Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Warrant and Need for Apologetics (Part 2)

This message is a continuation of the previous tape, yet with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience that wherein you are spoken against, they may be put to shame who revile your good manner of life in Christ. For it is better if the will of God should so will that you suffer for well doing than for evil doing. Now, I read this in this particular context, the beginning and end, so that you'd see that the call for apologetics is in the middle of a discussion of suffering for righteousness sake. Now Peter says it's a matter of common sense. He says, who's going to hurt you if you're zealous of that which is good? Most Christians need to hear that as many times we act in ways which are hypocritical and really dishonoring to God. And then when the world picks up on that and criticizes us and brings us down, we think we're suffering for righteousness sake and we aren't. Many times the world gets down on us because our behavior hasn't been exemplary. And so that's something of a rebuke. Peter says, if you're having a hard time in your social situation, you may want to stop and ask. Isn't that unusual? Even people who don't agree with your religious perspective will show a measure of respect for your good works. You know that's true, don't you? How many times have you heard people say, well, you know, the Mormons, they're really wrong, but look what they do with families. Who's going to harm the Mormons as long as their reputation is being family centered, you know, and, and having a place for teenagers to go, and also providing for those who are out of work, bringing groceries over to them and so forth, it's pretty hard to beat that that isn't because the world likes Mormonism or evangelicals, that they like Mormonism. But the good works tend to soften the entry socially for a person. And we as Christians should remember that many times people ridicule us and put us down because our lifestyle is not very exemplary. So Peter says, who's going to hurt you if you do that? What is good? But now Peter's realistic. He knows the depravity of man. In the next verse, he says, but even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, he says, I know it's going to happen. There are going to be some people who just got it out for you that are contrary, or maybe who hate the light that you represent so much that you're nevertheless going to suffer. And even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, consider yourself blessed. That's the kind of masochism in the Bible that we don't easily associate with, right? I'm supposed to be happy that I'm being given this hard time. You know, I think I'd be, I could understand it if I was suffering for doing bad things. But here I'm trying to please God and people won't even, you know, respect that. They're giving me a hard time. Peter says, you should be happy when that happens and don't be afraid of them and don't be troubled, but do this. Okay, so now there's where the call for apologetics comes in. People are mistreating you, they're bringing you down, ridiculing you. They're being unfair. These are not, you know, people of neutral minded approach to religion. They're saying, we really don't have anything against you, we don't have anything for you. We just like Peter says, no, it's in the midst of people being unfair and ungodly, not at all being neutral, showing their hostility and the irrationality of their hostility. He says, but don't be afraid of them. Rather sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord, being ready always to give an answer to every man who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you. And do it this way with gentleness and respect. And immediately verse 16 picks up again on this issue of our lifestyle, how having a good conscience that wherein you are spoken against, they may be put to shame who revile your good manner of life in Christ. They may be talking you down, they may be saying all kinds of things against you, but he says, you keep showing a good conscience before God and they'll eventually be put to shame for talking about you that way. Live a righteous life, for it is better if the will of God should so will that you suffer for well doing than for evil doing. See, God is glorified when his people do what is right and suffer for it. He's not glorified when they suffer because they've done bad things. So there's the opening and the closing of that thought. Peter says, if you do good things, you probably won't suffer, but it would be better if you suffered for doing good things and for doing bad things in the middle of that, where he says, but when people are unrighteous and oppose you for doing good things, don't be afraid of them. And you're not going to be afraid of them. You're not going to fear their fear because of two things in particular, the one we've already spoken of, a good conscience toward God. You're going to put them to shame by the way you live. Most of us who are engaged in apologetics, it takes a long time to let this sink in. We put people to shame not just by refuting them academically, we put them to shame by the way we live, and we put them to shame by the way we live and the way that we treat them. Now, I've seen people, I've seen myself sadly be in situations where we're being mistreated and ridiculed, and we're able to come back and just slice our opponent to bits. And you know what? People don't like being treated that way. And so what happens is they turn off the mind, they don't care about the argument anymore, and they just hate you all the more for it. And yet we may have thought, wow, what a good boy am I, look what I did. Their arguments are in shambles now, but Peter says that our lifestyle has got to reinforce the answer that we give. I hope that you will not forget that I said that. Since we're going to focus so much on the answer to argument