Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Revelational Epistemology (Part 7)

This message was delivered by Dr. Greg L. Bonson, Scholar in Residence at the Southern California center for Christian Studies in Irvine, California. I'll keep a running tally on this side of the board of where we are. We've already looked at the concept of apologetics at great length yesterday, and then at the end of the day, the history of apologetics, and, oh, I wish we could have looked at it more, but I hope that you've gained something from that. And today's assignment is to gain some biblical guidance for apologetics. I want you to imagine somebody coming to the end of his life, having worked in an evangelistic crusade, a man coming to the end of his life and having to confess with shame that the reason why they had been so successful in getting people to come down the aisle is because he had from time to time bribed individuals to pretend that they were going to come forward to accept Jesus as their savior, so that other people watching these individuals who turns out to have been bribed would think, well, a lot of people are doing this and they feel more free to come forward. Now, let's just take a minute and evaluate this. The people who came forward because they had been paid $20 to walk the aisle obviously are no better off for what they've done. And we wouldn't say that that in itself has done anything in favor or positive for the kingdom of God. But what about those people who came forward being encouraged by the hypocrites who were going forward and they became saved? Doesn't that make it all worthwhile? How would you answer that? I think most of us would answer, God's work must be done in God's way. And the outcome, the consequence, that a number of people may have been saved or encouraged to come forward to be helped, pray. The sinner's prayer, whatever it may be, does not justify the deceptive means that were used in the bribery that was practiced in order to accomplish that. Okay, I'm starting with an easy illustration. Let's ask about Eve in the garden, hypothetically. I remember I had a student in seminary once, having listened to what I was teaching about the necessity of doing things in a biblical way, ask this question. And I thought it was very clever, and I've used it a number of times since then. He said, Dr. Bronson, we know that God called upon Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the garden. And hypothetically, what if Eve had obeyed that command? She had refused to eat of the tree. However, the reason for her refusing to eat of the tree was because she was concerned about her figure and she thought, you know, maybe it'd be best if I refrained because I've had enough calories today. Now, would that count as obedience to the commandment of God? No. We look at that and think for a moment. No, as a matter of fact, that would have the right outcome, but it wouldn't be accomplished in God's way. It wouldn't be for the right reason. It wouldn't be faithful to God. It would really be a matter of faithfulness to my vanity. And it just is coincidental that obedience to God fits into my own plans. Okay, now let's drill into the nerve. What if someone were to say my approach to apologetical method, my strategy for defending the faith has been used of God to convince many people of the truth of Christianity. Now I realize that I have to kind of make a deal with the devil. In the process of doing this, I have to go to people who think that they are independent of God and that God, if he's going to be admitted into their thinking, into their universe of thought, must submit to them as a judge. I realize that I have to encourage them to consider themselves self sufficient, totally apart from God, and, and then on their own self sufficient evaluation and reasoning and by their own final standard feel that God is authorized to be believed. So I've asked them really to act in an unbelieving way. But I figured I've got to meet people where they are and that was the best way I knew to bring them to the conviction that the Bible is true. Do you see any parallels here between the man who bribes people who come to come down the aisle or the Eve in our hypothetical situation who obeys God's command apparently, but out of vanity. You see any parallel here? I do. It seems to me that when we're doing the defense of the faith and trying to get people to conclude that the Bible is true, we need to do more than get to that conclusion. We need to get to that conclusion in God's way. Our method as well as our conclusion must be faithful and pleasing to God. And that's why the first point in our outline today is defending the Bible biblically. Defending the Bible biblically. We don't want to simply defend the Bible in any way possible. You know that's true. Here's a way to defend the Bible. When someone disagrees, take out a gun and threaten them, say, don't you dare speak against Jehovah and if you do, I'll be his hangman. You say, well, that's not A way to defend the Bible because you don't get people really to believe. Well, what if you are a very clever, sophistic debater and you get people to believe the Bible is true? Because you trick them by arguments that though they are fallacious and you know they are fallacious, nevertheless they do a pretty good job of bamboozling people. Would you be any happier with that? I mean, that's not violence. It's just that you've led people to think something is true by means of an argument that in fact doesn't establish the conclusion. Just you've caught them in their lack of philosophical preparation and they fall for the fallacious argument. Hey, the important thing is we get people saved, right? You know, we'd say at that point also, no, you've got to defend the faith and a faithful manner. And so that's why we're going to take an entire day, if things work out as I have planned, an entire day to ask what would the Bible say to us about how the Bible should be defended? One of the reasons I am enthusiastic for this course in apologetics, as I told you yesterday, is that we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of Cornelius Van Til's birthday this year. And I'm going to begin by reading a couple of portions from the writings of Van Till, which I think are very apropos for what we're trying to accomplish in our class today to learn to defend the Bible biblically. First of all, I'm going to read a few pages to you from