Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Conditions For Success IV (Part 31)

There are souls for all eternity, but a faith which is worthy of defense, one of which we need not be intellectually ashamed. We do pray that you would give us the courage of our convictions to take a stand for the truth of the Christian faith. We do pray that you give us diligence and responsibility in preparing to answer any man who asks us a reason for the hope that is in us. We do pray that you would bless us with faithfulness in that endeavor, that we might always honor you in your sovereign prerogatives, that we might see you in all of your majesty and glory. That we might recognize that the Lord Jesus Christ is Lord of our minds as well as everything else in our lives. We do pray that as we speak a word in behalf of the word of our Savior, that you would bless it. That you by your spirit would sovereignly work in the hearts of those to whom we speak. That we might see not only success by being faithful to the Savior, but we might also see with joy, hearts changed and minds turned around and lives redeemed. We do pray that you will make use of all of our previous sessions in this long course, that they would not simply have been idle time spent, but that you would sanctify them to our use and drive home the lessons to our hearts that we might live from what we have learned in your word. We pray that you would forgive us of our sins and bless this session of study again tonight. In Jesus name. Amen. Well, we come to the end of, I think, nine months of this course in apologetics, if I have that right. And finally, chapter 24 of the syllabus, an overall summary and application, which I have entitled Effectively Encountering the Varieties of Opposition. I begin this chapter by noting that opposition to our faith comes to practical expression in a great variety of ways. And I want to point that out because I think we tend to have a stylized idea of what an apologetical encounter is like. And then what happens is I don't really see very much of that exact circumstance happen in my life, so I don't have to do a lot of apologetics. Well, let's take a look here. I suggest that popular media and entertainment propaganda from the cults and false religions teachings in our schools and colleges, remarks that are made by our colleagues at work or our neighbors at home, our friends, not to mention modern trends in psychology and in politics and in medicine and in society list can go on and on. All of these things present a fruitful ground for apologetical work on your behalf. The opinions, assumptions and behavior of people who come into contact with their lives are for the most part grounded in hostility to the teaching of scripture. That hostility, remember, doesn't always active. It isn't someone shaking the fist at God. Sometimes it's just a silent, passive, I don't care and I don't need God attitude that you encounter. The believer, I say, is apologetically challenged on every side. Of course, his need to defend his beliefs has greatly increased to the extent that he initiates an evangelistic witness with those around him. So there's no lack of opportunity. Now stop and think about it. Not every apologetical encounter, not every use of apologetics comes to expression in your life through you going out, witnessing, and then having someone say, oh, but how about this? And then you've got to defend the faith. I think that we tend to think, well, I'll evangelize and in the midst of evangelizing, then I'll need to defend the faith. Or more remotely, more rarely, we'll have someone who knows we're a Christian who comes up and says, oh, how can you believe in God when there's war in the world? Or what about evolution or something like that? Every once in a while someone will bring the attack to you. So you either go out evangelizing and that opens up the possibility of apologetics, or someone's attacking you because they know your standard. But you see, apologetics is more than that. Every day you read the paper, you have to do apologetics. Every day you watch the tv, you have to do apologetics. Time you consider movements in politics or medicine or what have you, you have to do apologetics because, you see, our faith is being challenged on all sides. The challenge doesn't always come to verbal expression with some opponent out there, you know, in a nice clean cut way. And by the way, apologetics, I think, is probably a lot more done on the run than it is in terms of formal setups. We like to think that, well, what I'll do is I'll have someone over for coffee, we'll sit down, he or she will state her opinions, I will state mine, we'll exchange evidence and that sort of thing. Well, that happens occasionally. But you know, what will happen is you'll have a colleague at work who, you know, in the midst of a conversation will throw out something and, and you've got to take the bait and you've got to give some kind of an answer in three minutes, you know, because it's time to get back to work or something, and maybe a coffee break. And you can't say oh, well, if we had time to sit down and go through 20 weeks of assignments, I could finally get to an answer. You've got to be able to go right to the heart of the thing and say something that's going to win you another five minutes later and then another hour and something like that. So remember that the use of the material that you have been given in this course is not just for those kind of preconceived, stylized apologetical encounters that you may be thinking of. The variety of opposition and opportunity is quite great. But I want