Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Divine Wisdom (Part 19)

This message was delivered by Dr. Greg L. Bonson, Scholar in Residence at the Southern California center for Christian Studies in Irvine, California. There's really so many different things that could be said by way of introduction to presuppositional theory for defending the faith. I'm a little bit at loose ends as to know which would be the best with which to begin. I do think that the overall theme, if I could generalize, is the greatness of divine wisdom. The greatness of divine wisdom. If you know that that's what you're defending, and keep that in mind, that it's the greatness of divine wisdom that you are as a foolish sinner, saved by grace, called upon to defend, and you are defending the greatness of divine wisdom with men who have suppressed the truth and unrighteousness and have become fools in their reason that that in itself should control and shape the very manner in which you defend the faith. Today we're looking at the presuppositional theory. Tomorrow we'll look more at the presuppositional practice of defending the faith. John Calvin wrote in his commentary on 1st Peter 3:15, these words, 1st Peter 3:15, of course, is the Magna Carta, isn't it, Christian apologetics? It commissions us to defend the faith, and it defines how we should defend the faith when it says, sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to set forth a defense to everyone who asks you for a reasoned account concerning the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and respect. And about that verse, that is the warrant for Christian apologetics. Calvin wrote, contentious disputes arise from the fact that many think less honorably than they ought of the greatness of divine wisdom, and are carried away by profane audacity. And he really puts his finger on it there. Let me read it again. Contentious disputes arise from the fact that many think less honorably than they ought to of the greatness of divine wisdom, and are carried away by profane audacity. A truly Christian defense of the faith must never fail to exalt Christ as lord over all. And if Christ is lord over all, he must be lord over argumentation and reasoning as well. An apologetic that builds on any other rock, then Christ does not honor the greatness of divine wisdom. It's foolishly, as Calvin would say, audaciously erected on the ruinous sands of human authority. The task of apologetics must be exercised then upon the infallible and presupposed authority of the word of Christ in Scripture. Apologetics does not first do obeisance to human philosophy and human science, and then proceed to encompass God within its sphere of reverence. We don't begin by reverencing our own reasoning and our own research and science and so forth, and then we finally widen the circle and say, and God, you too now can be encompassed in the circle of our reverence. The Christian cannot indeed the Christian must not take an unattached or a neutral stance with respect to his faith in order to win the unbeliever over to Christ's authority. A Christian apologetic grows out of and a Christian apologetic is shaped according to a total dedication to the wisdom of the Logos, the wisdom of God expressed in His Word as we find it in Scripture. We do not develop our apologetic, therefore, according to the wisdom of man's logic, but rather the wisdom of the Logos, who is God Himself. Hebrews 10:23 says, Let us hold fast the profession of our hope without wavering, for the one who promised is faithful. Since God is faithful to us, our apologetic must not be faithless to Him. We must not waver with respect to the hope that he has given us. First Peter 3:15 says, It's a reason for the hope that is in us that we offer to those who ask us. And Hebrews tells us that hope is to be held without wavering. You put these two together. It seems to me you have to draw the conclusion. I can't defend the faith on a neutral basis. I can't give up my hope in order to defend my hope, even temporarily. I cannot give it up with that goal in mind. God has been faithful to me. I must not be faithless to Him. Christian apologetics thus begins with and ends with him who is the Alpha and the Omega, the One who only and always reigns as the Lord, the greatness of divine wisdom. That's my starting point. That's also the conclusion of my reasoning. And so he's the Lord. Throughout the process of debate, comparison of evidences and worldviews, and all of my logic and all of my argumentation, I believe that a presuppositional approach to apologetics is the only truly faithful method of contending for the Christian hope in biblical message. The only truly faithful one. Now, that isn't to say that people who don't take a presuppositional approach don't have Christian faith. Because I want to point out that though I profess faith and I believe that it's genuine, and if I persevere to the end, you all should believe that it's genuine as well. That though I profess Christian faith. I'd be the first to tell you I fall short of that faith. That doesn't mean I've stopped being a Christian. It just means this Christian sometimes doesn't always act as a Christian should. Now, hopefully we all have that minimalist humility whereby we can say that, I mean, if any of us says we haven't sinned, you know, we lie and the truth is not in us. John says so I know that I don't live up to my faith. I don't live up to the things that I preach. That's a terrible feeling for a preacher. You know, we have the greater accountability. But I know that that's the case. I'm a person who professes faith. I believe with all my heart I have genuine faith. And yet I'm faithless sometimes. Now, if I can say that about myself in any number of areas, then hopefully you can see that when I say that some Christian apologists are faithless, I am not saying they are unbelievers. I'm saying they're not living up to their best character as Christians. They're not living up to things which they probably, in some areas of their theology, they realize but are not consistently carrying out in their practice of defending the faith. I have to say that because many times when presuppositionalists want to draw a sharp antithesis between the method that they're endorsing and trying to live up to the ideal that they put out