Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Methods XV (Part 25)

And we do ask again for enlightenment tonight to understand the issues that we are studying, that we might better set forth the glory of the gospel and its truthfulness and the honor of our Savior. We ask that you would make us better defenders of the faith and bless our class time to that end. In Jesus name, amen. I have been arguing in the last few sessions, I guess more than just a few, that in defending faith we have to present different worldviews with the challenge of the gospel. We need to set the worldview of Christianity over against the worldview of unbelief. And there are a number of different forms of unbelief, a lot of different kinds of worldviews that are non Christian. And just as a reminder of the way we've captured categorized things and illustrated each category, I said we can begin with secular, atheistic or materialistic naturalistic worldviews. And you help me now, what are some of the problems with a secular worldview? One that omits any supernatural, any spiritual forces, entities, principles.

They can't account for concepts.

Okay, Concepts, categorization, or if you will, kinds of things. Keep going, Joe.

How about even language disappears?

Yeah, Language having to do with concepts and kinds becomes impossible. What else? Knowledge. Okay, what kind of knowledge? Yeah, any kind of knowledge. But think of specifics here, Ray. Ethics and morals. Okay? Ethical absolutes can't be accounted for. Can't account for the uniformity of nature necessary to science. Can't account for the fact that the human mind is more than just brain tissue. The whole question of mind and brain. If the brain is nothing but a natural entity subject to the laws of physics and biology and so forth, then there is no freedom in one's thinking. And so the idea of argumentation makes no sense. A person has a condition, we're spent response mechanism. Why argue with them? You know, it's not going to necessarily change their mind. Yes.

Would that be related to the problem they have? Understanding determinism, things that are being determined rather than being free choice?