the opening chapter of Christianity in conflict. In the 1960s, Dr. Van Til published a mimeographed work, a quite extensive one, takes up a notebook about like that in my library on the encounter of Christianity with the world and the conflict that it engenders. And most of you will recognize in this a pervasive theme in Van Till's apologetic of the antithesis that exists between the world and God's people, between the thinking of those who are unregenerate and thinking of those who have been regenerated by the grace of God, Christianity and conflict. When on earth Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, said to the Jews, I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. To this he added, no man can come to me except the Father, which hath sent me draw him, and I will raise him up at the last day. The whole of the story of Christianity in Conflict must start from this self identification of Christ. The important thing here is a Christ who identifies himself and defines himself. In saying this, we are already in the midst of conflict. In fact, in saying this, we are at the center of the conflict as it has always been carried on and as it is being carried on today. Now, you may be sitting there thinking, Dr. Bonson didn't give us all the background because hasn't Van Till escalated this thing awfully fast? These are the opening words. He just quotes a couple of comments by Jesus about himself, and he says the whole of Christianity and conflict starts from Jesus identifying himself. And then he says, but now we're in the midst of conflict. Boom, right away. That's the problem. And I'll just give you, for those who are not familiar with Van Til's thought, a little bit of a hint as to where we're going. The problem here is that why should Jesus be allowed to define himself? Why shouldn't our autonomous reason look at the life of Jesus, consider his miracles, consider his resurrection even, and so forth, and then decide what to make of this man? The fact that Jesus tells us what to make of him is already begging the question, right? It's already reasoning in a circle. How can Jesus claim he's the bread of life that's come down from heaven? For all we know, he's nothing more but the illegitimate son of Mary who was given by the devil incredible powers, and he, you know, bamboozled people. He deceived them. You say, what a disrespectful thing to say. No, is it really? When you say that's a disrespectful thing to say about Jesus, what are you assuming? You're assuming that what he said about himself is right rather than what his contemporaries said. Because, by the way, his contemporaries said, you're the illegitimate son of Mary and you're possessed of a devil. And so who should define Jesus? Those who have the observational evidence and do their best, given their rational ability to integrate this into their natural experience? Or should we let Jesus define himself? That's why Vantil says he just quotes Jesus. He says, already the conflict's begun. And in fact, we're at the center of the conflict as it's always been carried on. Because when all is said and done, apologetics is going to come down to this. Now, he wrote a long syllabus to explain that one little point. It's illustrated over and over and over again. But you need to understand that every bit of what we see in the history of apologetics, and maybe you noticed this even Yesterday. Every bit of it is just a variation, more and more illustrations on the same single theme. Who is the ultimate authority? Will it be God, who defines himself and tells us what to think of ourselves? Or will it be man, who is first of all intellectually independent of God, so that he might learn to be dependent upon God? At the end of yesterday's class, I said, the theme of the history of apologetics, in my opinion, is yes, but yes, you're right to try to think independently of God, but you're wrong to come to the conclusion that you're independent of God. You should start thinking you're independent of God, and that should lead you to say, oh, I must be dependent upon God. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is perhaps the most important philosopher of the 20th century, there are many important philosophers, but Wittgenstein dominated philosophy twice in the 20th century. It's quite an accomplishment. And so we speak of the early Wittgenstein, whose point of view, following after Bertrand Russell, came very close to logical positivism. The Vienna Circle was very enamored of Wittgenstein's work, the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein came to change his mind on what he had written earlier. And eventually we have the blue and brown books of Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, and a whole new approach to the philosophy of language in the 1950s and 60s and so forth blossoms out of that. And so here's an incredible seminal thinker, a man who was extremely troubled by what he called Das mystical, the mystical in life, the fact that his rational system doesn't capture everything, it only captures what can be said. Now, at the end of the Tractatus, we're now looking at the early Wittgenstein, where Wittgenstein had argued for to be over simple, a logical, positivist approach to things, that the only meaningful statements are those things that we can say based on observation and in the laws of logic and so forth. Wittgenstein has a long discussion of what is sayable and what isn't sayable, given these rational strictures. And at the end of his book, he had the good grace to admit that if what I'm saying is true in this book, if what I have told you and I've taught you is the case, then you must realize I could not have said it. He said, the propositions that I have offered you, he organized it in terms of an analytical outline of numbered propositions. He goes, the propositions that I've offered you have to be looked upon as something like a ladder that you climb up and once you get up to the top, you get to the roof, then you throw the ladder away. That's the problem with the history of Christian apologetics. If I can use Wittgenstein by way of analogy, Christian apologists have so often wanted to use atomic economy as a ladder by which they climb up to the authority of Christ. And then once they've proven that Christ is the ultimate authority, they say, oh well, I guess this ladder wasn't right all along and you throw it away. Van Till says the self identification of Jesus is