to talk about a different kind of variety, more importantly tonight. And that's the different kinds of criticisms that can be raised in all those situations. There's no shortage, I say, of the kinds of criticism and problems encountered by the Christian apologists. And I'm just going to go through here, give you some idea of the various things that you're going to have to defend if you're going to be alert in this world and defend the Christian faith. I say, first of all, there are direct attacks on Christian tenets. There are people who will just openly say, I can't accept the, this, that, or the other aspect of the Christian faith. Some people reject the Christian God, obviously. Atheists reject the Christian God and any notion of God. Agnostics reject the Christian God, skeptics reject the Christian God. So there's one major part of the faith. In fact, many people think the whole of apologetics is tied up in proofs for God's existence, because that's that big a deal. Obviously, when someone out there doesn't believe in God, you've got an apologetical encounter. But then there are some people who believe in God, but they'll attack revelation first, the possibility of revelation. Some people will say God is of such and such a nature that he can't reveal himself or doesn't choose to reveal himself, or we couldn't understand it if we got it. Others who accept the possibility of revelation will say, God can reveal himself, but the Bible's not that revelation. So then you have an attack upon the Bible per se as being the revelation of God. Now, why would people reject the Bible? Well, they'll reject the Bible first of all, because they think that it's illogical. That is, they suppose that there are contradictions in the system of doctrine taught in the Bible. You have an example here, and the person who says, well, if God is all good and God is all powerful, there shouldn't be evil. There's. There's a logical problem there. You have to give up one of those premises. Either you must give up the existence of evil as a premise, or you must give up the idea that God could eliminate it if he wanted to, or that he's good enough to want to. Others suggest that there are logical problems because the recorded accounts in the Bible conflict with each other. For instance, resurrection narratives are sometimes given as an example of the Bible contradicting itself. Okay, people reject the Bible on the basis of logic. So they think. And then secondly, people reject the Bible on the basis of factual matters. Okay, they will reject the textual accuracy of the Bible. How often have I had people say, well, but the Bible's such an old book, you know, who knows what it said originally? I mean, there's been all these copies down through the years, right? So textual accuracy is being attacked. Or they'll attack the historical veracity of the Bible. You know, there was no Noah's Ark, Jonah wasn't in the belly of a great fish, Jesus didn't rise from the dead. That leads to another one. They'll reject the possibility of miracles. They'll have a naturalistic assumption that there can't be anything out of the ordinary. That happens, and when the Bible records it, it must be wrong. So you have people rejecting the Bible on the basis of logic, on the basis of fact. And then we have people reject the Bible on the basis of ethics. Interestingly enough, too, you'll find this all the time. People will say that God's actions in the Bible are abhorrent, like holy war in the Old Testament. Or you'll have people look at the commandments of God and ridicule the commandments of God and want to reject the Bible because they don't think, you know, those commandments are good. And then finally, there are personal reasons why people reject the Bible. They'll say, the Bible is not to their liking. It doesn't suit them. It's kind of like, the soup's too hot, I don't want this. Or they'll say that it doesn't meet their needs. Or there are people who are apathetic and indifferent to religious truth. There are people who are relativistic, getting the idea. But that's only one category. I said, that's the direct attack approach. Now there's a whole other area of apologetics start all over again. Now we might have to do apologetics dealing with people that have competing systems of thought. So you have people that are not attacking Christianity directly, but putting up competition to Christianity. You have those who have the wrong God, people who are Deistic in their view of God, people that are pantheistic in their view of God. You have the various world religions and all the, as you know, the potpourri of views of God that we've seen there, some have a different revelation. There are people who depend upon their intuitions or their personal feelings or the opinions of their society or their human traditions or other sacred writings. You know, how often have you said, well, my authority is the Bible, and somebody says, oh yeah, well, there are all these other sacred writings. So they have competition out there to deal with. And then some people accept the wrong interpretation of the Bible. Now we're narrowing it down to people like Roman Catholics who accept the Bible, accept the triune God, but then they interpret the Bible inaccurately. Or you have people that have an incorrect view of soteriology, as the cults often do. False view of salvation. Okay, now, when you think about all the different ways in which Christianity is repudiated or attacked, from the passing remark at the water cooler at work, to the sorts of things you hear from Ted Turner, you know, in the media, to what your neighbors say to