures as though they were establishing their authority, but from the worldview of the scriptures.
Now, that doesn't set aside careful thinking or reasoned arguments, as witnessed Paul in.
The Areopagus on Mars Hill.
But it is reasoning with the scriptures and in light of the scriptures, not pretending to neutrality to see if God's claims in scripture are valid.
It's important that actually we remember in our evangelistic and apologetic efforts that it is God, the Holy Spirit, who reveals Christ to people and not us.
Our task is to be faithful, to be obedient, to glorify God.
It is the Holy Spirit who reveals Christ to people.
When Jesus asked Peter, Who do you say that I am?
And Peter replied, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Jesus said, Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
So the scriptures make crystal clear that all people have a duty to acknowledge God's self revelation in creation.
In Christ, in Scripture, and conform their thinking to it.
Every word of God is a law word, it's the condition of our existence.
His word is the condition of all life, and it is this word we take by faith and trust, and which we presuppose in our engagement with the world.
That's thinking Christianly, but to wrap up, we could also think unchristianly.
Those who reject Christ and his revelation obviously do not have a Christian view of things.
But that doesn't make them neutral.
It does not mean they don't have a faith foundation for their thinking.
Rather, something takes the place of the living God.
For the unbeliever, there is a God surrogate.
Consequently, the problem we face, the challenge we face in engaging the unbeliever, is what we can call the epistemological sin of the heart.
It's a sin of the heart.
It's a refusal to acknowledge God's word revelation and respond with obedience.
Paul tells us, doesn't he, what the situation is?
Confronting the God Surrogate00:09:59
For God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them because God has shown it to them.
For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made.
As a result, people are without excuse.
For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude.
Instead, their thinking became nonsense and their senseless minds were darkened.
They exchanged the truth of God for the lie, it should say, really, a lie, and worshipped and served something created instead of the Creator who is blessed forever.
What is the lie?
The lie, right back in the garden of God.
Has God really said, You will not surely die, but you will be as God?
You can define good and evil and truth and falsehood for yourself, you can know it for yourself.
It is this reality that we confront.
All worldviews have their own religious starting point with a presupposed criterion of truth.
And this is where the truth is exchanged for a lie.
The unbeliever's explainer for reality will always posit something that just is, that's just there, something that doesn't depend on anything else for its being, an unconditioned reality, a divine per se.
Everybody either believes in the living God or they will give something created.
A God surrogate, the status of divinity, and the Bible calls that idolatry.
It's this religious foundation that impacts then all knowledge and all truth.
And over the centuries, the idol factory, as John Calvin called it, of the human heart has tried to give divine status to everything from planetary bodies to numbers.
Like the Pythagoreans who worship numbers, to ideas, to logic and human reason, to emperors and states, to energy and matter, and to many other things besides.
Roy Klauser helpfully summarizes it this way it's almost lunch, so hang in there.
Those who don't see the divine as the biblical transcendent creator will make it some part of the world instead.
And regarding anything in the world as self existent will slant, guide, And control the deeper content of every concept.
The name given to this way of explaining, the way that identifies what part of the world all the rest depends on, is reduction.
A reductionist explanation is one that claims to have found the part of the world that everything else depends on.
A Christian should say these are all wrong.
They are all examples of regarding part of creation as the creator.
The ultimate explainer is no part of creation at all.
Every one of these divinity candidates is real, but they all depend on God.
The Christian would adopt a systematically non reductionist approach to every sort of theory, every sort of knowledge, and every concept of everything.
Now, this idolatry can take very sophisticated and deceptive forms, so that man's creativity in finding God's surrogates can appear very, very sophisticated.
These idols then shape people's thinking, and through people's thinking, they start to shape culture and society.
For example, some people try and make the physical aspect of reality, material reality, sometimes in tandem with the biological, as the only true reality and use it to explain everything else.
The physical is said to be truly real, and everything else, all the non physical properties like logical thought, Beauty, love, number, even history are either illusory or they are simply byproducts of what is physical.
Philosophers call that epiphenomenal.
They're just a byproduct of matter.
Everything is made dependent on the physical aspect of reality, so every other facet is diminished in status as less real.
I was reading this past week about a new exhibit.
About the human brain that everybody's raving about, these experiments being done on rats and other animals, and this sort of neurological science, deep investigation of the brain.
Look how these electrons are firing, and look at this activity over here when someone's praying, and this activity as though you can reduce human existence to the movement of atoms, to the firing of neurons.
It's actually self defeating if you follow the logic of that view out.