the issue throughout the history of apologetics. That's why we're in the midst of the conflict already. He said current, that is post Kantian philosophy of history insists that to be truly scientific we must say that we can have no knowledge of either man or God and of a personal relation between them. And the reason why we can have no knowledge of God is on Kant's basis in the last analysis, based on the assumption that man must first obtain identify himself in terms of himself before he can say anything about God. In other words, in Kant's philosophy it is man who takes the place of God in Christianity. God is the original self affirming one. In Kant's philosophy it is man who is the original self affirming one. And post Kantian thought, actually it's true of the whole history of philosophy, but it's really dramatically expressed after the time of Kant. Kant says we can't know anything except our own phenomenal experience. And so what I think of myself has to be based on the phenomena, my experience in this world. But to get beyond the experience and say what I ultimately am, the ding on zik, the thing in itself I cannot do and I can't tell you what God is in and of himself either. That's impossible. We can only go on the basis of experience. So with Kant in this particular form the problem is expressed in Kant, man has to identify himself based on his own experience and then he works out from there. Whereas for Christianity God identifies himself and then we learn who we are in light of what God tells us about ourselves. Or this isn't the example used by Van Till, but in the history of Western philosophy. It seems to me that Descartes is a really clear illustration of this point. Descartes being shut up for a long and cold winter in a cabin that had a stove, decided that he would try to play the part of the philosopher. And. And he said, I'm going to see if I can discover something that is absolutely indubitable when I think, okay, and so he started thinking about all the things he believed and of course every one of them is doubtful, right? He believes that when he was a child he had the following experience. Well, but maybe he dreamed it. Okay, yeah, he believes that he has hands and feet and so forth. Well, but maybe that's an illusion. Maybe he's in a drug state, as we might say, whatever. So he starts going through, I can doubt that God exists, I can doubt that there's an external world, but the only thing I can't doubt, Descartes said, was that I'm doubting. I'm having a present experience. What's my phenomenon right now? What's my experience right now? Doubt. And so from this we get the famous Cartesian formula, I doubt, therefore I am. I must exist, because if nothing else doubting is going on, so I've got to exist to do the doubting, okay? The problem with all this, of course, is what Descartes was assuming is that he had to exist in order to prove that he existed. Bertrand Russell, no friend of Christianity, is the one who so clearly pointed out Descartes circular reasoning. Descartes began with the premise I doubt or actually I think cogito. But you see, in expressing himself in that way, he's already assumed what he's supposed to be proving, right? That there's an eye to do the doubting. Russell pointed out if he really wanted to be skeptical, he should have said doubting is going on, and then tried to get from that to therefore I must exist. But of course you can't get from doubting is going on to I exist. So this most famous philosophical aphorism, I doubt, therefore I am, I think therefore I am proves to be logically fallacious. Isn't that amazing? So Descartes didn't even do the minimal work that he thought he had done. But from a Christian standpoint, far more importantly than the silly fallacious nature of the argument is the attitude of heart, the approach Descartes took. What Descartes said is God is so. So I'm all right. I can't be too sure about God. I'll get there in a minute. But this I know for absolutely sure, I exist. He begins by defining himself and then God comes into the picture later. So this is what Vantil is referring to, that the whole question is, where do you begin? Does God identify himself or do we first identify ourselves? In Christianity, it is God who in Christ calls men away from the folly of his would be ultimate self assertion. We're not going to get through this day if I comment on every line. But this is so good. Listen to this. In Christianity it is God who in Christ calls men away from. And then how would you describe what men are called away from? Well of course there's a dozen, well more than a dozen, probably a hundred different answers in terms of what the Bible says men are called away from. They are called away from selfishness and self love and rebellion and death and all sorts of things. Van Till puts it this way. God in Christ calls men away from the folly of his would be ultimate self assertion. That's what God is saying is stop thinking that you are the original defining point in your thinking. That's what I'm asking you to do. Stop thinking of yourself as God. You are not the original. You were not the first to identify yourself. I identify myself and you must submit to my self identification in what you are in light of what I tell you. And so what Christ is calling men to do is to stop being autonomous, right? The ultimate authority and a law unto themselves. He tells men that no one knows the Father but the Son, and no one knows the Son or can come to the Son except the Father. Draw him. It is with this background of utter self affirmation that Christ says, come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Christ Jesus came to save men from their sin. He came to give his life a ransom for many. Matthew 20:28 he came to destroy the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of Satan. The Gospel is the good news about the Son of God and the Son of man who died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Only Christ himself can tell us this good news. He testifies to Himself in the Bible as a whole and in the New Testament in particular. Therefore, as the acts or works of redemption performed for us by Christ in history were finished once for all, so his testimony to these Acts was finished with once for all. Herein lies the reason, says Herman Ritterboss, that it is impossible to be confronted with the acts of God elsewhere than through the witness of Christ to Himself in the New