you, or how your relatives find it really eccentric that you believe these superstitious things, or to people openly attacking tenets of your view, or people coming to you with an alternative religion because they're really committed to some other kind of faith. And then you think of all the different kinds of attacks. Well, we've only taken a few minutes to talk about it here, but I haven't done a good job. If you aren't depressed, because you should be depressed when you stop and think of it, as I say here, how could anyone hope to be an effective defender of the faith? And I have to, before I end this course, dissuade you from that, I have to not leave you with the idea that this is an overwhelming task and you're not up to it. I need to especially do something which I think all pastors have to face. But in God's providence, the way that my life is developed, I must especially be careful that I don't give people the idea that apologetics is for specialists like Dr. Bonson, who has written in the area or has a PhD in epistemology or something like that, that is not what you should leave this course thinking. I say, well, then why did you start tonight the way you did? Because we're ready to leave. We're ready to say, well, it's for the priest. It's for the special guys, you know, the ones who have all this training, you guys are going to have to do that. And when we have problems, I run into something at work, I'm going to say, I'm going to have to go ask my pastor about that. You know, I. I don't know if you've ever run into that. When I was in high school, it used to really bother me. I grew up in a Mexican American community, a lot of Roman Catholics. And when I would talk about religious things and there'd be some challenge about religion, invariably my Roman Catholic friends would say, I'm going to ask my priest about that. And I wanted to say, do you not have any religion for yourself? Is this just the religion of the priest that you kind of borrow every once in a while? Which it turned out I found out is more or less true. But it's frustrating. I don't want you to be in that position. I don't want you to defer to the priest, to Dr. Bonson or whoever your pastor may be, or your local teacher. Let's look at 1 Peter 3 and I'll begin reading verse 13, 1 Peter 3, beginning at the 13th verse. And who is there to harm you if you prove zealous for what is good? But even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not fear their intimidation. And do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness, reverence. K. Peter says that we should be zealous for what is good. And he goes, now think about it. If you really led lives that were characterized by holiness and goodness, God's character, people are not going to be all that much out to get you. But there are some. But even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, he says that's a blessing to suffer for righteousness sake. And some other time I'll preach to you about that because I have to preach it to me first. That's a hard one to get in that. When things are not going right, that's a blessing as long as they're not going right because you've been righteous. Of course there are the times when you feel guilty that maybe you brought this on yourself. But Peter says, when you have done the righteous thing and you suffer, count that a source of happiness. That's a blessing to you. And then he says, don't fear their intimidation and don't be troubled by those who are out there opposing you. And then comes in this context, that famous verse, be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you. Because you see, Christians are going to be ridiculed when they continue to hope in God and things are going badly. People are going to say, where's your God now? Why is it that if you're really on God's side, things aren't working out for you? I judge from the looks on your faces. You've all heard that one way or another, and it hurts, it's painful, but it's right there that Peter says that's when you're able to give a reason for the hope that is in you. So Peter says, we should be able to defend the faith. But now look at the demand here. Sanctify Christ is Lord in your hearts. Always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, with gentleness and reverence always to everyone. I started out by saying, you're going to run into apologetical circumstances every which way in this world, and you're going to find all kinds of different attacks or competition with the faith. And Peter says here, and it's an order just as clear as thou shalt not murder. It's an order that you should be ready to give an answer, always ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you. And so if I let you leave this course thinking, well, this has all been interesting, but I've been a spectator and I really got to leave this to the experts like Dr. Bonson. I am not going to have done you any good. The Bible says you must be ready to answer anyone. You ready for anyone, Carl Sagan, were to come into the room, would you, or some of us would, like Carl Sagan? But think about who do you think is, you know, some intellectual for, you know, formidable opponent intellectually, you know, the local college professor or whatever it may be, would you be willing to sit down over coffee and expose yourself to the cross examination of such a person? Peter says, of course. Who says that? Peter. Peter the fisherman tells us to be able to do this. You see, if this were to come from Paul, we might tend to say, oh, well, of course, Paul. I mean, you're more of an academician. You studied at the feet of Gamaliel