there and set that over against what other schools of apologetics are doing. You know, umbrage is taken to that. People, you know, get their toes stepped on and their feelings hurt, and they think that we're saying more than we're saying. I'm saying presuppositional apologetics is the only faithful method of defending the Christian faith, that the other schools of thought are not living up to the ideal, are not as faithful as they should be given the faith that they genuinely hold. I'd also say that the other schools of thought against which I'll be speaking in our lectures today, at some points, these other schools of thought in many cases are not really living up to their own profession of the method that is non presuppositional. There's a long way of saying they say they're doing one thing and they're not. They're really more presuppositional than they recognize. Many Christians would say we should set aside all of our distinctive commitments when we talk to unbelievers. We should enter the arena with a neutral mentality we should be intellectually uncommitted and just follow the truth wherever it leads. Now, they would say that's what we should do. And they would even teach courses to students like I'm doing now, and tell them, you can't go in and assume the very thing you're supposed to be proving. So you have to be willing to set aside your Christian faith and go in with the unbeliever and talk about the facts as everyone can see them, reason as everyone can reason and come to the conclusion, if you would only reason properly, that Christianity is true. Now, what I want to ask you is, though there are Christians, hundreds, thousands of Christians, who have been taught that, who have said that, who say that they are practicing that. Why is it, if you look at this statistically, why is it those people who say they're setting aside their Christian faith always leave the arena of that debate? Remaining Christians? The statistics are overwhelming. You know what that suggests to me? They haven't really set aside their Christian convictions at all. See, the odds are if a person says, when he gets up in the morning, I'm going to give up my Christianity for the next two weeks hours, because I'm gonna have a talk with somebody who's not a Christian. The odds are if he really were giving up his Christianity, if he really were setting aside completely, well, every once in a while, in fact, maybe more than once in a while, the guy's gonna come back and say, the other guy had a better argument. I can't be a Christian today. I mean, that's what you would expect to happen. You would expect that if you really could put aside your commitment to the greatness of divine wisdom, just to argue on a neutral platform with the unbeliever, every once in a while, the unbeliever would have the, you know, the better of the argument. And for that day, until you, you know, finally got it all worked out, you'd have to say, I guess I can't be intellectually honest and be a Christian. Now, what I'm doing here is I'm needling, I'm pushing, I'm. I'm really trying to make those who think that they're not presuppositionalists realize that even when you pretend to put aside your Christian commitments, you're not putting them aside. You know exactly where you want the argument to end up, and you know how you want the argument to go there. And you begin by evaluating evidence at the starting point in a Christian way in hopes that you can get the non Christian to See it that way and to end up with your conclusion. So back to my point. When I say that presuppositionalism is the only faithful way of defending the faith. I am not saying non presuppositionalists are not Christians. I'm saying they're not living up to their Christian ideals. They're not living up to what they know and their better knowledge from the Scripture. And I'm also saying they're really not as non presuppositional as they think. They are. Resting upon the authority of the living God rather than the authority of human reasoning. As a self sufficient authority, the apologist should presuppose the truth of Scripture and then lay siege to all apostate presuppositions. The reason that must be his method is that the word of God in the Bible has a unique epistemological status for the Christian. Yesterday at the end of the day, I was explaining to you that everybody grants certain of their beliefs a privileged status, right? Everybody does that. And the Christian should give that privileged status to God's Word. God's Word requires no corroboration and carries its own evidence inherently or self, attestingly. I have to say that again because this is the point. Many, many people who want to be presuppositional still don't let that point sink in. They still want to take the approach that we have to corroborate the Word of God. Now I believe in arguing for the Word of God, but the Word of God needs no corroboration. It carries its own evidence inherently. And if that's God speaking in the Bible, in the nature of the case, that has to be the best evidence available. And so the Bible needs no corroboration. It carries its own evidence, the very best evidence inherently in itself. As God makes a total demand upon the lives of his covenant people, they recognize that the words of Scripture must be their most ultimate authority, must be logically primitive for them. If our apologetic is going to be a distinctively Christian apologetic, not a method or an apologetic that is making common cause with the world and therefore is not distinctively Christian, an apologetic that is not neutral in its methodology and therefore not distinctively Christian, if our apologetic is to be distinctively Christian, it must be presuppositional in character and method. By putting it this way, maybe you can see that non presuppositional approaches are saying we shouldn't be distinctively Christian at the beginning, only at the end. We should start with the world and its way of thinking and end up with God and his way of thinking. You're not distinctively Christian in your apologetic method. You're only distinctively Christian in your apologetic conclusion. That's what the non presuppositional approaches would be saying. The presuppositional approach says, since Christ is lord over my life and all of my thinking, I have to be distinctively Christian in