Testament. See, we don't figure out a gospel that somehow makes sense of the life of Jesus. God doesn't give us raw data, you know, from history. Jesus lived, Jesus did this, he died on a cross and so forth. And then say now what do you make of that? How would you interpret that? It turns out the only way we know of the history of Jesus in his life is through the interpretation of that history that Jesus Himself gives either himself personally or through his authorized spokesman, the prophets and the apostles. How could we claim to know and profit from the redemptive acts of Christ if we do not take Himself and his acts to be what he himself tells us they are? And then Van Till asked them two questions. One, shall we seek access to Christ through the Holy Spirit and insult the Word which the Spirit inspired Anybody? Tell me, who's he referring to here? Say, the mystics, charismatics in Calvin's day, the fanatics and so forth. Those who say that the Holy Spirit directly guides us in our thinking and we don't need to go to the written word of God. Mantill is softening us up because he knows people who are reformed reading this will say, oh, no, no, it's the Spirit working with the Word, right? Not the Spirit apart from the word. Question 2. Shall we first interpret ourselves, our finitude, our sin, our evil plight in terms of criteria taken from ourselves or from the world and then turn to Jesus Christ for help in time of need? Probing question. You know, many Christian evangelistic outfits, many pastors have the mistaken idea that the world can understand its misery on its own terms and then turn to Jesus as the answer. But you see, Jesus isn't the answer to the world's questions because the world doesn't know how to form the question. You know, man thinks of his sin. Well, he doesn't think of it as sin. Man thinks of his problem to be abstract here in ways that have nothing to do with the personal holiness of God. Man thinks of the outcome, for instance, of what we would call his self, love. Okay? He sees all the broken marriages and the crime and the greed and the world and so forth. And he says, there's something seriously wrong with the human race. But from there's something seriously wrong with the human race because I can't walk the streets at night, our families are disrupted and so forth. You don't get to Jesus. Now, we believe you can come back to that and redefine that and show how Jesus helps that problem. But the point is, if you don't understand sin in terms of what Jesus says, you can't understand salvation either. We can well understand and must deeply sympathize with those who have attempted to follow either of these ways. Let's put the Bible aside, let the Spirit guide us. Let's let the world define its misery and then say, jesus, we'll call for help in time of need. At that point, the question of the human factor in Scripture allows of no easy solution. There are Detailed questions of text. And there is the general question of the nature and extent of the canon. But back of all these questions lies the much deeper, the ultimate question. With respect to the nature of Christ. We appear to have no way of knowing who and what he is unless he tells us about Himself. And if he tells us that he was from all eternity in the form of God, and that he was with God and was God, and that for our sins and our salvation he was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, then we dare not say that such a Christ cannot exist. If Jesus says, this is the way it is, this is who I am, interprets Himself, then we can't even begin with the question, is it possible that that's true? We don't want to entertain any way of thinking that might lead to the conclusion that cannot be the way it is. On the other hand, we dare not assert that because as the eternal Son of God, equal in power and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he is not fully comprehensible to us, that therefore he cannot clearly reveal Himself to us. In short, we dare not think that we already largely know who and what we are and what the environment we live in consists of, how fact is related to logic or logic to fact, and then turn to Christ for further light or further help. It is that point of view precisely from which we have been saved by the grace of God in Christ. This is a revolutionary insight. It's been in the Bible and it's been in Christian theology. Implicitly, it's been in Calvin's theology more clearly. It's been there all along. But Van Til has really brought to the surface, it seems to me, the epistemological dimension of salvation. We've been saved from thinking. We understand things all right as far as they go. God just needs to supplement our understanding of it. You know the illustration I used yesterday, that in terms of the way we live our lives, we've gotten, you know, all the way to first base, second base and third base, on our own steam, by our own direction. We know what we're doing. It's just that God needs to bring us home so we can finally score, you know, the point, according to Van Till, the problem with the ungodly man, the unregenerate man, is that he doesn't realize that he only got to first base because of God, second base because of God, third base because of God. And he's guilty in the eyes of God of not giving God the glory, not saying thank you to God for what he has accomplished already, and he'll never get home until he learns to say thank you for first, second and third base. Whereas the evangelical world, and sadly many in the reformed world, have taught let's let men be autonomous in terms of first, second, third base, and now just try to convince them that being autonomous God needs to help them limp home. We dare not think that we already largely know who and what we are, what the environment we live in consists of, how fact is related to logic or logic to fact, and then, and then, and then having all of that alright as far as it goes, and then turn to Christ for further light or further help. It's that point of view precisely from which we've been saved by the grace of God in Christ. Write gladly do we then, by the help of His Spirit, submit our thoughts, our interpretation of the whole of human life and cosmic history to the obedience of Christ? Right, Gladly then, do we join the great councils of the Church when merely seeking to re express an opposition to thinking that centers in man as ultimate that the Son is equal in power and glory with the