and excelled in the Jewish religion. And, you know, you're quite a thinker. But I want you to remember it's Peter, impetuous, sanctified, converted Peter, who says, be ready to answer anyone at all times. All right, so what I have tonight is a long list of books that I'm going to sell to you so that you can all give up your jobs and give up your applications, give up your families and go home and fulfill this commandment by studying all these. No, that ain't going to do it because I'm going to tell you something. You already know this, but I think it's good for you to hear it. I'm supposed to be trained in these things. I can't answer every detailed question that comes up. I don't know the details of every world religion. I've got a better than conversational knowledge with most of them, but you know, you don't understand how many weird little sects there are out there if you think anyone can get on top of all that. I don't have answers for all of that. I haven't heard every scientific attack on the Bible. I haven't done the research for every one of them. I haven't mastered, you know, just tons and tons of historical background. So that's just not me. I'm not talking personality, it's. No one can do that. There's too much. If I were to put together a library of apologetics for you to get into all these things, you probably couldn't even read it in a lifetime, much less master it and use it. So that's not the answer. When Peter says be ready for anyone, he's got to be saying something else. And I want to suggest to you, as I do in the syllabus, that what Peter wants you to do is to recognize that all of those different kinds of attacks boil down to certain fundamental issues. And you can master those fundamental issues. There are central principles in every apologetical encounter, from the most minor skirmish to the most major systematic attack on the Bible. And for the most part, those principles have to do with what we philosophers call epistemology, the theory of knowledge. How do you know what you know? I say here in the syllabus there is a common basic set of circumstances and principles that are embodied in each and every apologetic encounter. At bottom, the issue is always a matter of recognizing the sovereign Creator who has clearly revealed Himself, as well as your total dependence on him, even in the realm of thought and knowledge. What I'm saying is, whenever you talk to somebody, I mean, think about this. I'm sometimes in airports and weird cult people come up to you when you have a lot of time on your hands in airports, they want to talk, okay? And I have to admit, when this sort of thing would happen to me at first I'd say Oh well, I'm not up on this particular brand of Hare Krishna, so what am I going to do now? But you know, the more you talk to them, you realize that it really comes down to the same issues over and over and over again. And it may, I mean, I don't know what the number is. Let's say it's a dozen. And I'm not saying you're going to see the same one out of those dozen with every individual. But there's only so many things that it can come down to. And at base, if I can narrow down all of the problems and all of the competition to those epistemological questions, it's going to come down to how do you know you've got an opinion? I have an opinion. How do you know and how do I know? Of course you know. Why you know. You're going to say, you know, Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. I believe that God revealed himself in the pages of scripture and this is what he tells us there. And I believe that his word must be self authenticating, that is, it must be the highest authority because it's God's word and therefore nothing outside it is more authoritative by which it can be verified, but everything else must be tested by it. Now that's where I'm coming from. Now if someone says, oh well, I don't accept it just because you say it. So I don't expect you to accept it just because I say it. I would like you to accept it though, because you read it for yourself, open the Bible and let it speak to you and have God's authority be the reason for that. Not just because I do it, I said, but now, why do you believe what you do? Oh well, I believe da da da da da. And I say, what? What's the next thing? Why? Why do you believe that? And what are the answers going to be? My father told me to believe this. The priest told me to believe this. This makes me feel good. I've seen evidence of it. You know, we're getting low now. I mean, there's not a whole lot left. You know, it seems logical or reasonable to me. Okay, and now you got something to talk about. And I've given you the tools from that point. You know how to get in there and do a lot of damage, right? Do you know how garbage disposals work? Garbage disposals are not systematic. I mean, we may have an image of them, you know, nicely slicing everything and dicing it and rinsing it down, you know, the pipe and so forth. Garbage disposals are a real blunt way of disposing of things. It's just a bang it out until it's mush and it's gone. Okay? You don't have to be the slice and dice apologist. You can just be the masher. Just get in there and start doing some destructive work with why this guy believes what he believes he does. You getting my point? Do an internal critique. Ask him why he believes this, and then start throwing some of these problems at him. Start showing some of the tensions and contradictions. And then when he wants to say, enough of this, I'm going to attack you. Fine, you're ready. Imagine what kind of attack could a person bring against Christianity? Let me