side of this and not so much on the lifestyle, because that's just what the course is going to require. I don't want you to leave here thinking, okay, now I've got the arguments, I'm ready. You better have the life that goes with the arguments or they're not going to be persuasive or powerful at all. In verse 15, this is what Peter says about giving that answer, the, if you will, more academic side of the response to mistreatment, not just the lifestyle part. Peter says, set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts. You can't do apologetics unless you meet this prerequisite. Set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts. What is the heart? According to the Bible, if we follow the modern evangelical world, we think, well, the heart's the center of our emotions. The mind is where we think. And so we'll hear people say, and I mean as an idiom, it's all right, but it's misleading. When we apply what the idiom says to the Bible, we'll say, we have to love the Lord our God with all of our heart and our what? And our mind. Right, heart and mind. In that case, we tend to think as emotions and thinking. Now, in that case, that isn't what it means. It's just really a piling up of terms that mean about the same thing. The point is in the Bible, the heart is the center of man's life. What is private, if you will, it's the interior of his life, not the exterior of his life. And in the interior of our life, we think, we feel, we make commitments, we have our priorities, we have our conception of the world. Everything that is internal to man is that which is central to him is his heart. Out of the heart are the issues of life. The Bible says, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. And so when Paul. Excuse me, when Peter here is talking about the heart, he's not talking about our emotional feelings or our commitments. He's talking about everything that's internal to us, and that includes our thinking. And he says, in our thinking and feeling and doing, in all that we are internally, Christ is to be the Lord. And if Christ is not the Lord in this way, then you will not be prepared to answer any man who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you. It's depressing and somewhat alarming that people can teach entire courses and write entire books on apologetics trying to prepare to answer every man and not pay attention to the prerequisite answering every man. If you're going to effectively defend the faith, you must first make sure Christ is Lord in all your thinking. And if Christ is Lord in all your thinking, that means he's beyond challenge, right? You don't go to your Lord and say, now you proved yourself to me. That's what Satan wanted Jesus to do in the desert, actually, at the pinnacle of the temple, right? So jump off. God will take care of you. That's what the Bible says. Jesus said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. He's the Lord, and therefore he's not tested. He tests us. We don't test him. Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Make sure he is the ultimate unchallengeable authority in your life, and then you'll be ready for anybody. Second thing I want you to see here is that this is a command given to all Christians. This isn't for the eggheads among us. You know those Dr. Bonson types who go to graduate school. Everybody's supposed to do apologetics, not just specially trained people. I don't think it's wrong for the Lord to give the church teachers and people that may have some expertise they can share with others. And by his grace, I hope that I can do some of that. But this is not a command given to me and to others who are philosophy majors. This is a command given to all of God's children, even those who don't go to high school. And if you listen to what I'm going to teach you this week, I'll be bold to tell you that even a high school dropout can accomplish this task, which is to make the next point to have an answer for anybody who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you. See, that's a little frightening, isn't it? People might say, well, I might get to the place where I could talk to my sister about this, or, you know, somebody that I've worked with for a number of years that I think won't, you know, just bite my head off. I could probably do this. But the local philosophy professor, these guys who write books, academic sorts. Yes. Peter says, be ready for anybody. Apologetics, if you do it in a faithful biblical way, enables you to take on all comers. Now, what does that tell you about the method of apologetics? Maybe it doesn't tell you anything yet, and you'll have to go back and re listen to this lecture to pick up on this, but it tells me something very significant, and that's that apologetics preparation to do apologetics is not found in memorizing answers to every conceivable problem. You know why? Because you don't have enough time and maybe not enough ability. I don't think I have enough ability to memorize answers to every problem. Sometimes people will ask me, well, do you know about all these new cults and so forth? And I say, no, just flat out. I don't have time to read about all these new religions or even all the old religions. But I've read a lot about religion. Well, then how can you be prepared to answer any of them that comes along? Well, what do you think a guy who's played baseball and has become pretty good at swinging the bat might be asked, have you ever had somebody throw, you know, a fork ball at you? Say, no, I can't think that he did. Well, then how are you going to be able to do it? He goes, because I've learned how to watch the ball and to hit it. And if you learn how to defend the faith in a biblical way, Peter says, no matter what comes at you, you're going to use the same strategy and you're going to hit a home run. Hopefully you hit a home run. The point is, you don't have to know all of the objections and all of the answers to them, because when