Father and the Spirit, that the divine and human natures of the Christ remain, each of them intact, even when brought into permanent and intimate union in oneness of person. Right. Gladly do we confess his genuine humanity as well as his unqualified divinity, and speak of the communicatio idiomatim, merely expressing therewith the fact that in the Gospels the one subject of the God man is given both divine and human predicates. With the communicatio apostolistema we would understand the fact that the work of redemption is the work of the one divine Person and His two natures. With the communicatio Christamatum we understand that the human nature of Christ was from the beginning endued with rich gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Christ who tells us what he is and what we are, what he has done, and what we have done and must do, the Christ whose face as Creator and Redeemer we cannot but see in the words of Scripture. This Christ we would teach all men to proclaim, to witness to, and to explain in secondary and and subservient fashion, heralds, witness bearers, truth proclaimers they must be. Please turn the cassette over. At this time. The whole world lies in darkness. All men keep down the truth confronting them, even the truth of Christ, the Son of God, through whom the world is made in unrighteousness. Hence the wrath of God abides upon them. To teach men everywhere to flee from the wrath to come to be saved for this life and for the life to come, and all to the praise of his grace. That is what the followers of Christ must learn to do. It is easy for any of us to think that we have good reasons, reasons of fact, reasons of logic, reasons derived from our moral consciousness and our sense of freedom, freedom to depart from this historic position with respect to the person of Christ. But if we thus depart, then we must also assume the responsibility for supplying a positive foundation from which life and history may be seen to have meaning without this Christ. But if men insist that the Christ of the Scripture cannot be accepted because of the facts of history, because of the demands of logic and basic to all, because of the rightful requirements of human personality, then we beg of them in Christ's name, lest facts, logic and human personality all be lost, to permit themselves in the whole world to be interpreted by Christ as he continues to confront them in the words of Scripture. The Christ that has determinate character and as veri dus vere homo, very God and very man, the Son of God incarnate, the crucified Savior, the risen Lord, the ascended Christ, the judge of all men to come, the Christ before all history come into history. And Lord of history, the Christ was saving relevance to all the problems of modern man in history. We cannot know him and confront him unless we confront him in the Scriptures. That's the choice. Accept Christ as he fits into your autonomous scheme of interpretation and thus lose logic, history, facts, personality, freedom, or accept Christ on his own terms. That's what apologetics really comes down to. We want to explain to men that God, the one who interprets their situation and their problem and their need, and that Christ as he interprets himself, is the answer. We don't work up halfway by our own autonomous scheme of interpretation. What the difficulty is, what our problem is. And then let Christ be the answer as he interprets himself. Christ is the answer from beginning to end. And so Van Til has taught us in terms of Christianity and conflict, that the essence of the problem is who is the ultimate self interpreter, God or man. And then closer to the end of his life, Van Till wrote a marvelous little booklet. It concerns me greatly. It's so difficult to find this. But Toward a Reformed Apologetics explains in his own words, very simple terms, what he hopes he has accomplished in his career and in his writings. And when he comes to the book that is his feshrip Jerusalem And Athens Evantil says more about how Christ must be the self attesting Christ, the one who interprets himself for us. And I'd like to go over these words as well. As we understand that we must defend the Bible in a biblical way, that the method itself must be faithful and not just the conclusion. A reformed apologetic must, I hold, seek to follow the Apostle Paul's example says if we're going to defend the faith in a way that's pleasing to God, we must do it in a biblical way. We have to follow the example of the apostle, Apostle Paul. And then I'm going to skip a bit of the discussion and continue where he says about those that we are calling upon to be saved. They are covenant breakers. Unless they turn about and accept the Christ on the authority of Christ, they will abide under the wrath of God. That's our point, right? You must do God's work and God's way way to accept the truth of Christ. You must accept it because it's Christ's truth and not just because it's the truth of Christ or about Christ. Let me say that again because that's crucial. We must accept not just that it's the truth about Christ, but that it's Christ's truth that's about Christ. Unless they turn about and accept the Christ on the authority of Christ, they will abide under the wrath of God. Has not the Greek paideia been made foolishness with God? The word paideia here refers to the pedagogical philosophy or outlook on the Greeks. How is it that the human mind learns and can know things? Unless has not the Greek paideia been made foolishness with God? Can you not see that on your presupposition man cannot even begin to ask any question about anything, let alone obtain any answer to any question? That's the heart of it. Given what you think that you're the ultimate starting point, that you're autonomous, that you define yourself, that you interpret your environment and God has to be fit into your preconceived ideas. Don't you understand that on your approach you couldn't even ask a question, much less answer a question. Some of you were wondering, why can't they ask questions? They do it all the time. Well, they ask questions because they're not what they say they are. They ask questions because they are made in the image of God and they know God. They're suppressing that truth, but they nevertheless have that information. And in terms of that, they ask questions about God, who alone makes sense out of their ability to ask questions. Socrates may insist that he wants to know