take the most popular one, at least the most common one that I've heard in my life. It's, well, there's so many wicked things, horrible things that happen in the world. How can there be a God? Or how can God be all powerful? Or how could God, who is all powerful really be considered good when he allows these things to happen? Okay, somebody brings that attack. You know that the principle from which you proceed is the sovereignty of God. Now, what would that mean in a case like this? This would mean, since you do believe in the goodness of God and his omnipotence, that he's able to do anything he wishes to do. You must believe that God must have a good reason for allowing war or suffering or disease or death. Do you also believe that if God has that reason, he's obligated to give it to you? No. Okay, now, so you say to the person, are you suggesting there's a logical contradiction in saying that God is all good, God is all powerful, and yet evil takes place? Yes, there's a logical contradiction. And at that point you want to say it's not a logical contradiction because God can be all good and allow this evil, provided he has a morally sufficient reason for allowing it. And I believe he does. I trust him. The person says, what is that reason? Well, God hasn't revealed it to me in every case, and he's only revealed it to me in the most general terms overall. But the point is, I trust that God is of such a nature. Person's going to say, well, that doesn't satisfy you. So what you're really talking about is not a logical problem. You're talking about a psychological problem. You've got a personal problem with trusting God. And now we're dealing with personal things, right? Like, why don't you trust God? What has God done that would lead you to trust him and so forth. Now, that is probably the most common thing, and yet you can handle that. And what you're going to show is that there's no logical problem with your Christian faith. But if you don't have this God, this person who is attacking God cannot call anything evil in the first place. See, I've parried the shot the person has thrown at me. But now I'm going to come over here and I'm going to use it against him. Now, of the three premises that you gave that form, the paradox, one of them is, there is evil in this world. And the common example I use, because I have never found anyone to back off it, is the torture of little children that happens. There are some wicked parents and adults who torture little children and do the most despicable things to them. We have accounts of it. Now, I say to this person, I imagine it's that sort of thing that you're upset about that God allows. That's right. I say, well, now I know why that's evil. Because God has revealed himself and his character and what he expects in terms of a loving relationship between parents and children. And on and on and on. I know why violence is wrong. I know why sexual assault is wrong. And I know these things because God has told me. Now, why do you think it's wrong? You see, all of a sudden, this person who has taken the most common persuasive attack on Christianity has found himself reversed because now they've got to make sense out of saying that's evil. See, now, on your worldview, why shouldn't we torture little children? Now, mind you, I don't believe in doing it. I'm a Christian. But on your worldview, why shouldn't we? How can you call it wicked and evil? The problem of evil is not a problem for the Christian. It's a problem for the non Christian in his heart of hearts. He knows that there are horrible things going on, but he can't ethically justify saying that it's horrible. So what we have here is an example of what you should do in apologetics. You need to honor the sovereignty of God, truth of Scripture as your fundamental starting point and ask what follows from this? If there is evil out there and you believe God is good, then you must believe he has a reason for it. It's not hard, not really hard to imagine that if you see things out of context in my life, you might think that I'm doing something evil. But when you put it in context, you would have a completely different opinion. And some of you have heard my tapes or heard my lectures on this. So pardon the repeat of the example, but the one that has been effective in talking to people is there was once a time when I paid men to stick needles in the face of my son. And that's all you knew, that's all you saw, then you might think that I was really a terrible person. Then if you step back and realize that what had happened is that my son had fallen off a stool and had gashed his face, and I went to the hospital and they had to stitch him up, then you say, oh, well, then there was a morally sufficient reason for inflicting pain and terror on that child. And believe me, poor David was terrified. I felt horrible about that. But, you know, it was out of love that I held him down on the operating table and said, sew him up. I didn't want him to bleed to death. In the same way we can say if we on a human plane can see that, how much more might it be possible for God, who sees all things, to have a morally sufficient reason for what he's allowing to take place, though in isolation and out of context? What we see is very painful and very hard to accept. You answer from the standpoint of your own position. Don't follow the fool's principles, lest you be like him. But then you turn it around and answer the fool on his own principles and show that he's not wise in his own conceits. Let me give you a quick synopsis of what we learned in this course. And then we're going to do a little