all is said and done, the right way to answer them boils down to the same strategy over and over and over again. So you just apply the same method. And you can apply it whether you're a sophisticated PhD candidate or whether you're a high school dropout. Surely there'll be a difference in vocabulary, maybe a difference of sophistication of the presentation. Maybe the one isn't as academic looking as the other. But you know, it doesn't have to have all the world's armor and all the splendor and so forth to be effective. King David didn't want Saul's armor. He said, I just want these, you know, little stones in the power of God. And so even high school students or high school dropouts who learn how to to think in a biblical way can talk to PhDs in philosophy. And though the PhD in philosophy will probably say, who's this punk? Who cares what he says? The punk is going to ask him questions that the guy who's supposed to have all the answers is just going to be all tripped up over. You'll be able to make a fool out of him. Whether he admits it, whether he cries uncle is not the issue, but you're going to make a fool out of him. Peter says, un all of you need to be prepared to answer anybody who comes to you. And you'll be prepared to do that if you set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts, in your thinking, make sure you have the right ultimate authority. So this is the warrant and the need for apologetics. First Peter 3:15. I'm going to add a little bit to this, especially for those of you who are studying for the ministry, either here in the classroom or listening by tape, it is all the more incumbent upon you that you be adept at defending the faith. Let's look at Titus 1:9, A little hot in here. Titus 1:9. Seven begins, for the overseer must be blameless as God's steward, not self willed, not soon angry, etc. So it's in the context of Paul explaining what is required of those who would be overseers, those who would be elders in God's church. And in verse nine it says, holding to the faithful word, which is according to the teaching, according to the doctrine of the apostles, that he may be able both to exhort in healthy doctrine and convict the gainsayers. And so you see, when people come before our presbyteries thinking that they are called to the ministry, and their gifts have been tested and they want their examinations and so forth, it is appropriate that we test them not only according to the soundness of their doctrine, but also their ability to convict the gainsayers. And I'll just give you a personal confession of depression. What I see in most reformed churches in our day and age falls woefully short of this. This is not just like a good idea. It's not like we all got together and say, now what do you think would be good for candidates for the ministry to have we do a little bit of that. But here the Bible gives it as a moral requirement that the man who would be ordained must be able to convict gainsayers for a few years. In my own presbytery I won't mention which one that is because that's not really my point here. But in my own presbytery I was on the committee that examined candidates and I examined these fellows in apologetics and I'd say, why do you believe this? And they say, well, because the Bible teaches it. Okay, let's assume that the Bible does teach that. Why do you believe what the Bible teaches? He says, well, because the Bible says it's the word of God. All right, now, but if a Muslim says but the Quran says it's the word of God, now what do you say? I say, well, the Quran is not the word of God because the Bible's the word of God. I say, okay, that's right, that's the situation. But now why should somebody believe your claim that this is the word of God rather than the Quran's claim that it's the word of God? And believe it or not, this is somebody who wants to stand in the pulpit and have under his charge as the sheep of Christ college students and others, people who go out into this world, they're going to run into Muslims and Hare Krishnas in the airport and so forth. And he says, I don't know, I can only tell you what I believe. Now I don't tell you that because that was a notoriously bad experience. And you know, so I'm just taking advantage of that. That was pretty much run of the mill. Men are not able upon cross examination to give much of defense of their faith. It isn't hard to sit around at a presbytery meeting at lunch and talk to people who are like minded, although sometimes it does. But it isn't hard when it comes to this question of is the Bible the word of God? Is Jesus the son of God and things of that nature. And so as long as we stay in our nice comfortable cocoons and so forth, and apologetics doesn't seem that necessary, but Paul said it's absolutely morally required that A man who would have hands laid on him to be an overseer, be able to convict those who gainsay the gospel. And so the warrant and the need for apologetics is there for all of God's people. First, Peter 3 says all of you have to be ready. But if all of God's people are supposed to be ready to do this, then all the more those who lead God's people must lead in apologetics as well as in healthy doctrine. You cannot teach the truth without simultaneously refuting error. And so people who would be ordained to the ministry must be able to teach the truth, healthy doctrine, but also convict the gainsayers, refute error. Alright, let's move on to the next point. We've seen what the term itself is in its biblical setting. And then how the Bible warrants the study of apologetics, indeed calls for it as something necessary. I'd like to begin to look now at the contours of the apologetical situation. And by that I mean you need to know something about the general condition or situation under which we are defending the faith. If you've ever had a public speaking course or a seminary course in preaching, whatever. One thing, if it was a good course that was emphasized, is