Exploring Approaches to Apologetics CA513 LESSON 14 of 24 Gordon Lewis, Ph.D. Experience: Senior Professor of Christian and Historical Theology, Denver Seminary, Colorado. My prayer for you as you study through this course is the prayer that Paul had for the people in Philippi in the first century. Philippians 1:9, And this is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God amen. To review Gordon Clark s approach to apologetics, picture him as a pastor talking with Jane who has questioned belief in God and Christ as a result of her studies at a typical university. Pastor Clark does not appeal to objective facts of history or science. After greetings, he inquires about Jane s basic assumptions or axioms. He wants to know whether as a naturalist she starts with matterenergy or as a pantheist with some version of a pervasive psychic energy. Clark will point out in either case logical inconsistencies in accounting for her philosophy of reality, morality, education, science, history, or politics. If she considers herself a Kantian, he will point out that Kant s position is inadequate. Kant never explained how and why all human minds possess the same a priori forms and principles. Clark will seek to shake her faith in her non- Christian heroes and world and life view. He will seek to reduce it to absurdity, meaninglessness, and despair. When Jane realizes the bankruptcy of her alternative philosophy, she must become willing even to repent of her idolatrous worship and service of a wisdom based on the elements of this world rather than on Christ. Then counselor Clark will ask Jane to begin all her thought with the existence of the God of the Bible. He will show the consistency with which one who starts with the God of the Bible can deduce an entire world and life view. With that axiom, one can account for the origin of anything at all, for the weeds and the tendency to evil as a result of the fall. One can account for the limited role of human government, a morality of healthy self-interest, the universal and necessary principles of human reasoning. For these 1 of 11
are innate in the mind of God s image-bearers. And one can also account for the deep quest for the transcendent in every human breast, a quest not satisfied by anything in creation. Jane needs the Christ and the Scriptures from above. Having displayed the consistency of the Christian belief system, Clark would emphasize the Augustinian conviction that to know truth is to know God since God is truth. Clark would again appeal for repentance and call for belief of the gospel concerning Christ. Pastor Clark will count on God to answer prayer and grant her repentance and faith, regeneration, redemption, and reconciliation. Before leaving Clark s approach, we should note how Carl Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today, utilized it in his works. In Henry s six-volume magnum opus on God, Revelation, and Authority, he points out that since Christianity makes claims to universal truth, the Christian apologist must 1) adduce criteria for verifying truth and 2) show that non-biblical alternatives are futile. That project will encompass all areas of cultural experience and call them to account. Non-biblical alternatives are futile because they are logically inconsistent. There is ultimately one comprehensive system, one set of axioms and consistent deductions which constitute the mind of God. The task of apologetics, therefore, is two-fold: first to investigate and expose inconsistency in contrary positions and second, to demonstrate the consistency of the axioms of Christian revelation. You can see how dependent Henry has been upon Clark s approach. Henry concedes that the task of apologetics is a tedious project and that there is no final achievement of it in current theology. So the apologist must with eternal patience strive to approximate the mind of God. Christian apologetics yields persuasive, rational evidence that, while not compelling belief, calls one into accountability. The effort to find logical consistency in the data of, for example, history, science, psychology and ethics yields a broad, impressive coherence, a subordinate test for truth that supports the Christian faith. Notice here that Henry slips in a subordinate test of truth that Clark did not emphasize; coherence with data or facts from human experience. Henry s apagogic against naturalism considers its basic truth claim not only that nature is real but that nature is ultimate. And he thinks that position vacuous of meaning and not empirically verifiable. Since naturalists allege that everything is changing except that statement, no number of empirical instances from yesterday can establish a general theory for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Naturalists have abandoned causality for correlation 2 of 11