bit of play acting tonight and practice some of these things like I promised. Though I promise we will turn off the tape recorder for that portion. None of you have signed up to be permanently embarrassed and have it on the Tate Ministry chart for all time. Oh, I recognize that voice. Oh, you're the one who said that. I won't put you through that sort of thing, but let's do a quick synopsis of the studies we've gone through so far. The first part of our course dealt with the lordship of Christ in the realm of knowledge. And I argued that when God speaks, he must speak with an authority which authorizes itself what we call a self attesting authority. And his revelation is moreover, necessary as the foundation for man's knowledge. When men attempt to be neutral with respect to this revelation God has given, they are being immoral on the one hand, and unavoidably that will lead them to a disintegration of knowledge in principle, there's something else going on that keeps them from being having as bad consequences, which keeps as bad a consequences from coming as might. Consequently, the Bible characterizes the unbeliever's thoughts as vain and foolish and requires the believer who is renewed in mind, set apart and different to be set apart from the world by submission to Christ's word of truth as his ultimate authority. And it's this that rescues us from the futility in the theory of knowledge that the contrary claims are going to face. I then went on in our course to talk about certain conditions that characterize all apologetical situations and make argumentation fruitful. We have to be humble as well as bold. But we need to know that it is possible to argue with the unbeliever, and it's possible to win due to God's inescapable revelation. Every unbeliever knows God and thereby, contrary to what he espouses, knows himself in the world in some measure. I think that's really a crux point that other apologetical schools don't push. When you talk to people, you need to know they know in their heart of hearts that you're right. They know the Bible is true. They know that they will answer to the very God that we're talking about, not just to a God, but the God of Scripture. Knowing God, all men are thus without an excuse, without an apologetic for their rebellion. So you need to go into this skirmish realizing it's your opponent who can't come up with a good reason. The whole created realm constantly reveals the living and true God, thus providing abundant common ground between the believer and unbeliever. What can you use to start an apologetical encounter? Anything. You can talk about the standards of beauty if you want to. You can talk about how we know what we know. You can talk about science or ethics, personal dignity. Anything in this world is appropriate because everything gives testimony to God. It's not just special things like the resurrection, but everything testifies to God. So you can talk to anybody about household matters or nuclear fission, and you're going to eventually have to deal with the principles of Christianity. The whole created realm constantly reveals the living and true God, thus providing abundant common ground between the believer and unbeliever. Since the unbeliever is always the image of God, regardless of what he says about himself, and since he possesses the truth, though he is trying to suppress it unrighteously, the apologist always has a point of contact with him. We have two different worldviews. But the unbeliever doesn't really live according to his worldview. He says one thing, then he lives another way. He'll tell you that there is no order in this world, but then he balances his checkbook. For some reason, you would think unbelievers would really have it made. They go to the bank and say, hey, there's no order in this world, so you can't expect the amount I put in, the amount I take out to somehow match one another. Do you think a bank would accept that the very fact the bank opens tomorrow shows the bank is operating on Christian principles? Think about it. Well, how should the Christian go about defending the faith if what I've told you thus far is true? First of all, you must firmly acknowledge that unbelief rests and results from intellectual foolishness. If you really feel intimidated by unbelievers and the systems that they develop, then you will not be an effective apologist. Given the conviction that intellectual foolishness is the basis of your opponent's thinking and understanding, the believer can repudiate those basic assumptions. The presuppositions of the unbeliever can present the absolute truth claims of Christ and do an internal critique of the unbeliever's thought, showing where the assumptions of the unbeliever inevitably lead to the destruction of morality, science and logic. In other words, we're going to show unbelievers that they're actually opposing themselves by what they say. And now we have to take this approach, I say, because two worldviews are really standing over against each other. It's not just a few facts or a few applications of logic that we're talking about. It is the very possibility of knowing anything outside of God's revelation that we're going to argue about. All argumentation over fundamental issues of life and belief reduces to a question of one starting point. And where we start is firmly in the word of God and the fact that it authorizes itself. And we challenge the starting point of the unbeliever, which we say is really destructive of rationality. By understanding and operating upon the principles that I've enunciated here, I think the apologist can have confidence in his