audience analysis. I had to do audience analysis before I came here today. Now, maybe I didn't do it. Well, I'm not trying to make me the paragon of this, but I've got to think, am I talking to PhDs in philosophy? If I'm talking to people in the pew of all different sorts? Am I talking just to men, just to women? If I'm going into a Baptist setting and talking about baptism, where am I going to start my discussion? Where am I going to end it? Would I do the same thing if I went into a setting where people already committed to Covenant theology? You've got to analyze your audience. Well, that's what I want to do for you here. But it's more than just audience analysis. I want to look at more broadly the contours of the situation in the most abstract and general sense. What's going on when we're doing apologetics, I want to look at three things. First of all, the faith that we defend. Secondly, the unbeliever that we answer, and thirdly, the God for whom we speak. And I'm starting to do this now because after we go through the entire course and I've given you a specific approach to apologetics, there will be people who say they don't agree with that, or, you know, they have a different school of Thought they followed this rather than that. And I'm going to try to sandbag all of that right up front here by saying if you just stop and think about the situation, it should be obvious to you that you have to defend the faith in a presuppositional way. At this point, before I've stepped on any toes or gotten anybody antagonistic, what is it that we all would grant about the apologetical situation? The contours of the apologetical situation? The first thing underneath d here in the outline is I want to look at the faith that we defend. And the point, very simply, is that the faith we defend is a unit. The faith we defend is a unit. Christianity as an outlook on life is a united or a unified whole. That isn't to say that Christianity can be reduced to one premise or to one statement, but all of the statements that define Christianity require all the other statements that define Christianity. Christianity is not some kind of, you know, tinker toy where you can have certain elements and leave certain elements out. It's all a matter of choice. Or as I like to say when I'm doing weekend conferences to make it easy for people to understand the God we worship is not a Mr. Potato Head. You know what a Mr. Potato Head is from when you were children. You know, you get this little box that has the eyes and the ears and the nose and the mouth and the hat and so forth. And. And you get a potato and you can put them on any way you want, you know, so some people want a Mr. Potato Head without ears. Some people want a Mr. Potato Head with a hat that's, you know, far back on his head. Some don't want any hat at all. God's not like that. God is not a number of disposable parts, you know, and you decide, well, I'm convinced of this one. So now we put the ear in, and now I'm convinced of this one. We put the hat on and so forth, and. And eventually you get the biblical God. You know, anything short of the biblical God is not God. And you aren't defending the Christian faith if you prove that Aristotle's God exists. But now there's more we want to tell you about him. Some people think, well, why can't you at least begin there? Their idea looks something like this. We begin with an elementary foundation. It's abstract in general. And there may be many people that agree with us on this foundation that there is a God. And then we can go a step further, be a little more defined about this and say that on this foundation, we can now talk about this God being the Creator, or this God being personal, or whatever it may be. And then another attribute of God is added. And eventually, if you follow the evangelical way of doing apologetics, you can say, and this God showed himself in history in the person of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead, so forth and so on. So if you will, you have block by block by block, a steady refining of the Christian concept of God from more general notions down here. Okay? So you move from the general to the specific. And in apologetics, we can make common cause with those who agree with us in general, and then we need to move them up the steps, if you will, to the more specific notion. But that really is not appropriate. And I'll take Aristotle as my example. Those who try to prove the existence of God from what is essentially an Aristotelian argument use primarily what's called the cosmological argument for God's existence. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Christian writer, endorsed Aristotle. In fact, he said Aristotle was right at the gate of heaven and that he was the best example of natural reasoning. And he said, even the natural man in his natural reasoning can see that there must be a God. And so those who follow Aquinas and Roman Catholic apologetics use those kinds of arguments, and. And they're quite willing to begin with the Aristotelian God and then move to more specific conceptions of God, as we know in Christianity. Well, here's the problem. The cosmological argument, as Aristotle gave it, was to this effect. We all have the experience of motion in this world. We also know that motion requires something that makes what's moving move. And so within this world, I think you'll be able to see, well, let me put it over here. Within this world, we all experience things in motion, and we also know that those things in motion have been moved. They initially started moving because of something else. So here's the world, and you have all these things that are moving in the world. But then Aristotle said, well, what makes these things in the world start moving? And his answer, this is where Christians get a little uncomfortable. But if you want to be true to Aristotle, his answer is, well, there are levels of heavens around the earth, and they are