and discontinuity. At the point of discovery, the naturalist transcends an inductive view of the scientific method. And the truth comes from divinely illumined intuition or detached creativity. When that does not happen, the naturalistic scientists consider how something works rather than the more important questions of what, why, and who. Logical positivism which could not verify its own assertion that meaningful statements must be verifiable was self-defeating and self-destructive, a noncontender. Naturalism with its limited sources and tests of truth cannot resolve conflicting truth claims in religion or ethics. Henry not only works extensively on the naturalistic worldview but also on subjectivism. He claims that the prominence of subjectivism is a result of Kant s approach to the categories and modern existential and dialectical thought. De-mythologizers of the Bible have provided no criteria, therefore, for distinguishing the mythical from the non-mythical elements alleged in the life of Christ. The term myth became a tramp word of uncertain identity and even contradictory nuances. Without a propositional revelation, Henry argues, dialectical theologians and mystics speaking of encounters or experiences of God do not know who or what is being encountered. Affirmatively, after answering naturalism and subjectivism, Henry considered it crucial to defend propositional revelation. When he talks about the God of the Bible, he s talking about the Bible s content being translatable into actual assertions in logical form. He claims that the biblical sentence is the basic unit of revelation. Isolated words are neither true nor false. The Bible s sentences tell us not just what God is like but what God is. Numbers of other thinkers like Cornelius Van Til, whom we will look at shortly, imagined that we discover from the Bible only analogous knowledge of what God is like. Clark and Henry are asserting that we learn what God really is. That is called univocal predication. That is, the statements of the Bible are of one meaning, one voice for God and for us. To deny univocal predication, Henry says, is fatal to Christian theology. God is no more sort of omniscient than He is both holy and unholy. Non-propositional revelation is unintelligible, unverifiable, and incapable of giving the meaning of biblical events. We must give priority, then, to propositional revelation in order to know true definitions of God, of sin, and grace. Let me remind you that a logical proposition is of the form S is P, S standing for a subject is for some form of the verb to be, and P for a predicate 3 of 11
nominative. God is Spirit is a logical proposition. God is love is a sentence in propositional form. And Henry is saying statements in the Bible that are not in that exact form, nevertheless imply propositional assertions about reality, divine or human. So Henry defends a Bible that is authoritative, inspired, infallible, and inerrant. And there is much of value in his discussions of God s immutability, triune nature, and sovereignty over moral evil. We will be comparing and contrasting Clark s and Henry s approaches with others. A student s understanding of these approaches to knowing is cumulative. You begin to understand the empirical approaches better after contrasting them with the rational approach of Clark. And you will understand Clark s approach better when we compare it with that of Cornelius Van Til and Christian mystics. For now, it seems devastating to point out that while contradiction is a sure and sufficient test of error, sheer logical consistency is not a sufficient basis of affirming the truth of any philosophy or of Christianity. Please do not feel bad if you do not fully comprehend these ways of reasoning in support of entire worldviews in one or two easy lessons. It took these gifted writers years to develop their approaches themselves. Don t feel down on yourself if you have not mastered them in two weeks, ten weeks, or fifteen weeks. Keep focusing on the different views of the starting point, points of contact, criteria of truth, the role of reason, and the basis of faith. And these comparisons will enable you to bring the approaches down to manageable size. Also, put together all of the approaches to Jane our skeptic, and you will see in a short paragraph or two how they would manifest themselves in communication. When you agreed to give a reason for your faith, you never imagined that giving a good reason could be so differently understood by Christians in the twentieth century. Again I never promised you a bed of roses. Hang in there. Casey Stengel, coach of the famous Yankee baseball teams, would pounce on a player who made an error. The player would reply, But no one can make that kind of catch. Stengel replied, You can, that s why you are a Yankee. And you can make these difficult decisions. That s why you are a servant of Jesus Christ. That s why you are an apologist. Once you have worked through these approaches to cogent argumentation, you will find that the field is not as confusing as at first it seems. Carl Henry, then, is the greater communicator of Clark s approach, and I would recommend that you read a chapter on him by Richard A. Purdy in Baker s Handbook of Evangelical Theologians pages 262 to 273. That book is just off the press, and 4 of 11
