2. No Neutrality, No Autonomy. C.S. Lewis noted years ago, the unbeliever likes to place God on the witness stand while he takes a seat on the bench. This is the essence of his rebellion! The believer cannot allow this attitude to go unchallenged. Non-Christians are not dispassionate observers – never mind impartial judges! Neither are they in the right to assume that human beings should act as if God did not exist. All men are obligated to believe in …
Category: Apologetics
In the last few weeks I have encountered articles and audio in which the approach to Apologetics known as Presuppositionalism has been thoroughly misconstrued. I am therefore re-posting an older article, this time in short installments, which may help correct any stray reader who has been misled. An Introduction Apologetics is the defense and confirmation of the Christian Faith. Peter told his readers that they were to be “always ready to give an answer (apologia) for the hope which was …
Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, by John R. Muether, Phillipsburg, PA: P&R, 2008. Any biographer of a man like Cornelius Van Til needs to assume certain things. First, Van Til’s thought, though brilliant, is not always easy to divine. Second, that this is made more problematical by the coming together of at least two different obstacles: a. Van Til’s sometimes awkward way of putting things, and, b. the difficulty many of us have with obeying the injunction to …
When I have told people that the Roman Catholic Church supports theistic evolution they have usually doubted my words. But here is a link showing I am not making it up. Not that I believe the Intelligent Design movement is the savior of apologetics or anything, but I am not dim enough to think it inferior to neo-Darwinianism – whose apologetic mantra is “we can imagine how this might have happened” – but you would have thought “the church that …
I came across this touching memorial of the Bahnsen/Stein debate from Dr Bahnsen’s son. Greg Bahnsen’s work in apologetics is more important today than ever. He was a true gift to the churches. …
Here is the text of a letter to the editor of the Fort Worth Weekly about an article they published about Intelligent Design. The article was ignorant to say the least. Here it is if you want to read it. The Discovery Institute’s response is here To the editor: The article “Devolution in Education” (Sept. 3, 2008) by Laurie Barker James sought to correct the thinking of those who might wish to allow Intelligent Design’s incisive critique of macro-evolution entrance …
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) Another thinker whose world and life view has influenced millions of people is Soren Kierkegaard, “the father of Existentialism.” In contrast to Kant, whose life was marked by pedestrian regularities, Kierkegaard led a rather tortured existence.[1] He was greatly disturbed that the Enlightenment, instead of liberating man, ended up stealing his soul, and, as Kierkegaard thought, obliterating man’s individuality.[2] His response to this was to teach the complete freedom of the individual’s will as it progresses through …
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) A paradigm shift began with Immanuel Kant[1], who influenced most of the Western world to believe that our minds are the organizers and rationalizers of a reality which is unknowable “as it is.” The mind of man becomes the final adjudicator in the interpretation of the Universe. In Kant’s system, it cannot be any other way. Further, the empiricist in him put everything not open to the senses behind a cognitive wall in a realm he called …
The last post on “The Frame of Knowledge” asserted that the revelatory viewpoint of Christian-theism provides the only acceptable “frame” in which reason and experience can be understood for what they are – i.e. gifts of the true God. I further tried to show that Christians, therefore, ought to begin and end their thinking from within this frame. I closed out with the observation that unless Christians rethink their approach to epistemology in more biblical, which is to say revelatory …
This is an enlarged version of a review I wrote on this important volume. Review of New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, edited by W. C. Campbell-Jack & Gavin McGrath, consulting editor, C. Stephen Evans, Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 2006, 779 pp., cloth, $45.00. When Norman Geisler published his Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics in 1999 he provided the Christian community with a helpful, if slanted reference book on the defense of the Faith. Like the Catholic Handbook by Kreeft and Tacelli, …