Would that be the problem? Yeah, because a naturalistic understanding of the brain would be a deterministic understanding of the brain. In which case then we don't have freedom of thought at all. What else did we talk about? There's more than just this, the dignity of man and ethical absolutes. There was more than that, but let's move on. If we have supernatural worldviews, those which incorporated spiritual or mental entities, They can be divided into the major world religions, excuse me, the philosophical ones. And I took as my example of a philosophical worldview that has supernatural entities or realities, Plato's philosophy. Or we can look at the religious worldviews that obviously incorporates some kind of spiritual or mental or supernatural entity or force or principle. These religious options I divided into religions of transcendent moralism, Excuse me, mysticism, get my own outline wrong here. Transcendent mysticism. And then worldviews that emphasize eminent moralism. And then finally those which ape Christianity, which are counterfeits of Christianity. And we said that there are polytheistic counterfeits like Mormonism. There are Unitarian, like Islamic, and it's following of the Koran. And they're also pseudo Messianic such as the Moonies. Okay, so we've really covered a lot of ground. We haven't covered every illustration possible, but some pretty big ones here. We've talked about naturalism, say the position of a Bertrand Russell position of the logical positivists, the determinists, the behaviorists that are around us. We've studied one of the major philosophical worldviews in Western history, Plato's. We've looked at all the religions of the world in these basic categories. We've looked at Hinduism, we've looked at Buddhism and Daoism and Confucianism. We've looked at Mormonism, we've looked at Islam, we've looked at the Munis. Now by this time, hopefully then you're getting some idea of what it means to do an internal critique of the foolish position or the foolish worldview of the unbeliever. But what I want to talk about briefly tonight is someone who says, oh well, I don't have one of these ready made worldviews. I don't come in with naturalism. I don't come in with Platonism or with Hinduism or with any of these other sorts of things. My worldview will instead be as follows. It'll be Christianity minus the things in Christianity that I don't want to have there. That is, I'm going to give an altered Christian worldview where we don't have to have every element of Christianity in it, we just have it cut down to kind of maybe a deistic kind of Christianity or maybe a non trinitarian Christianity or Christianity that doesn't have a redemptive message in it or doesn't call for the history in the Bible or the miracles of the Bible. That is to say, I want kind of a rough outline worldview, but one that doesn't commit me to everything in the Bible. I want just kind of like we'll call it Christianity prime, that is Christianity Altered somewhat. Christianity, Neo Christianity we'll call it. And so every time you bring up the problem of how does, how do you have the uniformity of nature? They say, oh well, because God's in control of all things, he keeps nature uniform. Just like you Christians say, how do you have concepts or kinds? Well God's thinking is the basis for our categorizing things as cows and giraffes and so forth. God has those concepts. Oh, that's the way Christians do ethical absolutes based on the nature of God. The way in which the brain is more than just brain tissue. There's mind that incorporates freedom and choice and so forth. Well, I have the same view of creation man made in the image of God as you Christians do. However, I don't buy any of the other stuff. All of the stuff that's necessary to save myself philosophically I have in my worldview, but I don't go any further than that. And it's been proposed to me in the past. How could we possibly answer a person like that? What if we have someone that has a worldview that is exactly parallel to ours but truncated just to the points of answering the problems that we brought up? We're going to step outside the line of looking at non Christian worldviews and we're going to start considering, if you will, worldview that you synthesize or fabricate on your own. And what I'm going to do, following the pattern, what I've taught you in this class is I'm going to set this up as a conflict, as a debate between two worldviews. The worldview of Biblical Christianity, full orbed biblical Christianity. Versus what we'll call reduced Christianity, that is Christianity that just has enough philosophical sophistication to get by. And now let's compare these two worldviews. First of all, is there any reason for me to hold to the full the whole enchilada? Why do I take the whole biblical presentation as my worldview rather than just reduce down to the philosophical bare bones minimum? Do I have a reason for that? And I would say yes I do. Let me try to give you some of the reasons why I hold that my worldview must incorporate everything that's in the Bible in the first place. This worldview is based on the self revelation of God. I did not come up with any of the elements by my saying now what would be necessary to put together a good worldview? I didn't construct this from parts. I didn't go out there and find this philosophical part. And that Philosophical part, I didn't devise it at all. What I was given was God's own revelation of himself. And I'm going to suggest that no one has the right to construct what God is like unless God himself is talking and telling you what he's like. That it's the self revelation of God that enables me to have a worldview at all that uses his name. Moreover, in his self revelation, the Bible teaches it's plenary inspiration, which is a theological way of saying it's fully inspired. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable, so forth and so on. Jesus says not the slightest jot or tittle shall pass away from the law. Scripture cannot be broken. Okay, so call to mind, I'm not going to take the time tonight to remind you all the theological training you've had on this point that the Bible teaches its full inspiration, that every bit of it, the counting of Gideon's men is under the inspiration of God. The details of the materials that went into the building of the tabernacle under the inspiration of God, the genealogies under the inspiration of God. So my worldview is based on God's self revelation. And in that revelation he says that everything in the Bible is inspired is His Word. And then we can add another consideration, that if it's not authoritative. Or trustworthy. At one point, then it's not at any. Now I'm not saying that if the Bible is untrue at one point, it's not true at any. That would be a logical fallacy because bits and pieces of any book could be true and some false and so forth. What I'm saying though is that if at one point, point I have the right to supersede the authority of God and say, well, that's not important, that's not necessary, that I don't have to submit to without challenge. If at one point the word of God is not the ultimate authority or is not trustworthy in what it's saying, then I have to say at every point I've got to be the one who decides whether it's trustworthy or not, in which case I'm the final authority. So in terms of my presuppositional approach to these matters, I have a consistent, coherent reason why I say it's the whole enchilada or it's none. Now that's my reason for preferring this worldview to this worldview. Now let's go over and look at what might be wrong with the reduced approach to Christianity. The two crucial failings of any philosopher I'VE taught you this before are arbitrariness and inconsistency. Now we have someone here who wants to set forth a worldview. And for convenience, I'm just going to call this worldview the set of A, B, C, D, E, F and G. And it could go on and on. Of course, these are the propositions that make up this worldview. View these and not other ones. Okay, now the question I'm going to ask. See, someone says, well, where do you get this worldview? I say, well, God has revealed himself, revealed himself in the pages of the Bible. And the Bible itself makes the following claims. And that's why I put this whole thing together this way. But now I stand over here and I say the same. Where did you get your worldview? Well, here are the two options. I got my worldview by stealing yours and reducing it. Which guys say, well, then you're going to have to deal with the authority of God who gave you the right to throw out any of the parts that God put in his revelation. You see, if the person, and this is the only honest answer they have is, well, I've taken Christianity, but the parts I don't like, I'm chucking. But then what you want to say, I mean, if that's the way they approach it, you say, now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Then you haven't taken Christianity, have you? Because Christianity doesn't allow you to chuck some parts that you don't like. The Christian worldview takes as its ultimate authority God revealing himself in the Scriptures. And so you have not taken the Christian worldview and then tinkered with it, because the Christian worldview doesn't allow tinkering. And even if you did, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for stealing things from me in order to try to win this argument. If you've got to steal from me, then you ought to say my position is right because you didn't come up with anything on your own. But he doesn't have the right to say he's taking it from me because my position says that's its ultimate authority. It's God speaking the Scripture. And that's been violated. So now he's going to have to go the other way. He's going to have to say, oh, I guess I've constructed this piece by piece, Piece by piece. Well, then the question is, are all the pieces consistent? The first problem he had is that he was arbitrary. He took Christianity and then just said, chuck this, that, chuck that, he can't do that sort of thing. That worldview doesn't permit that. So now we're going to ask, can he consistently go on a piece by piece basis if he were allowed to do so? The first thing we'd have to ask is, when you tell me that the uniformity of nature is taken care of because God himself keeps it uniform, how do you know that he's going to say, well, but if God doesn't, then nature is not uniform and you can't have science. I say, yeah, well that's true, but how do you know that God does it? Now what answer is not available to him? He can't say, God told me so. Right, because then he'd have to go to a religious book. What's that?

He just decides, okay, I'm going to be sinful, I'm going to do it. I'm just going to be, no, no.

Sinful on his terms or on my terms? Because if it's sinful on my terms, he loses the argument. If it's sinful on his terms, and I want to know how can that be sinful? Since what you are doing shows that you are the ultimate authority in your worldview, you're the one who constructs your worldview, fine, go for it, do your best. But don't say God said this unless you think you are God. So you see, this person is not allowed to make reference to the authority of God in doing this. He cannot appeal to the self revelation of God. So when someone says God does the following to make nature uniform, he says, wait a minute, you can't speak for God. You don't have a revelation that you're relying on. So now what's he going to say? He's going to say, well, there must be some reason why nature is uniform. And whatever that reason is, I call God. But you see, if that's going to be allowed in the debate, then we didn't have to have the debate at all. What we could all say is, well, there's some reason why every philosophical question you could pose to me has an answer and I'm just going to label that answer God. So now it's all over. God's the answer to everything. But what does that mean? Whatever you want it to mean. It means every, every worldview's got its own. I mean, this is not answering any question, it's just shelving it with a linguistic convention saying there must be some entity that makes nature uniform and I'm going to call that entity God. Before all we know, that entity doesn't have to Be personal, could be a principle, could be kind of the spring works and mechanism of the natural world. Who knows? What you need to see is when a person starts doing this, you have to say, you cannot go to the Bible and then start editing because the Bible doesn't allow editing. And if you can't go to the Bible, God's self revelation, then you can't speak in the name of God. Because you see, if the person tries to speak in the name of God, then what he's going to do is assume that he is the ultimate authority because he's constructing the worldview. God's not giving it. But then he's going to turn around and he's going to make God the one who pays the debts for his worldview. He's going to make God the one who is the explanation and the backup for everything that he comes up with. And that's inconsistent. On the one hand, God is the ultimate authority and explanation. On the other hand, God is not. God comes in afterwards. God comes in after I've done my reasoning and shown the necessity for him. Remember how Isaiah made fun of the idolaters in his day, Said, you go out and you cut down a tree and you fashion it and you carve it and you do all this kind of stuff and polish it, set it up. And then after you've done all this good stuff, then you say, that's my God, it made me. After you've made God, you turn around and say that God made me. And he just laughed at that. And we ought to laugh at the person doing this. This person goes and constructs all the stuff that he needs, he thinks. And then he polishes it and says, that's God. You can't do it both ways. If God's the ultimate authority, then you aren't allowed to speak for God. You can't construct a worldview and then just label it God or that it came from God. Because if you say it came from God, I'm going to say, how do you know it came from God? When did he tell you that? The person says, well, I don't have to have an object of public revelation. He just privately did it. He kind of told. He appeared in my bedroom one night and told me that he's the answer to all the philosophical problems, problems that that Bonson guy brings up. But then of course, the answer is, you're now into arbitrariness, aren't you? Because if it's God appeared to you in your bedroom, what are you going to do when the Next guy says, no, he didn't. He appeared to me in my bedroom and he didn't say the things you're saying. And so what are you doing here? I'm going to dance this guy from pillar to post. I'm going to dance him from arbitrariness to inconsistency, back and forth, back and forth. He cannot say that this is a divine revelation. He has no self revelation of God. Since there's no self revelation, then he cannot speak in God's name. Or for God. But then if he can't speak for God, then we have no reason to trust his worldview. Okay, any questions on tonight's lesson? John, would theistic evolution be in that category on the writings? Well, some would and some wouldn't. There are some theistic evolutionists who believe that the Bible can be interpreted to allow for theistic evolution. I don't agree with them. In fact, I've got a lecture on tape that you can pick up at the shows that it's in the Hebrew impossible to justify evolution on the Hebrew text. But that's a different thing from recognizing that some people think that they're following the Bible. There are others, however, who would say I follow the Bible, but when it comes to its account of origins, we've got to make some adjustments. They'd be the tinkering kind of Christian professors. And as we've shown, tinkering is not allowed. Yes.