ability to answer all the varieties of opposition to Christianity. That is to say, realizing that it all boils down to these things. Now, you don't have to worry about who it is and where it is or what the particular challenge is going to be, because you're always going to reduce it down to these issues. The last thing we studied in the course over the last few weeks are the conditions of a successful apologetical treatment of unbelief. And I'll rehearse that here and then we'll be done. First, the apologist must be true to his presuppositions and remember the nature of saving faith. Remember, we're looking for saving faith. We must work toward unconditional submission to the word of God on its merits. We must not move into a neutral position. We must not give the impression that human autonomy can lead to meaningful and true conclusions. We must see that belief will be foundational to understanding. We must present Christ as the foundation for one's use of reasoning. And of course, especially given our reformed convictions, we'll know that success comes only if God sovereignly grants the unbeliever an understanding of the truth and enlightens his mind, changes, converts his heart and gives him the gift of faith. Since it depends upon God's sovereignty, then you have nothing to lose by being faithful to the end. And what you're going to ask of the unbeliever is that he recognize that he is a rebel in his mind and that God calls for him to give up and to submit his mind to the claims of Christ. Do you have any questions about how we can deal with this formidable task of apologetics? You get my point Tonight it's a simple one. Boil it down to the basics and master those basics and then you'll be able to talk to anybody. Don't forget what I said many weeks ago too. If you get unbelievers to talk long enough, they'll hang themselves. And so if you're in an awkward situation, you're feeling like I don't know very much of what he's talking about, just keep him talking, keep asking the right questions, and they will finally put the noose around their own neck, I assure you, because these issues will finally have to be faced and unbelievers don't have an answer. I had a very intelligent person that many of you know who was a philosophy student once say, well, why aren't these issues dealt with in my philosophy classes? I said, they're not dealt with in your philosophy classes because they're an embarrassment to all non Christian philosophers. They don't have answers to them and so they kind of skirt them. It's kind of like, oh, we can just take for granted that there's a connection between the immaterial mind and thoughts up here and the physical world out there, that there's a subject object correlation that is meaningful. No one wants to face the embarrassing questions. And so I guess what I'm telling you is you have to be willing to say the king has no clothes and not be embarrassed and say, oh, well, everyone else thinks the king has clothes. They say, well, everyone else had better come up with a better reason than I've heard from you then. Okay, Mark, I do want to know what your response to a non Christian would be if he were to challenge you. That there are so many internal debates in Christianity that how can you be sure that the Bible really is the word of God when there's so much disagreement upon it anyway? Even outside of Christian circles, there's disagreement as to what or should be interpreted in what way. Okay, very quickly, the first thing I would say is that this person has kind of truncated or foreshortened the question right away. And that betrays something. Now, when we see people disagreeing over something like that, you can say that it's God's fault or that there really isn't a God behind it, or you could say it's the disputant's fault. And notice you didn't take that into account. You didn't say, well, now maybe this really is God's word and sin gets in the way of people reading it. Cor, you just took it for granted that if it's God's word, there can't be any sin in this world and nothing's going to get in the way. Okay, I turn on my radio and I'm getting all this kind of static, and I don't like what I'm hearing, okay? And I call up the radio station. I say, what's wrong with you people? Can't you send a clear signal? And so they're nice enough to come out and look into the situation, and they say, what's wrong with you? Can't you buy a radio that works? All right, now, if there's something garbled in the transmission, let's not automatically assume it's the sender. Maybe it's the receiver that's messing up. That's what I usually tell people. I say, now, of course, given the biblical picture, if God is sovereign, and of course he isn't God, if he isn't, then of course God isn't going to be kept from revealing himself just because of man's problems. But the biblical picture says that man wants to suppress the truth, truth and unrighteousness. And even Christians are growing in their knowledge of God. And so there are things that we can say to show that the picture Painted doesn't have to exclude the truth of Christianity. But now, between you and me, that's another reason why we need to pray for greater unity among Christians. Because it is a scandal, it is an embarrassment that we don't have more of a unified front. Most evangelical Christians, you can give the Apostles Creed and say, well, we may arrive at it different ways, but most every Christian through the history of evangelical Christianity would tell you these things. And so don't pretend like it's just a complete hodgepodge. Those are some of the things that I would say, John.

