Evidence That a Verdict Demands: On the Appropriate Place of Evidences in Apologetics

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1 Evidence That a Verdict Demands: On the Appropriate Place of Evidences in Apologetics Mark A. Snoeberger Associate Prof. of Systematic Theology, Detroit Baptist Seminary Introduction. The method of apologetics commonly known as presuppositionalism is often seen as rather critical toward the use of evidences in the apologetic task. And that is because of the robust view of total depravity held by all who legitimately claim the presuppositionalist label. Since the depraved mind and will are uniformly hostile toward God, ever suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and exchanging the truth for a lie (so Romans 1), it follows that all evidences for the God of Scripture and for the coherence of the Christian truth system will be uniformly misinterpreted and manipulated into some alternative conclusion to which the depraved mind is more amenable. This being the case, it has not been uncommon among presuppositionalists to come dangerously close to denying the possibility of means to the Gospel, or at least of any means other than strict proclamation. The Scriptures, however, are quite filled with instances of early believers utilizing means in evangelism means that in some cases consist of a sampling of evidential ideals and behaviors that in some way precipitate faith. Note the following: Matthew 5:16 Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. John 17:20 23 I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 1 Corinthians 9:19 23 Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God s law but am under Christ s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. 1 Peter 3:1 Wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives (see also vv , where gentleness, respect, and a good conscience are functionally strategic to apologetic success). Titus 2 You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. 2Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in endurance. 3Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much

2 2 wine, but to teach what is good. 4Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God. 6 Similarly, encourage the young men to be self-controlled. 7In everything set them an example by doing what is good. In your teaching show integrity, seriousness 8and soundness of speech that cannot be condemned, so that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us. 9 Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, 10and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive. 11 For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. 12It teaches us to say No to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13while we wait for the blessed hope the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 14who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. 15 These, then, are the things you should teach. Encourage and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you. In all of the preceding texts, we discover certain personal evidences of faith that in some way benefit the apologetic task. These do not share synonymy with the objective evidences that we find, say, in the spheres of science, history, archaeology, and the like, but they are evidences of a kind, and they are clearly an integral part of a successful apologetic presentation. What I would like to suggest in this presentation is that the abundant attention the Bible gives to these particular evidences is adequate to the construction of a robust theology of evidences of every sort pursuant to the apologetic task. The Problem of Evidences. That the world is a veritable sea of evidences of the true and living God is denied by no self-respecting apologist. These evidences speak plainly to all who observe them (Rom 1:19 20), confirming to all God s existence, attributes, and ethical expectations so clearly that every person who has ever lived may be described as without excuse. All intrinsic problems that these objective evidences have are insubstantial; the problem lies instead with the subject who is observing the evidences: Man is totally depraved and will never accept the conclusions anticipated by the evidences. For this reason every appeal to evidences in apologetic discourse is an exercise in both redundancy and futility: redundancy because the unbeliever already has more evidence than he could possibly ever need; futility because the unbeliever s moral inability will never permit him to extrapolate from the evidences to the embrace of the God who is so plainly there. Despite all this, Romans 1 makes very clear that the objective weight of the evidences is such that it can never be fully suppressed. The evidences persistently bear witness to the truth all the while the unregenerate engage in their untoward exchange of truth for lies in the marketplace of ideas. The evidences do, it seems, exacerbate the guilt of the unregenerate they are without excuse, and the compounded evidences intensify that condition. The same is true with the ethical evidences detailed in the passages above. Believers who are attentive to their conduct do, in fact, adorn the gospel, direct men to praise God, and, if nothing else, can stop the mouths of critics and put them to shame. Sadly, the problem of this class of evidences is more pronounced (i.e., we Christians do not bear witness to the faith as consistently as we ought); still, again, they clearly complement the Gospel in very real ways.