my method as well as in my conclusion. In the past couple days I've summarized my dissatisfaction with the non presuppositional approaches by saying that it always amounts to yes, but yes, but we're not distinctively Christian in our method. So we say yes to the world and its way of thinking. Yes to the world and its basic starting point, its ultimate authority, the autonomy of man's mind. Yes to that. But we don't want to come to the conclusion you all come to. We want you to come to our conclusion. You start with non Christian thinking in hopes that you can transform it into Christian thinking thinking. But you see, if non Christian thinking is true to its own starting point, its own standards and its own method, where is non Christian thinking going to end up? It has to end up with non Christian conclusions. A distinctively Christian apologetic, therefore, over against one that makes common cause with the world and pretends to be neutral. A distinctively Christian apologetic would have to be presuppositional in character and method. Indeed, it's thinking to maintain a kind of neutrality with respect to Scripture that natural theology and the proofs for God's existence, which occupies so much space in apologetical literature, want to move from logical and empirical grounds to God. And the natural theologians who do this want to do so by excluding what I'll call now the revelational principle, excluding the revelational principle, as though we could get to God without revelation. The revelational principle says only God is adequate to define himself, disclose himself to show Himself to us. Natural theology says let's start with logic and in the facts of experience, and we can work up to God. In which case you wouldn't need revelation, would you? Man's own thinking can get him from ground zero partway to heaven, get him part way to God without God condescending to show himself to come down to us. And therefore the exclusion of the revelational principle. Natural theology subsequently means that there's an endorsement of apostate philosophy of some sort or another. Some apostate philosophical construct is being used to kind of build your Tower of Babel up to God somehow without God having to come down and show himself to us. The exclusion of the revelational principle. But the Bible teaches us that the knowledge of God must be rooted in his own self disclosure because the clear revelation of God in nature and the clear revelation of God in man's constitution is suppressed in unrighteousness. Faith must necessarily start with the clear, authoritative, self attesting special revelation of God in Scripture which is coordinated with the Holy Spirit's inner testimony to the regenerated heart. And I want to emphasize what I've said in this last sentence, hopefully precisely that there's a coordination of the self attesting special revelation of God in the Scripture with the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit, the inward testament of the Holy Spirit to a regenerated heart. Don't mix those two. Many people think presuppositionalists don't believe in an argument for scriptural authority, but only believe in the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart. So that it's subjectivism. But what we actually believe is that there's a coordination between God's own testimony to himself in Scripture. The arguments about which we're going to be discussing the rest of this day and tomorrow, a coordination between the self attesting nature of Scripture and the inward work of the Holy Spirit. They are not the same thing. We believe that God's self attestation and the argumentation that displays and applies that self attestation is adequate proof of the truth of God's word, whether people accept it or not. We believe there's a difference between proof and persuasion. And so proof goes on the self attesting side. Persuasion goes on the Holy Spirit's inward testimony side. People will not be persuaded of the proof that is there, but it has been proven nonetheless. If the Holy Spirit doesn't change their hearts and enlighten their minds and they won't accept the proof. But acceptance of a proof is not the standard of whether it actually proves its point. Can you imagine a court of law that applied that kind of criteria? If the defendant is not persuaded of his guilt, then he's not guilty. You have not proven his guilt until he says, oh, I'm persuaded. No, the Bible offers a convict. Well, I don't want to use the word convincing. An adequate proof of its own authority. It's all tied up in the self attestation of God. And that's what we're going to be working out. But my point is that's one thing over here that's objective, has nothing to do with response. The Holy Spirit's work has to do with whether that proof will become persuasive in the life of an individual. Historically, when Hume and Kant exposed the invalidity of the theistic proofs, apologists generally balked at returning to revelation as the basis for the certainty of God's existence. They balked at the idea of using the revelational principle in apologetics. They wanted to find something that the world would be more amenable to to start with, so we could say yes to the world, but let's show you what conclusion you should come to. They elected rather to maintain status in the blinded eyes of worldly wise thinkers and attempted to prove Christianity's credibility through considerations which they said pointed to the probability of God's existence in Scripture's truth, pointed to the probability of scriptural truth. They settled for a mere presumption, a mere presumption plus pragmatic assurance. They always add that of course we have full assurance in our heart, but intellectually a presumption in favor of a few salvaged items, like the fundamentals of the faith that are found in the Christian system. They refuse to presuppose the sovereign God revealed in the Bible. They would suppose the God revealed in the Bible as a hypothesis subject to autonomous testing, but they would not presuppose that God as what is necessary to approach any reasoning about our suppositions or hypotheses. They refuse to preserve presuppose the sovereign God revealed in the Bible as the source of all material and all logical possibility, and hence failed effectively to challenge or to internally criticize the