Well, a couple of questions that I don't know that there's a quick answer, but I mean, it'd be neat if you. Sometimes we have the time to go over or create a list of questions that various groups cannot answer. 10 questions that atheists can answer. Agnostic, various groups of people. Well, for them, it would be.

Well, I don't want to be coy, but I mean, if my pastoral duties allowed for me to write something like. Like that, I've been longing to do it for a long time, and I don't know that I would scratch where everybody's itching. But I do think there are certain, you know, like 10 things that you need to know when you deal with the unbeliever, you know, or the 10 biggest problems that unbelievers throw at us. And those sorts of things, you know.

When it comes to the philosophy of science, things like that. 10 questions that scientists can't answer.

Well, it could be done.

And then another area of apologetics. Seems to me that even though you can make things plain to someone, you still have to have an armor of illustrations to make it plain to them. It might be plain to you that you're working with an infant, really, or even an unbeliever, no matter how smart they are, saying you have to talk to them as though they're a child. And you need lots of simple illustrations. For instance, this concept that a totally materialistic universe cannot produce uniform classes of things they don't understand, that you have to go over and over and go very slowly.

Exactly. Much of your work is educational, teaching them some of the problems of philosophy that they. Well, whether they should be aware of them. They need to become more aware of them and. And face them and realize what a problem they'd have.

There needs to be hundreds of illustrations that you can pull in and tape them.

Yeah.

The other big problem is as soon as you get close to someone as far as nailing them, that's the end of the Conversation.

Oh yeah, well, that's another problem is that people get scared of where the conversation is going and then they want to cut it off and then we'll come back to it.

Let's say an unbeliever does ask you to prove to me that the Bible is true. Is it appropriate immediately to say to them, well, the words they're using, such as proof and true and me don't have any absolute meaning apart from the Christian worldview?

Yeah, I don't know that I would use that sentence right away because the very problem you just brought up, people wouldn't understand. But that's what you want to get across. You want to say, well, the whole notion of proof in a sense presupposes the view of the world that the Bible presents and then the concept of.

Linguistics to explain to them that their ability to even ask a question and expect an answer is part of the Christian worldview. Yes, Suppose they go back and say, well, linguistically learned behavior from CRO Magnon man up to the enlightened or something.

Well, language is one of the great wonders of human reality. And I think anyone who wants to talk to principles of language, you know what happens, they watch these popular shows and they'll see things like developments with chimpanzee or porpoise dolphin behavior and so forth. And I mean, it is laughable. It's laughable, the gulf between the most advanced things they've done with chimpanzees and what a little child can do in terms of the creativity of language. You know, and so when people do that, you want to be able to say, now wait a minute, I mean, I've got a three year old child here who's doing all these sorts of things. And You've been working 19 years with this chimpanzee and you're satisfied. The chimpanzee tells you when he's hungry. That is not important because the chimpanzee does not know how to use words interchangeably, cannot create new sentences. Chimpanzee can only mimic what you have taught it in the right, you know, stimulus, response, circumstances and context. And so. Well, anyway, the point is you want to, if they want to talk about how language is developed, you want to say, that's right. Isn't that one of the wonders? And the one who calls himself the word is the reason why we are able to use words as people. I had a friend there was an.

Evolutionist and we took him to the zoo and showed them these chimpanzees and monkeys. He didn't talk much about evolution ever again because they kept throwing their own dung at people.

Well, yeah, but I think that's kind of an ad hominem sort of thing. They do have a way of accounting for that and primitive behavior and so forth. But if you want to talk about evolution, that's a real embarrassment. In fact, it's such an embarrassment, most scientists today don't even want to admit that Darwin has been thrown out long ago. Darwinian survival of the fittest. Evolution is laughed at by advanced sciences now because there's just so many problems with it.

The same with Mormonism. You have millions of believers, even though the original prophet has been just shown tremendous idiots.

Yeah, it takes a while for the people in the street to catch up with what others have known for a generation or two. Okay, other questions about tonight's lesson before we turn off the tape recorder and spend our remaining time doing a little bit of play acting here. Ellery? Well, I'm afraid this is peripheral, but it puzzles me. The account of the tower fable. Makes good sense in the context of. Of the Mediterranean cultures, but why would there have to be a quarter of the whole world's languages over in Papua New Guinea? I don't know. What's the problem with that? I mean, God's judgment has had historical ramifications. I mean, the splintering of the human. Human language tree, as it were, has just gone on and on and on. And I can probably talk more theologically than apologetically about that. I mean, what we see, of course, with Christianity is the reversal of that trend. Languages on the day of Pentecost now being united. And what we're going to see is a world order now brought back together around the true word of God rather than than a tower of man's devising. But I don't know what the apologetical problem with that is. It's just we'd say God has judged the human race, and it's such a severe problem that it's even carried out to Papua New Guinea. And you have all these dialectics and all these different languages that have to be mastered, but we have confidence that it's going to be done. It's interesting. In the academic community, the one area where Christians stand out and everyone gives them credit is translation work, Wycliffe Bible translators and so forth. Everyone honors the work of Christians in that area. They may pooh pooh us and all sorts of other things. But isn't that interesting that we should be leaders when it comes to what the word. Well, as opposed to millennial I think there's a reason for that. Okay, well, I'll go ahead and turn off the tape recorder and we'll call it a nine month course ended here.