in motion, okay? And as they move, they create friction against one another. And so the outer heavens move. That moves the inner heavens, and the inner heavens move the earth, and that's what causes motion here. But now we've got a problem as to what moves the outer heavens. Aristotle was no flunky. When it came to philosophy. And he knew it wasn't going to do any good to multiply more levels of heavens, eventually we're going to have to stop that. And so Aristotle said there must be a different kind of movement that gets the outer heavens moving. And what kind of movement is that? He said it's love. Have you ever heard that expression love makes the world go around? That captures Aristotle pretty nicely. Aristotle says the outer heavens emulate something that they love. And what do they emulate? They emulate God. Okay, now what is God? Well, God is perfection. Well, what is perfect? Well, thought is perfect. What would be the most perfect kind of thinking? It would be thinking about thinking, wouldn't it? And so if God is perfect, then God is thought thinking itself. That's very crucial. This is not just part of the light heartedness of this course, thought thinking itself. Now if thought thinks itself, that means it's turned in upon itself. It is circular. The outer heavens wanting to emulate the perfection that God is, move in a circular direction. The inner heavens correspondingly in the earth. And as we say, love for God makes the world go round. So somebody say, well okay, we as Christians want to say a whole lot more than that. But why can't we say just that much? Well, stop and think about it. This argument is all predicated on what view of God? That God has no other thought or interest but himself. The God of Aristotle is thought thinking, thinking itself. It's not just thought thinking about everything that's in the Library of Congress. It's thought thinking only about itself. Aristotle's God is not personal first of all. Secondly is not even aware of the world. Aristotle's God is a projection, a philosophical necessity to account for why the last level of the heavens moves. So now what if we were to pump into this little schema here of we have these broad planks and then not so broad and so forth. We have Aristotle's notion of God. Now this God, Remember, if the argument works, this God knows nothing of the world. And what are we moving toward? We're moving to the specific conclusion that God came into this world in the person of his Son and died for the sins of his people. That shows a lot of interest in knowledge of the world, doesn't it? So if we were to begin with Aristotle's God and conclude with a Christian view of God, somewhere along the line we've actually violated our premises. We've gone contrary to our foundation. The God that we defend must be the God of the Bible. And that's why you don't have the Mr. Potato Head approach. A little of this, a little of this, a little of this, and finally, you know, we get it just right. Christianity must be defended as a unit. I'll give you another example. Christians rightly make, central to their proclamation of the Gospel, the mercy of God. What it's all about, God's mercy in Christ. Now Muslims hear us say that and they say, well, we have something in common with you. Because throughout the Quran you read of what? Allah the merciful. Allah the merciful. And so it would appear that we don't have to worry about Aristotelian problems here. This impersonal God that doesn't have anything to do with the world now it's just a question of how God shows mercy and what the name of this God is that shows mercy. Right? Dead wrong. Please turn the cassette over at this time. Because if you do an exegetical study of the Quran, you will find that what Muslims mean by mercy has nothing to do with what Christians mean by mercy. When Allah is merciful, he is blessing people for their good works. The Qur'. An. It is merciful of Allah to do good to those who are faithful. Now stop and think about that. It is merciful of God to do good to those who are faithful. That's not mercy, that's justice. God wouldn't be God from our standpoint if he didn't reward righteousness and hate iniquity. That's what the Bible teaches Muslims teach. Allah could be a real mean so and so and he wouldn't have to pay attention to your righteousness. So he's merciful to reward your righteousness. You follow that? Now compare that to the Christian concept of mercy. The Christian concept of mercy is not just that God gives us what we don't deserve, but he gives us the opposite of what we deserve. Isn't that right? If a man comes to your door and he says, I'd like a sandwich, I'm hungry. He doesn't deserve that sandwich. You give him the sandwich, you've given him something he doesn't deserve. The man comes and burns down your house and asks for a sandwich and you give it to him. Of course you'd have to go to the store to buy it. But if you did him good, after he has offended you in this way, then you've shown him mercy. In the biblical sense, it's loving your enemies, dying for those who despised you. That is the Christian concept of mercy. So again, it's not really possible for the Christian to make common cause with other religious points of view for minimal purposes and then try to move it along to a higher level and be more specifically Christian. Because if we do that, we're not even using the same concepts of God or mercy that are found in other positions. The Bible is at the center of everything that we present then as Christians. And the Bible is authoritative on everything about which it speaks. And as Dr. Van Til went on to say, and it speaks about everything. The Bible is authoritative on everything it speaks and it speaks about everything, either directly or or by implication. The Bible gives us some history, but it also gives us a philosophy of history. The Bible tells us of Christ's life, but it also speaks of the God who made the universe and sent Christ into this world to perform the particular task of saving us. And the information that the Bible gives us about God, about the universe, about man, about sin, about Christ, all of that is woven together. It's not, you know, break apart units. So you can have a little bit of this view and a little bit of that view. They all tie together. You can't separate the moral or religious instruction that's in the Bible from what it says about the physical universe. And you can't separate what it says about the physical universe from what it says about historical events. Now if you haven't followed what I've been saying up to this point, let me put it to you very simply. What we're defending is the whole enchilada. That's it, all of it. I'm not just defending a little bit of the Bible. When I defend the Christian faith, I'm defending all of it. That does not mean that I am committed to talking about everything at once. Granted, I have to talk about the prophets or talk about Jesus or talk about evolution or whatever it may be. I can't say everything at once. But everything that I say on every particular issue is informed by everything that I believe about the Bible. We can't pretend to defend pieces of the Bible or the general intention of the Bible without defending the actual words and specific doctrines presented in the Bible. Because the specifics and the general tendencies or intentions would be meaningless without each other. So the faith that we defend must be defended as a unit. There's nothing in the universe according to the Christian, nothing in the universe on which we can have any kind of understanding unless we take the Bible into account. Nothing. You mustn't think that there's a religious domain of life and of course the Bible informs all of that. But then you have a non religious or a secular domain of life. And for that we don't need the Bible. The Christian position is this faith is necessary to understand anything. Now, am I overstating my case here? Does Proverbs 1:7 tell you the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord? That'd be a verse that would be a lot easier to proclaim today if it were more highly qualified. The beginning of religious knowledge is the fear of the Lord. But you don't need to fear the Lord if you're going to understand physics or literature or history, do you? Well, Solomon thought you did. In Christ are deposited all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Colossians 2:3. And what happens to those who suppress the truth about God, according to Paul? Does Paul say, you know, you don't understand as much as you might understand by suppressing the truth? He says, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. The Bible is a lot stronger than many apologists want it to be. The Bible says it's all or nothing. You bow to the Lord Jesus Christ. You fear God at the beginning of the knowing process. You don't suppress what God has revealed, or else you're made a fool. Jesus taught it. Every Sunday school child has heard this story, right? The wise man builds his house. Where? On the rock. And what is it when a man builds upon something that's not the rock, the sand of human opinion, he's a fool. He's a fool. And what happens? Does a fool make out pretty well in the storm? He's totally destroyed. From a biblical perspective, there's nothing that is understood properly in God's world. And everything outside of God is God's world. There's nothing understood properly in God's world that doesn't involve an understanding of God. That doesn't mean that we go to the Bible instead of the laboratory. It does mean that when you go to the laboratory, even there, you must understand the world and man and your procedures as the Bible presents them. If you're going to be fruitful and effective in your research. Let me put it to you one other way. We mustn't think of the unbeliever as being all right as far as he goes. Now we just want to complement what he's already learned and add Jesus to the mix. You know, the idea that, well, the unbeliever has done fine getting to first base, second base and third base in his thinking. He understands history, understands logic, understands philosophy. You know, he's got all these things down. It's just he needs the religious dimension added. He needs Jesus given to his life. Like add Jesus to the mix, right? It's interesting. In the Bible you never have any kind of concept like that. Add Jesus to your life, things go better with Coke, things go better with Jesus. We have Christians who think that way, but the Bible teaches us that Christ gives us a new life, a new heart. We are new creatures, we see things completely differently. And so from a Christian standpoint, we don't want just to add a quantity of information to the unbelievers thinking. We want to change the entire way of thinking. The faith is a unit and what it calls for is a completely different outlook when you come to conversion. Secondly, under the contours of the apologetical situation, we know something about the faith we are arguing for. We can't break it up into pieces. An abstract God and then a personality for God and then a son for God and so forth and so on. It's the whole biblical story, the whole enchilada that we are defending. But secondly, we need to know something about the unbeliever that we are answering. And here I'm just going to presume on your previous teaching in systematic theology, not expect that I have to prove all of this to you. The Bible teaches us about the unbeliever that he is. How depraved. Totally depraved. Totally depraved. This is one of the biggest oversights in the history of apologetics, I think, is Christians who should know better going to an audience that they have not evaluated properly and thinking, well, you know, they think all right, and certainly they'll be willing to follow the argument where it should go. It's just they don't have a good will or they don't have a good heart, or emotionally