the essence of holiness without benefit of the revelation of God. But unless Christ in his long suffering patience were his Creator and judge, he could not even open his mouth to express such folly. Van Til is presuming, as he did throughout his writings to his disappointment, that his students knew the history of philosophy. But if you know the Platonic dialogues, you know one of the for which Plato and Socrates his spokesman is best known as well. I'll take it from the Euthyphro, the dialogue. The Euthyphro. Euthyphro came to Athens to bring an accusation against his father for impiety. And you have to understand the culture of Athens in that day, that's unheard of. A son does not bring an accusation against. I mean, that's disrupting the whole order of society. This is just preposterous, Euthyphro, how can you do this? And so Socrates, when he has a discussion with Euthyphro, says, Euthyphro, you must have a very clear concept of what piety is. Then Euthyphro says, yes, I do, and that's why I'm willing to come here and bring accusation against my father. And so Socrates wants to know what is the essence here, Van Till says, of holiness or piety. And when Euthyphro begins to answer the question by reference to what the gods say, Socrates in the dialogue, and I won't go through all of it because we don't have time gets him to realize that whatever holiness is or piety is, it has to exist and be defined apart from the gods. And the reason for that, according to Socrates, is that don't we say that the gods are pious? Well, if the gods are pious, then there must be some standard above the gods by which we evaluate them as being pious. And we can make sense out of saying that. On the other hand, if the gods define what piety is, then piety could be what it is as we think of it now, or the very opposite, depending on the whim of the gods. If the gods wanted to say it was the opposite of what we think it is, it would still be called piety, but we wouldn't be able to call them pious in any absolute and unchanging sense. And so by this little conundrum which many Christians have been led astray by as well, Euthyphro comes to see that the essence of holiness must be independent of the gods. What a mistake. Here's what Van Till says about that. Socrates may insist that he wants to know the essence of holiness without benefit of the revelation of God. But unless Christ in his long suffering patience were his Creator and judge, he could not even open his mouth to express such folly. Things cannot be independent of God as the definer. Because if that is the relationship of God to the essences, to logic and so forth, then it wouldn't even be possible to make sense out of our experience. And in the end we couldn't even open our mouths and ask the question. And seeking to follow the example of Paul, Reformed apologetics needs above all else to make clear from the beginning that it is challenging the wisdom of the natural man on the authority of the self attesting Christ. Speaking in Scripture in apologetics, when all is said and done, your strategy is to challenge the natural man, to challenge the natural man in terms of his presumed autonomy. Doing this, the Reformed apologist must place himself on the position of his opponent, the natural man, in order to show him that on the presupposition of human autonomy, human predication cannot even get underway. The fact that it has gotten underway is because the universe is what the Christian on the authority of Christ knows it to be. Even to negate Christ Christ, those who hate him must be borne up by him. And then perhaps the most famous illustration used by Van Til, a three year old child may slap its father in his face only because the father holds it on his knee. Apologetics is a matter of showing that the natural man could not even oppose Christ if he didn't first presuppose what Christ has said about himself and universe, facts, logic and all the rest. Van Til now talks about the new philosophy introduced by Herman Doyouvert. The new philosophy taught at the Free University of Amsterdam by Abraham Kuyper could be nothing other than a truly biblical and therefore Calvinistic philosophy. Calvinism, said Babinc, is Christianity come to its own. Moreover, a Calvinist philosophy is not merely to use certain ground motives such as creation, fall and redemption through Christ as guiding principles. A Calvinist philosopher must seek constantly to understand the specific and positive teachings of Scripture in their opposition to the specific teachings of philosophers who work on the presupposition human autonomy. To do this, the philosopher must for himself go directly to Scripture. You see, if it is the self identifying Christ who stands over against the natural man who would identify himself in his world on his own terms. Mantilla is saying, and how do we know about the self identifying Christ? We know about him from Scripture. That's where he identifies himself. Consequently, the Christian philosopher and this is said against Herman Doyouvard? The Christian philosopher's got to do more than just have the ground motives of creation, fall and redemption. He's got to go directly to the Bible. And now everyone's screaming bloody murder. No, no, no. How politically incorrect. Philosophers can't go directly to the Bible to the specific content of the Bible evangelists. Absolutely. If we're going to defend the Bible biblically, then we've got to go to the Bible, and not just for general themes, but for its specific content. I'm skipping a bit. Dantil says, I am mainly interested in pointing out the fact that the theologian and the philosopher do not have fenced off areas of interest. Neither can say to the other that he has no business entering his field. Both theologians and philosophers are, first of all simple believers in Christ, commissioned by Christ to proclaim his name unto men who are lost. And men are lost because they presuppose their independence from God. Boy, he had such a simple way of making the issue clear. The philosopher and the theologian are both simple believers, and we call on men to be saved by Christ from sin. And why are they lost in sin? Because they assume that they're independent of God. So as a philosopher, I need to begin by telling men, you're not independent of God. Your philosophy cannot get started independent of God, crawling up by the ladder so that now that you've got to a place where you accept God, you throw the