3 3 This state of affairs results in much confusion and may questions: May I ever appeal to evidences in apologetic presentation, and, if so, what can I expect them to accomplish? Does it matter whether or not I have answers for the scientific or historical objections that the unbeliever raises? And should I use those answers if I have them? Does it matter at all whether I live a life that corresponds to the message I am peddling? And to what degree should I engage in the neighborliness that the Gospel anticipates? In the face of clear warnings not to pursue the evangelistic task with certain specific means (e.g., 1 Cor 1:18 2:5), are there any means of which God approves? And how do I know the difference? Three Historical Options. While the marketplace bristles with varieties of apologetics, three basic hubs of thought relative to the concept of evidences may be discerned within the believing community. These three hubs (or hybrids thereof) are responsible for nearly every other apologetic alternative that can be reasonably conceived. The following is an attempt to delineate these by examining a prominent champion of each. 1. Abraham Kuyper, famed churchman-turned-statesman of late-19th century Holland, and founder of the Free University of Amsterdam, represents the very most skeptical view of the evidences of the three options here presented, and his understanding has been adopted, unwittingly and erroneously, by many well-meaning presuppositionalists. For Kuyper, all men conduct their thinking from the standpoint of some ultimate, controlling principium a presupposition. The unbeliever s principium is natural; the believer s is supernatural. These two principia are wholly incompatible and mutually exclusive, and thus result in two separate kinds of mutually contradictory science. Naturalistic science cannot allow for the Christian worldview, and wars against it necessarily. And for this reason Kuyper concluded that there was no pressing need to reason with the darkened mind of the unregenerate, and that Christian apologetics was ultimately ineffective and useless. The two spheres of knowledge populated variously by the pagan and the Christian are non-intersecting. The best and only thing one might legitimately do in evangelism is to transmit the Scriptures to pagans and await God s work of regeneration. No apologetic work beyond this simple task is necessary or even possible. In so opining, Kuyper explicitly rejects the Aristotelian thinking of view #2 (below) and turns to a very nearly Platonic one. Perhaps better, Kuyper seems to have drunk from the well that would eventually produce the Neo-Orthodox error. Spiritual truth cannot penetrate the pagan mind any more than it can a brick wall; we communicate it only so that when the Christ event regeneration occurs there is propositional truth available to embrace. 2. B. B. Warfield, champion of orthodoxy and inerrancy in the final, desperate years of the Modernist era, reflects a second and very different approach to the use of evidences in the apologetic task. For Warfield there is but one truth system into which all facts may be successfully integrated. We engage in the sciences not separately from our engagement with spiritual truth, but in concert with it. What is troubling about Warfield s approach, however, is that revealed truth is corroborated from below by the discursive efforts of depraved men rather than the opposite (i.e., that the discursive efforts of depraved men are alternately affirmed or denied by revelation from above the Christian Scriptures).

4 4 In Warfield s own words, Surely [one] must first have Scriptures, authenticated to him as such, before he can take his standpoint in them. [Faith has] grounds in right reason. 1 For Warfield, systematic theology builds upon the foundation of apologetics and not the reverse. As such, the inspiration and authority of the Bible that Warfield so famously championed serve not as the basis of Christian apologetics, but as the crowning conviction to which right reason will eventually take every honest scholar. In so opining, Warfield successfully avoided Kuyper s Platonic error only to fall into an Aristotelian one. More to the point, Warfield effectively nullified the overwhelming barrier of total depravity to right reason, erroneously imagining that the imago dei was an adequate solution to the noetic effects of sin. Not only might depraved man engage in reason (itself an unobjectionable prospect); he could also embrace the results of his own rational inquiry when the evidences pointed to Christian first principles. 