If you were to put yourself in the position of an Old Testament saint who was arguing, trying to argue persuasively for the existence of God and doesn't have a revelation to point to.

Would.

You be able to still do it with the apologetic method?

How could you say that an Old Testament saint wouldn't have a revelation to point to? You just said he's an Old Testament saint. He adds the Old Testament.

Okay, A person living in the time before the New Testament was written.

Just.

Say during the time of Moses, but he's not living right with people where God's there with the pillar of fire. He's in Greece somewhere.

The same defense that would be used by the New Testament saint would be used by the Old Testament saint. And the extent of what they are defending as their worldview would change depending on increased revelation. But the same approach to defending it would be there. Yes. That isn't to say the New Testament's unnecessary. Then what's to say is as God gives further revelation, the same apologetic procedure applies. The Old Testament saint would end up defending. He's at a disadvantage. He's defending his anticipation of God fulfilling the promise of a Messiah coming because that's part of the Old Testament. Okay, so in a sense he's saying God has never broken his word. I trust him. He has promised the following. It's going to come. New Testament saint has more and is in a different situation now. We're looking back and defending God kept his word and Jesus is the Messiah.

Right, but you have no self revelation of God necessarily to point to. Except for God came to this prophet that I know and told him.

The self revelation of God in the Old Testament is exactly what we have. And the only thing I think you would be talking about is the time it takes to have it recorded in writing. Right, right.

Because isn't that part of our major apologetic? We have the bible that's inspired, 100% inspired, infallible. You cannot add to it, you cannot take away.

Yeah, but what I'm defending, of course is the content of the Bible. I'm not just defending a book as a book, like it fell out of heaven. Yeah, well they had revelation in writing too. I mean Jeremiah prophesied, then it was written down.

Didn't God commit himself only to the.

Jews hand out his oracles? Well, no, actually I think there was revelation outside, but for the most part the oracles of God were consigned to the Jews. I think, for instance, Job was not a Jew. That's controversial. Some people would disagree, but I think that's evidence of revelation of God outside of the chosen line. Jonah went to Nineveh with a revelation of God, so there was a minimal revelation there. And of course all men have the revelation of God through nature and history, totally apart from special revelation that is later recorded in writing. Craig, speaking of the Jews, where in our non Christian outline of worldviews does Judaism fit Old Testament Judaism or Rabbinic Judaism or present day? I would consider it an apostate. Oh, I don't have the outline, an apostate version of Christianity. I mean, I realize that sounds anachronistic kind of funny, but in terms of strategizing this, you must look upon these people as trying to claim part of God's revelation but not going the whole way. So they're kind of like Mormons on one hand, but they're kind of like tinkerers on the other. Most apostate Jews today, however, can be approached basically as secularist. You have to ask them, do you believe in divine revelation and do you believe in a personal God? The vast majority of educated Jews don't. But Judaism, if you want what they call today Orthodox Judaism, which is really Rabbinic Judaism and not Orthodox Old Testament Judaism, but that I would just treat as a separate worldview of a pseudo Messianic. Sorry, Joe. In dealing with Christians who kind of try and play both sides of the fence as far as really believing the Word of God as an objective revelation, but employing visions and so on to qualify that, how do you deal with that? I see that you've addressed that in some. Yeah, you're not really dealing with somebody now in terms of worldviews. You're dealing with somebody in terms of theological polemics. There is a sense in which you could push an Arminian to a worldview defense and say, well, on your worldview you couldn't understand anything because God's not predestinating and in control. You could push a charismatic on how they tend to tinker with the Word of God and put greater stock in their subjective visions and so forth than they do in the objective public record of God's Word and how they're pitted against each other. You could do a worldview defense of a sort, even with those people. But I would say at some point you cross over the threshold and you're dealing with evangelical brothers and with evangelical brothers, it's just a matter. Let's go to the Word and see what it teaches there. It's not worldview apologetics that you use, it's what says the Scriptures. To a certain extent, that's true with Roman Catholics too. I don't consider Roman Catholicism. I'm not talking about individual Catholics. Roman Catholicism is not evangelical. It's not the Gospel. It's not Christianity in that sense. However, because they accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments and so forth, the way to argue with the Roman Catholic ultimately is to take them to the Scriptures. And the same with charismatics and Arminians and Baptists. Everybody else. And someone has a question about infant baptism. I'm not going to use a worldview defense. I'm going to be using what does the Bible say? Since we all agree on our worldview in the sense that the Bible is the ultimate authority. Okay, let's take a five minute break and we'll come back for prayer next week. Lord willing, I'm going to talk about the mystical cop out. I don't need a defense. I don't need.