ladder away, and now you say, I'm totally dependent upon you. Now, throughout the years, I was greatly helped along these lines by the work of the Calvinistic philosophers mentioned. However, in more recent years, I began to wonder whether Dr. Doyouvaerd was not beginning to waver in his commitment to the idea that it is the concrete body of teaching of Scripture that must as a whole be taken as the presupposition of the possibility of human predication. Now, Van Till has twice used this expression, predication. It would behoove me to explain what he's getting at here. Most of you will remember from your grammatical training what a predicate is, right? A predicate is anything that can be said of a subject. And so if I say runs fast, that is a predicate that applies to, say, a gazelle, okay? Or to predict athlete, whatever it may be. Red is a predicate because it's something that can be said of. It's a quality that can be attributed to a barn or an apple or what have you. And so whenever we utter something in the subject predicate form, we are predicating it. And Van Til maintains that predication itself presupposes the Christian worldview in order to make sense by the end of the course. I would be flattered if you understood that better. And I have to wait in the sense or else I'll never get my notes in to explain that more. So only a thumbnail sketch and explanation will be possible at this point. Why is it that from a non Christian standpoint, you can't say the barn is red? Why can you not predicate if you don't assume that God created all things, he controls all things by his mind, he's sovereign, providential, so forth and so on? Well, on the non Christian basis, the only thing that exists is matter in motion. We experience this matter in motion, but we don't experience things that are immaterial. And so when I refer to the barn, somebody might say, well, you're referring to something that's material. Well, I am, but I'm referring to it under a particular category, aren't I? I've had an experience, you know, whether it's visual or tactical or whatever it is, of some object, and I've said the barn. Well, by doing that, I've placed that object in a category. Okay, let's call it the category of Barnes. But in order to say that this object that I've experienced falls into the category of barnness, is to say that there is something that's immaterial. Right? Barnness. No one has ever, you know, bumped into barnness. You may bump into the barn, but you've never bumped into barn nest. The concept of a barn is not the same as a barn, and the concept is not itself physical. Now, some people wanted to argue, yes, it is. The concept of barn is those electrical stimulus that going through the cranium here, right into the gray matter of your brain. But of course, that's not the concept of barnness, is it? How do you know that it's not the concept of barnness? Well, because when I die in my brain, brain is gone, there's still going to be barrenness. So barnness is not what's going through my cranium. It must be something that's shared by many craniums, right? Because you all have the concept of barrenness. So I assume, I think you're human beings, you've had experiences like mine. And if we all have the concept of barnness, then it cannot be something particular that's had by just one of us. So it's some kind of a universe now already we're in trouble, aren't we? Look, at the. I mean, all I wanted to say is the barn is red and Van Til's got me into all this philosophical, you know, deep stuff. How can you, if you're an unbeliever, put something in the category of barn ness and then how can you attribute a quality to that? Are qualities and objects separate things? Well, you better say yes, because if you don't, then there's no basis for speaking of red apart from red apples, red barns and so forth. So we can abstract the quality of red from the various red things, but on the non Christian basis we don't ever experience redness, we only experience particular things. On what basis? It's a similar problem. On what basis do we speak of barn ness calling this object a barn? And on what basis do we speak of something like redness being attributed to that barn? On the non Christian basis, all I should say is I have an experience, but I can't identify the experience because to identify it I have to use universals like barn and red. So I have an experience. Think of it this way, like if I'm a camera, you know, the camera's not having an experience, it's just being impinged upon with waves of light recording it. Now what happens for me is I'm like a camera and I have this experience of what we would have called a red barn. But it's just an experience. It's not interpreted as barn or red, it's just an experience. And then I have another experience and I have another experience and I have another experience. Now in all of those experiences somebody might say, well you might see another barn. And so now you've got two barns and you can abstract the concept of barn from that. Oh, I can. Where did I get the power of abstraction if I'm nothing more but matter and motion? Well, that's just a thumbnail sketch. We're going to talk a little bit more about this problem later. What Van Til's getting at is the non Christian can't even predicate, can't even make sense of a simple sentence if he begins without God creating the world and controlling it in terms of his mind. Because God is the one who defines Barnes. And we know the mind of God from our experience and we're able, because we're made in the image of God, to think of categories and universals and so forth. But if you don't begin that way, then you can't make sense of predication. Vantil says, in more recent years I began to wonder whether Dr. Doyoubird was not beginning to waver in his commitment to the idea that it is the concrete body of teaching of Scripture that must as a whole be taken as the presupposition of the possibility of human predication. At any rate, and this is the point of primary importance, a truly Christian apologetic must bring in the whole concept, content of biblical teaching as the presupposition of the possibility of human predication. And then he says, I have, as best I could, shown them that I was only trying to follow Paul's example and that it is more obviously necessary to do this now than it ever was before if we are to win men to Christ in a way that does not compromise the name of Christ. And so Van Till's concern