3. Cornelius Van Til, himself a descendant of the Dutch Calvinist tradition, but also schooled by Warfield and also a colleague of Warfield early in his career, was able to take the position of neither Warfield nor Kuyper. He agreed with Warfield that there is a single, objective, plainly revealed truth system under which all data may be subsumed, and, further, that this truth system was eminently reasonable. Right reason will, most assuredly, lead to the God of the Bible (so Psalm 19 and elsewhere). But he disagreed with Warfield s inference that the unbeliever might actually use right reason to deduce, much less embrace God. Van Til saw two major flaws in Warfield s approach: it (1) erred by regarding the unregenerate person as capable of right reason, effectively denying the doctrine of total inability, and (2) it had a troubling approach to authority, allowing the Bible to speak authoritatively only after it had been authorized to do so by an authority greater than itself, effectively denying the doctrine of sola Scriptura as the believer s Norma Normans non Normata (i.e., the norming norm that is not subject to norming). Van Til s rejection of Warfield did not mean, however, that he was stuck with Kuyper. Instead, Van Til argued that there was a tertium quid that lay between. This middle way acceded to Kuyper s understanding that all persons reason according to specific, guiding principia, that the believer s principium was that the Trinitarian God had revealed himself inerrantly in the Christian Scriptures, and that the unbeliever s principium was himself. However, Van Til also argued that the unbeliever never actually follows his own principium consistently in fact, he can t. As much as the unbeliever denies (1) God and (2) the idea of divine revelation, he cannot successfully live with the implications of these denials. And so he routinely borrows from the Christian worldview for his very survival. Illustration: Many unbelievers claim to hold to evolutionary theory and to its guiding rubric the survival of the fittest. However, when it comes time to live in the evolving universe of their own conception, they find it difficult to do. After all, they not only may but must, by their own principles, engage in the murder of the unfit, which all but those most advanced in their depravity cannot homologate. And so they fabricate laws that expressly resist the very guiding principle of their worldview, viz., Thou shalt not kill. 1 Introduction to Francis R. Beattie s Apologetics, in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, 2 vols., ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: P&R, 1973), 2:97, 98.

5 5 There is no reason for their embrace of this law it is both antithetical to their worldview and incoherent in it and yet every civilized society on the earth borrows some variation of this law and places it into its legal code. This, for Van Til, supplies an entry point for apologetic engagement. One answers the fool according to his folly to the degree he deems necessary (1) to expose the illogic of the pagan principium and (2) to demonstrate that the unbeliever already knows and uses the Christian principium in order to mount his attack on God. This is the basis for Van Til s much maligned and misunderstood rubric, Antitheism presupposes theism. Having thus demonstrated that the unbeliever knows the Christian God and correlate truth system already, the apologist may forego answering the fool further according to his folly and may rather defend God s unitary truth system, from the standpoint of Scripture alone, as a philosophical unit. As such, Van Til vehemently rejected Kuyper s understanding that there are two competing truth systems that never intersect. Instead, there is one universal, public truth system that incorporates in its scope all truth, with divine revelation (never discursive investigation) as its governing norm. This being the case, there is much room in Van Til s apologetic for evidences, but only in an a posteriori (after the fact) capacity, never an a priori (before the fact) capacity, a topic to which we now turn. Evidences as a priori phenomena vs. a posteriori phenomena. When we speak of evidences as a priori phenomena, we mean that there are worldview-independent data that may be inductively collected by neutral minds and synthesized by them to spiritual conclusions. The foregoing has concluded that this use of evidences is emphatically impossible. And that is because there are no neutral minds that can reason without guile, only hostile and skeptical minds. Evidences submitted to such minds are not bad, per se, but are uniformly twisted toward conclusions other than what the Scriptures would have us all to believe. This is seen with regularity in the Scriptures themselves: Faced with undeniable proof of Christ s resurrection, an alternative explanation was fabricated that persists to this day (Matt 18:11 15). Faced with the witness of a man who had seen Sheol, Christ asserts that unbelievers would scoff (Luke 16:31). Faced with Christ s astonishing miracles of feeding, the hearers responded favorably only to get free handouts (John 6:26). Faced with miracles of tongues, observers concluded that the disciples were drunk (Acts 2:13). Faced with miracles of healing, Simon assumed that magic was at work and sought to purchase it (Acts 8:13 24). Faced with miracles on another occasion, the hearers concluded that Paul and Barnabas were members of the Greek/Roman pantheon (Acts 14:13). One might conclude therefrom that evidences have absolutely no value in apologetics. The fact that the apostles used them, however, suggests otherwise. Why? Because evidences function quite effectively in an a posteriori capacity not to accelerate the unbeliever s embrace of the Christian worldview, but rather to demonstrate the consistency of the Christian worldview to believers and unbelievers alike, functionally both putting to silence the insults of the pagan and