very feasibility of knowledge, of logic, of factuality, of interpretation or predication, as they would be based on the boasted autonomy of free thinkers. That is to say, they wanted to be open minded. But open mindedness is sin. There's a good motto to write in your margin. Open mindedness is sin. God does not permit us to be open minded when he speaks. He expects us to be submissive, immediately submissive. To grant loyalty to what he said above all other considerations and to apply it in every area of our life. That's just the kind of God he is. Now, you might want to develop a different apologetic for a God that doesn't have that kind of authority or claim that kind of authority. But for this kind of God, the only apologetic that's appropriate is presuppositional. Open mindedness is sin. To even question whether God knows all the facts, to question whether God controls all the facts, to question whether God demands absolute obedience is already to deny that that God exists. It's to decide first and submit later. I don't submit as My decision. But I first decide about God and then I submit. And that's a form of rebellion. Adam tried to decide issues like these from a neutral and self determining autonomous viewpoint. And we're not supposed to emulate the way in which Adam fell into sin. We should obey God's word because it is his Word, not because his word agrees with our thinking and scrutiny. We don't say God. You've done a pretty good job here. That appears to be true because it agrees with my way of thinking. That would be insulting to the majesty and sovereignty of God. The second Adam, unlike the first Adam, replied, thou shalt not try the Lord thy God. Adam had put God to the test, the test of his own thinking and what he would find acceptable. The second Adam refused to do what the first Adam did. And so Satan's challenge was answered by Jesus from scriptural authority, even though it was the authority of Scripture that was in dispute. See that? So Jesus apologetic in answer to the adversary. When Jesus comes up against the antithesis, you find he assumes the self attesting nature of Scripture. Sinners want to exchange the truth of God for a lie. They want to cover up what they so very well know about themselves and about God. And so their intellectual efforts aim to prove that they are not the image of God, that this is not God's world and they are not under God's condemnation. Most non Christians will not come right out and say that's what they're aiming to do. But you see, that's what's motivating their hearts. They don't want to draw the conclusion that they are the image of God, that they live in God's world and therefore they're in trouble with God. They don't think they need God in their reasoning and they don't think salvation applies to their intellect. They might have to give their lives to Jesus if their intellect is ever satisfied that Jesus is the Son of God. But in the process of asking whether they should give their lives to Jesus, Jesus, it never dawns on them that their intellect already is answerable to Jesus as the Lord. They say that they are ignorant of God, they don't really know if there's a God. But God says, your ignorance is culpable. You have no excuse for that. And so the Christian apologist ought not to put himself on the same level with those who claim to be ignorant of God, who refuse to submit to the lordship of Jesus in their intellectual reasoning. We don't put ourselves on their level in order to lift them up to an Appreciation of the greatness of divine wisdom. Is this sinking in? Does it make any sense to honor the foolishness of the unbeliever as a way of making him see the greatness of divine wisdom? Don't ever forget that the unbeliever has substituted for your belief about origin, origins, the destiny of man, the absolute authority of God. Non Christians have substitute principles for those views. They have a different view of origins, a different view of destiny, a different view of absolute authority. And that's why we don't adopt the principles of the first Adam to prove the truths of the second Adam. Paul has taught us we should rather see the wisdom of this world as foolishness because it doesn't see the greatness of divine wisdom. And it's foolishness not just because it lacks a few facts. You know, we don't ordinarily say of a point of view that it's foolish because it hasn't taken into account information that hasn't been given yet. A point of view is foolish because it operates in a way regardless of how many facts have been given to it, operates in a futile and vain self contradictory way. And God says the wisdom of this world is foolish. It doesn't lack information. It lacks proper procedure, a proper destiny and goal, a proper standard. It's not because they lack a few facts, but because the Spirit has not changed the minds of the natural men to whom we speak that they are fools. And sadly, Christian apologists for years have accepted the autonomy of free thinkers and then tried to lift them up to the greatness of divine wisdom. And in the process, apologists have found their own defense of the faith razed to the ground by those who likewise postulated that bare possibility is a principle more ultimate than God, that man's reasoning is self sufficient. Deterministic science disqualified men miracles. Positivistic sociology relativized morality. Historical criticism faulted the Bible. Kant's transcendental dialecticism invalidated cognitive revelation. Idealism made God finite. Pragmatism made him irrelevant. Logical analysis made him meaningless. Process philosophy limited God, pulling him down from the throne of his sovereignty and pulling everything up into God in a panentheistic drive to the Omega point. Phenomenology made the universe into a machine for fabricating gods. Existentialism declared man is the being who strives to become God himself. By appealing to priority probability, apologists saw Christianity relegated to the museum of religious hypotheses, mere possibilities, rather than embraces the actual truth of God. So how's it going? How's it going. When we honor the greatness of the foolishness of the natural man in order to pull him up to the greatness of divine wisdom, it just doesn't work. It's un faithful and it's ineffective. Please turn the cassette over at this time.