is to follow the example of Paul and not compromise the name of Christ in the way in which I proclaim and defend the name of Christ. And for that I must let Christ identify himself. I must believe him on his authority. And in order to do that, I must go to the concrete teacher teaching of Scripture, even as a philosopher, if there's going to be any possibility of saving human predication and reasoning at all. Okay, so Van Till, I think, has done a marvelous job in pointing us in the direction of letting the Bible teach us how to do apologetics. But now Van Till, at the end of the booklet, offers retractions and clarifications. And for all of my. Well, actually, I guess this just increases my respect for Dr. Van Till. He was very sensitive to confess what he thought was a weakness in his approach, in his own career and scholarship. And I want you to hear what it is he says then, so far as content is concerned. I have often not lived up to my own motto on this point either. I have not always made perfectly clear that in presenting Christ to lost men, we must present him for what he is. He has told us what he is in the Scriptures. Apparently, I have given occasion for people to think that I am speculative or philosophical first and biblical afterwards. The criticism is made. You first work out all these grand philosophical, and they may be very good and useful schemes for argument. And then you run to the Bible and try to make the Bible say that you're speculative first, philosophical first, biblical afterwards. Van Till confesses that that was never his intention. I will argue that if you read the corpus of his writings, you can see how biblical it is, you know, throughout. But Van Till felt bad at the end of his life that he had never systematically worked out the biblical foundations for his apologetic. I have been told that on my view, the Christian can say nothing More to the non Christian than you work on one set of presuppositions, I work on another set of presuppositions and that is the end of the matter. There is simply no common ground of any sort between us. I would now make as plain as possible that only because reality is what the self attesting Christ of Scripture, Scripture has told us it is, do we as believers and as unbelievers have common ground at all? If the triune God of Scripture did not exist, and if he did not do what he says in Scripture he does, that is create and direct the whole course of history, the unbeliever would have no standing place in order to engage in his effort by his false systems to deny the existence and work of God. My hope for the future is that I may be given grace to be more true to the Christ of the Scriptures. And then I'd like to read the last page to round this out. Manson says finally, it is my hope for the future, as it has always been my hope in the past, that I may present Christ without compromise to men who are dead in trespasses and sins, that they might have life and that they might worship and serve the creature. That they might worship and serve those who worship and serve the creature more than the Creator. Rather than wedding Christianity to the philosophies of Aristotle or Kant, we must openly challenge the apostate philosophic constructions of men by which they seek to suppress the truth about God themselves and the world. To be sure, it is the grace of God which we proclaim to men, and we must proclaim the Gospel suaviter in moda. But nevertheless we have not been true to Christ. If we do not say with Paul, where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe we are children of the King. To us not to the world do all things belong. It is only if we demand of men complete submission to the living Christ of the Scriptures in every area of their lives that we have presented to men the claims of the Lord Christ without compromise. Dr. Van Till wished that he had written a more exegetical and biblical introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics. And by the time that he came to the conviction that this should have been done, it was not likely that he would have the strength to do that. The first thing the first project that I worked on after leaving Westminster Seminary and having studied under Van Till was a Biblical Introduction to Apologetics, because I had learned from him, and I thought it was a very dear confession that we need to show people that the Bible does lead to the defense of the faith. That is presuppositional. I mean, you can call it that in the speculation, philosophical way, but I think it's important that we see that the Bible directs our defense of the faith. So that's why we're doing what we're doing today. Let's get started. I'm going to be following the outline that you have in my syllabus, A Biblical Introduction to Apologetics. And so if you have that with you, it may help you from saving notes to do some underlining and annotating rather and trying to write down everything I have to say. The first section of my syllabus, A Biblical Introduction to Apologetics, deals with Christ in the world of thought, or as I put it in the outline on the board, Christ. Christ as the Lord of reasoning. Chapter one is entitled the Robbery of Neutrality. The Bible teaches us that when we attempt to approach any subject or any activity with an attitude of neutrality toward the demands of God, that we have already disobeyed God because God does not permit us to take a neutral, indifferent, uncommitted point of view or frame of mind to our thinking and our behavior. Let's look in our Bibles at Colossians 2. 8. While you're turning there. Just a reminder. If the Bible is going to be defended biblically, then we're now going to the Bible to see what it would teach us, what things it would say that would be relevant to the task of apologetics. And I think this one is very relevant. Colossians 2. 8. Take heed lest there shall be anyone that makes spoil of you through his philosophy in vain. Deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. Paul obviously is concerned about a particular kind of philosophy that we have to be on the lookout for. He says, be warned in advance. Be careful now, be watchful. Take heed lest you get robbed. My translation says, lest anyone makes spoil of you. Literally, the Greek means to be mugged. Don't get mugged by the philosophers. Now, does that sound relevant to Apologetics to you? Apologetics is defend. This message is continued on the next tape. It.