6 6 strengthening the faith of the believer. Apologetics deals with the fact of worldviews; evidences with incidental facts and details within that worldview. Illustration: The question of Noah s Flood becomes a helpful illustration of this point. Following Warfield s a priori approach to the evidences, one might expect an unbeliever to be able to study carefully the geological record, the fossil record, the many flood traditions found in the ancient world, etc., deduce that the Bible is true in its affirmation of Noah s Flood, and, consequently take his stand in it. Such an understanding is not only logically suspect, but theologically impossible. Following Van Til s a posteriori approach to the evidences, on the other hand, having by biblical revelation established the Christian worldview and by transcendental argument that all people must and do utilize that worldview, evidences may now be mustered as part of a holistic explanation of the Christian worldview. No longer do we prove Noah s Flood; we rather assume it, and having assumed it, we now are able to explain the world as we see it in light of that assumed fact. In this understanding, science is not the arbiter of biblical authority (Warfield), but the servant of biblical authority. Alternately stated, Scripture does not speak with the permission of science; it is the queen of the sciences. Summary of the Apologist s Expectations of Evidences: 1. What Evidences Can Do Ø Evidences strengthen the faith/confidence of believers. Evidences give believers the information they need so that they will not be intellectually troubled by the claims of unbelieving scholars. As Machen put it, they help God s little ones. Ø Evidences can be used to embarrass unbelievers in their criticisms against believers claims. That is, they can put to silence the ignorance of foolish men (1 Pet 2:15; cf. Prov 26:5; Titus 2:8, 15; 1 Pet 3:16). This falls short of convincing them, but it may cause the critic to retreat, creating opportunities for the Gospel. Ø Evidences can clear away the mental debris of intellectual prejudice for unbelievers. For instance, an unbeliever may triumphantly imagine that a Christian cannot answer some question or another, and until he knows otherwise is deaf to anything else the apologist has to say. Sometimes one must put out brushfires (again, Prov 26:5). Ø Evidences may even be a tool of the Spirit s convicting work, further strengthening God s case against unbelievers who know already that they are without excuse and worthy of death (Rom 1:20, 32), and displaying to them the wonder of divine wisdom in creation, providence, and redemption. Note: as we have suggested above, the deficiency of the evidences in not their objective invalidity; the deficiency is due to the non-observed presuppositions of the unbeliever. Paul stresses this, for instance, in his observation to Festus that the Resurrection was historically undeniable, that these things did not occur in a vacuum. But Festus was not (and could not have been) persuaded because of other precommitments. Paul had ironclad evidence, but Festus treated it with contempt. 2. What Evidences Cannot Do. Ø Evidences cannot compel faith. They never serve as neutral, objective, uninterpreted, and presuppositionless data that persuade independently of the Holy Spirit. They cannot stand on their own, but only within the framework of the Christian worldview.

7 7 Ø Evidences can never be presented to unbelievers as though they are theologically detached and uncommitted. Either one is with Christ or against him, and the unbeliever in emphatically in the latter category. The truth is either foolishness or wisdom; there is no in between. Ø Evidences can never be presented without the understanding that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Prov 1:7). Ø Evidences cannot be presented apart from the realization that all men inescapably have the knowledge of God, but are deeply hostile to that knowledge, suppressing it and preferring to walk in darkness rather than light. Ø Evidences will not be heard by unbelievers apart from a non-observational factor Regeneration (Luke 16:31). Christian Conduct As Evidence. We began this session with the observation that there are a great many Scriptures that speak to the efficacy of Christian conduct in apologetic contexts. For instance, We are to let our lights shine before men, that they may see our good deeds and praise our Father in heaven (Matt 5:16). We are to be at one with God and his body so that the world may believe (John 17:21). We are to forego our liberties in order to win as many as possible (1 Cor 9:19). Christian women are to submit to their unbelieving husbands so that they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives (1 Pet 3:1). Peter adds in the same chapter that gentleness, respect, and a good conscience are functionally valuable to apologetic success (vv ). Titus 2 is perhaps the most comprehensive of these, suggesting that every Christian demographic can do something to shame hostile unbelievers (v. 8), save the word of God from ridicule (v. 5), and make the teaching about God our Savior attractive (v. 10). I suggested then, and wish now to prove that these moral evidences are quite similar in effect to the more traditional objective evidences found in the various sciences. Specifically, they suggest that the Christian faith, being a comprehensive worldview, speaks definitely to every area of life, such that the apologist, duly steeped in the Word