they're depraved. You know, they do the wrong sorts of things. I don't know that you can find anybody who'll come right out and declare that. But in the practice of defending the faith, many apologists have assumed that men are not depraved in their thinking. I mean, that part, that little inner sanctum, I don't know if it's up here or just where it is, but we tend to think behind the eyeball. Somewhere there's this holy of holies that doesn't make mistakes and is not perverted and is not against God. We'd follow the truth if it were given to us. What a lie. Men will not believe the truth when it's right before their very eyes. Do you know that in your Bibles? Turn with me to Matthew 28. This is a passage that most everybody should know, because at the end of Matthew 28, we have the great commission, right, verse 18. And Jesus came to them and spake unto them, saying, all authority has been given me in Heaven and Earth, etc. We all know this. We've read it and read it and read it. We've had it preached to us. We know this passage. What does the verse right before it say? And when they saw him, they worshipped him. And now three words. But some doubted. There goes all your empirical theories of knowledge right down the tubes. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, stood right before them. And even in that setting, some of them doubted. You see, if you don't bring the right framework to your experience, the facts are not going to change your mind. Now, why do people doubt the word of God? Why do they argue against God? Well, somebody might say, well, it's because it's so ambiguous. You have to understand. People look at the world and they see some evidence for God and some evidence against God. They don't know what to do with that. Turn to Romans, chapter one. Is this what the Bible says? That people are opposing God? Because it's not really clear? Verse 19. Because that which is known of God is manifest in them, for God manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being perceived through the things that are made, even as everlasting power and divinity, in order that they may be without excuse. So Paul says, God has made himself known, and he's made himself known very clearly, so clearly that anybody who lives in this world is without excuse for not acknowledging him and serving him in the way that they should. Why do people oppose the truth? Why are they unwilling even to let their observations lead them to the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God? It's not because of a lack of evidence, and it's not because it's somehow unclear, you know, what the biblical account is over and over and over again. They're depraved in their thinking. This is the thing we don't want to say about ourselves and about others. Yes, we're depraved. We know we all do bad things, but not behind the eyeballs. That's the holy of holies, right? In our minds. We're willing to accept the truth wherever it will take us. Look at 2 Timothy 2, verse 23. But foolish and ignorant questions refuse, knowing that they engender quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not quarrel, but be gentle towards all apt to teach forbearing in gentleness, correcting them that oppose themselves. Now listen, if peradventure, God may give them repentance unto the knowledge of the truth and they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him unto his will. Boy, that's a pretty strong indictment. You know why they don't think right things? You know why they're so foolish and ignorant? Because they're in the snare of the devil and God has got to release them from that and give them repentance if they're ever going to see the truth in the way they should. They're depraved even in their thinking. Turn to Ephesians, chapter 4, Verse 17. This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord that you no longer walk as the Gentiles also walk. How do unbelievers walk? Well, we know that they make bad decisions. They're sexually impure, they're greedy, they're gossipy, they tell lies. But how about in their minds? Are they sinners in their minds? Are they in rebellion against God behind the eyeballs? How do the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart. Boy, line upon line. Why would you want to listen to or give any room to the thinking of someone who has a hardened heart, is ignorant, has in darkness, living in complete stupidity and foolishness to pick up other biblical ways of describing it. The Bible says the person to whom we are speaking is totally depraved even in his thinking. That's part of the contour of your situation. When you do audience analysis, you need to realize the person you're talking to is can't be relied upon to follow the evidence where it will take him to be open minded, to be neutral, to be disinterested, to think logically and clearly. Unbelievers are not interested in coming to the truth. I can prove that to you very easily. I think because Jesus said he's the way, the truth and the life. And by opposing coming to Jesus, they're opposing coming to the truth. Now, are we only using figures of speech here? I think for many years I took this Jesus is the truth as a figure of speech. But you know, if they won't come to Jesus, that shows a more elementary problem in their life. They're not interested in the truth, are they? They're interested in their own desires, they want to think their own thoughts and they do not want to submit to God in apologetics. Is it necessary for us to take that into account in our argument? Yeah, we better assume there's something radically wrong with the thinking of our opponent, and not just radically wrong with the conclusions or the lifestyle to which he has come. And then thirdly, the God for whom we speak has ultimate authority the contours of the situation. Before we get into any specifics, we know that the faith we present must be presented as a unit. The person to whom we speak is depraved in his