Faith and Reason in Christian Perspective – Pt. 1 Faith and Reason in Christian Perspective – Pt. 2 In this third and final article on the roles of faith and reason I want to turn to examine some biblical passages, which, I think, really help us to understand why reason must be driven by faith. The first of these comes from the Garden of Eden. Autonomy: Our Default Position in the Use of Reason Although we do not have a …
Author: Paul Henebury
I really appreciate John Byl’s stand for young-earth creationism against all the accommodationist nonsense of old-earthers. He has written some thoughts about apologist Douglas Groothuis’s big book Christian Apologetics which should be pondered. I think he shows the problems which inhere in the ‘two books’ view and in cow-towing to Big Bang cosmology. http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-defective-case-for-biblical-faith.html#more I agree with Byl that Groothuis’s book has good things in it, although I cannot recommend it as an apologetics book. I feel okay about it …
Recently K. Scott Oliphint of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia has published a book which he has called Covenantal Apologetics. I reviewed the book here and recommend it. But I expressed reservations about the writer’s agenda of rebranding Van Til’s apologetic teaching in line with the book’s title. Coming as it does from one of the foremost representatives of Van Til’s presuppositional approach around the thesis deserves attention. As I said in my review, by “Covenantal” Oliphint means the ‘covenants’ of covenant …
Part One A Case Study: Harold Netland and the Demand for Neutrality As we further consider whether reason should be categorized separately to faith as properly functioning independent of it, I cite the example of an article by Harold Netland entitled, “Apologetics, Worldviews, and the Problem of Neutral Criteria.”[1] In Netland’s 1991 article we see an able but, I believe, misguided critique of presuppositionalist John M. Frame’s epistemology as set forth in his book The Doctrine of the Knowledge of …
This and the following piece are old posts to which I am giving more daylight. I hope to append a Part Three! It appears to me that one of the first things a faithful theologian needs to do is to straighten out the confusion brought about by the world’s separation of faith and reason. This relationship is so vital to a biblically fastened worldview that to neglect it will involve the believer in a host of conflicting beliefs and …
Intro. I don’t think anyone who employs Van Til’s approach is overjoyed with the label ‘presuppositionalism.’ (PA). Van Til himself wasn’t terribly happy with it. Neither was Greg Bahnsen, whose apologetic acuity made him perhaps Van Til’s most faithful and articulate disciple. Stressing the role of presuppositions did not mean, either for Van Til or Bahnsen, nor Frame or Oliphint, that evidences were not to have an important part to play within this approach. Van Til stated over and over …
PART ONE This completes the thoughts offered previously. 4. Systematic Theology Coming now to Systematic Theology the first thing that must be said is that the pretended stand for a partial system must be summarily dropped. Dispensational Theology cannot be switched out for the term Dispensational Premillennialism. In point of fact, I make bold to say that the notion of Dispensational Premillennialism is a bit of an odd bird without a full-orbed system to back it up. Most Dispensationalists have …
What is a Dispensationalist Theology? For one reason or another traditional Dispensationalism has been abandoned by all but a relatively few Bible students. The wild success of the Left Behind novels is no sound indicator to the contrary. Two much better indicators which point decisively the other way are the degree of serious attention given to this point of view in most Biblical and Systematic theologies, which is nugatory; and the stunning lack of scholarly works in these areas by …
Part One, Two, Three The Question of the Incarnate Christ What do we do with Christ’s human soul in this matter of transmission? Do we commit the Apollinarian heresy of the Early Church, which says Christ had a human body but a divine soul? Or are we to fall into the Eutychian heresy, where Christ was said to have had a human body mixed with the divine soul? Those are not orthodox positions. But there are certain passages which speak …
The pieces I was working on are not quite finished so I thought I would give this one another spin. A Dispensationalist is a Christian who sees in Scripture certain clear divisions in the progress of revelation in which God governs history. At its best this is done on the basis of the covenants revealed in the Bible.A “dispensation” (Gk. “oikonomia”) is an administration or economy, wherein, within a certain period of time (known to God, but afterwards revealed to …