and prepared for them, can give an answer to every question (1 Pet 3:15). And just as we may thusly put out brushfires to extend gospel conversations by answering the fool according to his folly, so also we can put to silence the criticisms of unbelievers when our conduct matches the biblical expectation. The Gospel message is holistic in its reach, extending to every area of conduct, and consistency here will go a very long way in adorning the Gospel. As believers, we should be the best neighbors, workers, citizens, husbands, wives, etc., that we possibly can be, because this facilitates the advance of the Gospel. Note I am not saying that we may market the Gospel, selling it for the price of a concert, a carnival, or a turkey dinner; still, if the watching world is never exposed to the Christian s right conduct, the Gospel will languish. In Greg Bahnsen s sage assessment, the very most difficult question in all of apologetics is not the problem of evil; it is not the complexities of the fossil record; nor is it the seemingly impossible claims of a virgin birth, resurrection, and the like. These are easy questions when compared to this: Why don t Christians act like Christians? Our inability to answer that question has probably derailed more evangelistic conversations than any other. The defense of the Christian worldview may include evidences of archaeological, historical, scientific, and even philosophical varieties, but more than any of these, the Scriptures stress ethical evidences of faith.

8 8 Conclusion: I have yet to explain the title of this presentation, Evidence That a Verdict Demands. The astute student of apologetic literature will recognize that I have turned the title of a pair of apologetic texts written in the 1970s (and updated in 1999), Josh McDowell s Evidence That Demands a Verdict. McDowell has long been the whipping boy of presuppositionalist apologists everywhere as a glaring example of evidential apologetics at its worst. So thorough has been the critique of his approach that some have concluded, not unlike Kuyper, that apologetics cannot really occur in any meaningful sense. This is unfortunate. It is true that evidences, a priori, do not demand a verdict, if by that is meant that evidences can compel faith. This idea is frightfully naïve at best and Pelagian at worst. But this does not mean that evidences or apologetics have no place in Christian evangelism. While evidences can in no sense compel faith, true faith always compels evidence in an a posteriori sense. This is seen most visibly in the ethical fruits of faith in the passages discussed above, but it need not stop here. Since the Christian worldview is a comprehensive one a theory of everything, if you will it has an answer and explanation for all data in every discipline known to man. The problem is not the evidences, it is the function that we assign to them in apologetic discourse. Select Bibliography: Bahnsen, Greg L. Van Til s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1998, esp. chap. 8. Notaro, Thom. Van Til and the Use of Evidence. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, Van Til, Cornelius. Christian Theistic Evidences. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, The Defense of the Faith. 4th ed. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, Why I Believe in God. Tracts for Today, no. 9, 1948.

9 9 Appendix: Transcendental Argumentation vis-à-vis Evidential Argumentation Introduction: In the foregoing I mentioned in passing the idea of transcendental argumentation as a valid approach to apologetics that did not compromise the authority of Scripture or suppress the depravity of the natural man. The topic of transcendental argumentation is a complex one that would easily fill an entire session at a conference such as this one. I do not intend to introduce the concept comprehensively, but rather to answer a single question: Why do I not class the transcendental argument among the failed arguments of the evidential approach (e.g., the cosmological, teleological, and criteriological arguments)? What Is Transcendental Argumentation? Transcendental argumentation is not the employment of transcendent arguments to intuit the existence of something transcendent innately by sense as evidence (fideism). Transcendental argumentation is not the employment of transcendent arguments to deduce the existence of something transcendent from categorical sensory observations (rationalism). Transcendental argumentation is not the inference of something transcendent from experience (empiricism). Transcendental argumentation is a form of argumentation contending that logic, science, ethics, civics, aesthetics, and indeed every fact and experience in the universe has no intelligibility apart from the precondition of the existence of the Christian God. How Does Transcendental Argumentation Work? The idea of transcendental argumentation can be traced to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and specifically to his 1763 book, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In it he rejected Aquinas s cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God, but maintained, nonetheless, that God can be argued from the impossibility of the contrary. Specifically, he argued that apart from a Supreme Being that embraces within itself everything which can be thought