There's no such thing as a historical exhibit within science.
Everything is made dependent on the physical.
The importance of the physical aspect is then overestimated relative to everything that is said to depend upon it.
And this is the nature of reductionism.
It performs a grand leveling.
Matter leaps from one aspect, one level of existence to the next, as though the law for the movement of atoms can account for the psychical, the moral, the cultural, and the faith life of man.
By contrast, the Christian will regard everything, though, in creation as equally real.
Equally subject to God, equally dependent on His Word.
No part of the cosmos generates or explains the rest.
The Christian mind is non reductionist, it does not reduce the universe in whole or in part to one or more aspects.
In fact, it doesn't even reduce, remember, the cosmos to God.
We're not pantheists.
We don't identify any aspect of creation. As the source of the universe, and we don't reduce the universe to God as though God and the universe are somehow one.
There is a creator creature distinction that the Bible begins with, that the Gospel of John begins with, that it asserts, meaning the dependency of all creation on God and every aspect, every constituent aspect of creation, equally real, no part reduced in its importance relative to the rest.
And that is the root of the Christian mind.
In Him, all things are.
Hold together.
In him, all things consist.
Now, that might have sounded a bit abstract.
I know that's apologetics for you.
But when this is applied into the real world of political life and social life, you get National Socialism, Nazism, Communism, Marxism, and millions of people lose their lives.
When you have a reductionist worldview and then you apply it historically, people die, human lives are destroyed.
Perhaps the most popular idol of our age, the favorite God surrogate of our age, is the state, the political, where truth, morality, and law, as well as cradle to grave security, is found in the infallible state as the arbiter of life.
The crowd, the mob, the democratic will expresses a mutiny against God.
So actually, today, politics is.
It's politics that fights God and his claims tooth and nail.
Everything is politicized marriage, identity, life.
It's all made an aspect of the political.
That's why pastors get up into their pulpit and they want to talk about abortion and then they're accused of being political and bringing politics into the pulpit.
Which is exactly where it belongs, by the way.
Interestingly, Kierkegaard foresaw that atheistic and neo pagan movements would make their appearance as political trends and then manifest their true identity.
He said, This the future will correspond inversely to the Reformation.
Then everything appeared to be a religious movement and became politics.
Amen.
Now everything appears to be politics but will become a religious movement.
Let me end with this.
In this view of apologetics, the how of the Christian faith, the how of coming to faith, is as important as the what.
Inviting a Decisive Step00:04:00
In this view of apologetics, the how of the Christian faith is as important as the what, because the what cannot be ascertained or established under the illusion of some universal capacity of autonomous human thinking.
And the attempt to do so always ends with the accommodation of the Christian faith to the culture.
The gradual diminution of the gospel.
Human reasoning itself needs redemption, it needs reconciliation to the truth, just as every other aspect of life needs reconciliation to the truth.
To learn the truth, capital T, We must recognize that heretofore we have lived in untruth.
And so acknowledge our dependency upon God and His Spirit.
And it's only here that Christ, who is the truth, becomes for us constitutive of a new paradigm.
He becomes constitutive of a new paradigm, the Christian faith.
No human perspective.
higher that might be invoked to bring Christ and his revelation into judgment.
Let me say that again.
No human perspective is higher than might be invoked to bring Christ or his revelation into judgment.
Faith in Christ is the Archimedean point.
The difficulty in believing for sinners is not the reach of their reason, it's the hardness of their hearts.
That's the fundamental challenge.
It is difficult to believe because it is difficult to obey.
It is difficult to believe because it is difficult to obey.
And so we have to invite the unbeliever to take a decisive step.
Pascal talked about this a lot.
To put on the lens of Christ and the gospel and look again at the world.
By all means, internally critique their worldview, put on their lens and show them where it leads.
Then offer them the lenses of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the scriptures.
And invite them to take a decisive step, to take his word and pray for insight, to hang out with Christians, to go to church and listen to preaching, to take up his word and surrender their illusions and grasp the truth.
Ultimately, we must call them to follow and believe in order that they may understand.
I close with the words of the Danish philosopher.
If someone wanted to be his follower, his approach, as seen in the gospel, was different from lecturing.
To such a person, he said something like this Venture a decisive act, then we can begin.
In other words, follow me.
What does this mean?
It means that one does not become a Christian by hearing something about Christianity, by reading something about it, by thinking about it.
No, a setting is required.
Venture a decisive act.
The proof does not proceed, but follows, is in and with the imitation that follows Christ.