reasoning. And finally, the God for whom we are speaking has ultimate authority. In the Garden of Eden, God told something to Adam and Eve. Eve knew very well that in the day that she eats of the forbidden fruit, she's going to die. Satan came along and said, you're not going to die. In fact, God only said that because he's jealous and he doesn't want you to be like him. Our tendency, I think naturally, and this is not good, but our natural sinful tendency is the kind of pity Eve and say, well, what could she do? I mean, she had this opinion, she had that opinion. Obviously she was going to have to judge between them when she had to use her mind. Well, be careful. No one says she shouldn't have used her mind. Yes, she had to use her mind. The question is, would she use her mind faithful or unfaithfully? And the unfaithfulness of Eve's thinking is not just that she came to the wrong conclusion. It's that she came to that conclusion in the wrong way. She said, I'll decide. That's why I think it was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was the tree that tested how you would know good and evil. Would you know it on your terms or because God says so? Eve could have said God would never lie. God says, we will die. You are a liar, you snake. Get behind me. But she didn't do that. She gave consideration to the hypothesis that God might not be telling the truth. See, God is the ultimate authority, and for that reason his word is not to be brought into question. Job went through a very hard time of testing, and at the end of the Book of Job, we see that he eventually wanted to ask some questions of God. Though the Bible speaks of the patience of Job, at this point he doesn't look very patient. Job says, I want to ask you some things. I want an interview. God says, fine, I'll answer your questions after you answer mine. By the way. Just that procedure tells you something. God says, I always go first because I'm the Lord. But then he humbles Job, where were you when I made the world? Do you understand the operations of the natural world out there? Job, we. When you've got all that figured out, then maybe you would understand answers that I'd give you about how I run the universe. But the point here is Job puts his hand over his mouth and says, what? I spoke too soon. No one can find out the Almighty to perfection who can demand of God an answer. And the reason you can't demand of God an answer is because there's nothing more ultimate, more authoritative by which you could. And so Jesus, in the wilderness, as I've already told you, is tempted by Satan to test God. And he says, you shall not put the Lord, your God to the test. Jesus, when he has opponents dispute the word that he has spoken, says that on the day of judgment, they'll have one that testifies against them. If you're an evidential apologist, you might say, oh, yeah, all this good evidence and so forth is going to stand against you. Jesus says, my word will condemn you on that day. On that day, we won't brook any interference, any negotiation or any argument. On that day, my word will be the final standard. You won't have to appeal to evidence or other authorities. On that day, you'll be condemned by what I have spoken. That's ultimate authority. Paul shows that he knew the ultimate authority of God in Romans, the ninth chapter, where he presents, of course, one of these difficult doctrines of the Christian faith about how God predestines all things and controls all things. And then there's an opponent who says, well, who can resist the will of God? It's God's fault then. If God does all these things, then you can't blame it on us, you know. And Paul doesn't say, well, now let me see if I can analyze that for you and give you the philosophical evidence for how responsibility and sovereignty go together. He says, who are you to talk back to God? We're not accustomed to this because in our culture and our upbringing, our natural inclination is to think we can defy any authority because we think we're the authority. Ultimately, it's just natural to man to grab this autonomous spirit and hold on to it for dear life. And so when we come up against somebody who says, I'm the authority, that settles it. We don't like that. But you see it throughout the Bible. You see it in the Garden of Eden, you see it in the case of Job, you see it in the life and preaching of Jesus. You see it in what Paul taught us. The God for whom we speak has ultimate authority, and he will not give that up for the autonomy of any man. So if we're going to do apologetics effectively and understand the biblical concept, we need to know the contours of what the apologetical situation will always be. Because we always have a message, we always have somebody who's opposing it, and we're the messenger for somebody who has sent us. If you realize that the message is unified, you have to present the whole enchilada. It's the Christian faith as a package deal, a unit. If you realize that the person to whom you're speaking is depraved in his thinking and reasoning, and if you realize that the God for whom you speak has ultimate authority, there's nothing by which this depraved person could test God. Like I say already, you should know what kind of apologetic you're going to have to have. It cannot be one that pleases the depravity and autonomy of man, but one that obliterates the presumed autonomy of man to show the ultimate authority of God and that authority expressed in all that he has said in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. After we take our break, when we come back, I'll give you finally then, a definition of apologetics and try to relate it to a number of other fields that are relevant to it. This recording is distributed by Covenant Media Foundation, a non profit educational organization. Unauthorized reproduction of this tape is strictly prohibited. A free catalog of the Foundation's tapes and articles is available by calling 1-800-55-3938.