by man, the intelligibility and meaning of all things disappears. The nature of Kant s Supreme Being proved inferior to biblical theism; still, he pioneered a new approach to epistemology that proved revolutionary. The transcendental argument is not a direct demonstration of the existence of God. It does not attempt to prove that God exists, but that all people necessarily (whether wittingly or unwittingly) assume his existence in order to make sense of their own universe (i.e., he serves as the transcendental for all that they think and experience). In Van Til s words, The method of reasoning by presupposition may be said to be indirect rather than direct. The issue between believers and non-believers in Christian theism cannot be settled by a direct appeal to facts or laws whose nature and significance is already agreed upon by both parties to the debate. The question is rather as to what is the final reference-point required to make the facts and laws intelligible (Defense of the Faith, p. 117). One might logically argue from this indirect proof to a direct statement of God s existence, but this is in the realm of implication only. For instance, the transcendental statement Without God there is no intelligibility can logically be recast as Since there is intelligibility God is, but the former statement alone is the purview of transcendental argumentation. Again, citing Van Til, The Reformed method of argument is first constructive. It presents the biblical view positively by showing that all factual and logical discussions by men take place by virtue of the world s being what God in Christ says it is. It then proceeds negatively to show that unless all facts and all

10 10 logical relations be seen in the light of the Christian framework, all human interpretation fails instantly (Van Til, Christian Epistemology, p. 225). and The only proof of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no possibility of proving anything at all (Van Til, My Credo, Jerusalem and Athens, p. 21). The Advantages of Transcendental Argumentation Transcendental argumentation supplies a level of certainty that non-transcendental argumentation cannot supply. This contrasts with evidential models of apologetics that can provide only a high probability of the existence of the Christian God by means of inductive inference and deductive correlation. In short, transcendental argumentation alone supplies the warrant necessary for faith. Transcendental argumentation supplies a level of specificity that non-transcendental argumentation cannot supply. This contrasts with evidential models of apologetics that infer a form of theism and then pick from various options a specific form of theism that is more likely than the rest. Transcendental argumentation assumes a specific form of theism (viz., Christian theism), and then systematically eliminates all other comers. Transcendental argumentation supplies a philosophical self-consistency that is lacking in all other apologetic models. Since the inferences and deductions of evidential models can logically provide nothing greater than high probability, their objective models rely upon an uncharacteristic and inexplicably subjective/intuitional leap of faith. Transcendental argumentation argues instead from objective revelation (of both the public and private variety) to the intelligibility of the whole creation. Transcendental argumentation simultaneously recognizes the objectivity of all truth yet also the subjectivity necessary to its persuasiveness. Unlike (1) strict proclamation models that suggest that the gulf between the Christian and non-christian worldviews is such that there is no point of contact save an illuminating work that God alone can supply (Kuyper, potentially, and esp. neoorthodoxy), or (2) and models that argue from a denial of the univocal correspondence theory of truth to a denial of any correspondence in theories of truth (e.g., the later Gordon Clark), transcendental argumentation argues clearly the suitability of a single expression of objective truth, analogous to God s, for all persons in the image of God. But further, and more significantly, transcendental argumentation explains why people do not and in fact cannot accept the objectivity of truth. Transcendental argumentation alone provides an adequate explanation of texts such as Proverbs 1:7 which clearly describe the fear of God as the precondition of knowledge. The capstone argument for transcendental argumentation is its ability to account convincingly for the fact of and solution to human depravity. It alone rejects the autonomy of human reason, experience, and intuition, and identifies the fear of the God as that which renders intelligible and cohesive all truth claims as a self-validating truth system. Select Bibliography: Greg L. Bahnsen and Gordon Stein, The Great Debate: Does God Exist, CD recording, Michael R. Butler, The Transcendental Argument for God s Existence, in The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen, ed. Steven M. Schlissel. Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media Press, Don Collett, Van Til and the Transcendental Argument, WTJ 65 (Fall 2003): Robert Knudsen, The Transcendental Perspective of Westminster s Apologetic, WTJ 48 (Fall 1986): Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God, Tracts for Today, no. 9, 1948.