it is valuable on numbers of the other persons we are studying also. Now Roman numeral X in our outline Van Til s Approach of Self-authenticating Scripture. We now explore a quite different approach to Christian apologetics, that of Cornelius Van Til. His early life was nearly as controversial as Clark s even though by nature, Van Til was a bit retiring and shunned debate. A former student and long-time friend, William White in Van Til Defender of the Faith: An Authorized Biography published in 1979, thinks that he became a storm center of controversy for two reasons: the faithfulness of his life and the turbulence of the times. Cornelius was born in Grootegast in Holland in 1895, the sixth son of a family of eight children. His nickname was Kees. Kees grew up in a comparatively serene Christian home and Christian Reformed Church affirming the Heidelberg Confession of Faith. His family moved from Holland to Hammond, Indiana, in America when Kees was ten years of age. After attending Calvin College and one year at Calvin Seminary, Cornelius transferred to Princeton Seminary where the aging Geerhardus Vos and the vigorous J. Gresham Machen persuaded him to become more vocal against the rising tide of liberalism. The available apologetics approaches did not seem effective particularly against Hegelian philosophy. So Van Til s reading of Abraham Kuyper s works convinced him that the launching pad of all thinking is an antithesis between the mind of the regenerate and the mind of the unregenerate. After a brief pastorate, Van Til taught for a year at Princeton before moving with Machen, O.T. Allis, and Robert Dick Wilson to Philadelphia to start Westminster Theological Seminary. Meanwhile, he had become able to assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith and became a Presbyterian. After the untimely death of J. Gresham Machen, the full responsibility for apologetics at Westminster clearly rested with Van Til. His approach to epistemology drew him into conflict not only with liberals but also with many orthodox apologists and theologians. He had running dialogue and debate with Gordon Clark and J. Oliver Buswell, Jr. What then was Van Til s logical starting point? Note the problems first that he saw with other starting points. To start reasoning with pure empiricism from objective evidence, he claimed, gets one nowhere. Evidence can count neither for nor against the truth claims of a Christian. As Humes showed, empiricism leads to skepticism. The problem with rational empiricism is that innate thought forms are no better. 5 of 11
They do not help since they merely establish a formal and empty concept of God. It is fatal, he said, to true spirituality to start one s reasoning with data or the human mind however structured. The principal of causality from the beginning must depend on God s will or it is unreliable. Since the law does not guarantee itself, if we do not assume God s existence, the cosmological and all other arguments from empirical experience collapse. If we assume God s existence, then the cosmological argument is unnecessary. Unless we know God, we cannot even know ourselves, trust our consciousness, or our logical principles. The traditional argument for the possibility and probability of revelation allows for a sacred book, a superior book, but not an absolutely authoritative book. It compromises the very volume it set out to defend. Clark s appeal to the laws of logic is no more help than the law of causality. Divine authority, Van Til says, is above the laws of logic as well as causality. Human principles of thought are held to be different from God s and not self-sufficient. Their validity is given them by God. The foundation of their validity is the point at issue. So to reason with unbelievers from the basis of mere brute facts or logic is to beat the air. What is in question is the meaning of facts, Van Til insists, and the meaning of logical principles. What then about his starting point? He s saying that one s starting point must be all encompassing. It is comprehensive systems that give meaning to data. Every appeal to uninterpreted data to bare facts is unintelligible. All who reason about facts come to them with a schematism into which they fit. And every humanly-devised scheme is finite and limited to a number of finite precepts that imply something beyond themselves. Only a system beginning with God then can include all possible elements. Kant showed that universals must be presupposed, and Hegel showed that they must be all-inclusive. For example, all counting presupposes and depends upon a qualitative whole. Unless there is a numerical system as a whole, we could not tell one number from another. To add new information about a fact, we need to relate it to the system of facts already known. But no one has ever observed the relations among all facts. Nevertheless, we know that they must be related. To hold that all facts past, present, and future are related suggests an infinite mind containing the true significance of everything. Without such an all-inclusive system of meaning, there is not even a degree of probability that a relation between facts is meaningful. If God does not exist, we can know nothing. All, 6 of 11
Van Til says, is chaos and old night. Either God surrounds everything including the irrational and evil, or they surround God and ourselves. God either controls the devil or the devil controls God. Bare chance, possibility, and probability are not the ultimate concepts in philosophy. If they were, then what was meaningful this morning might not be this afternoon. All rationality would be destroyed. People choose a worldview to give meaning to life. Van Til invites them to start all their thinking with assent to the God of the Bible, because this presupposition alone gives meaning to all our experience. We cannot understand the meaning even of cause without presupposing the God of the Bible. Van Til s logical starting point, then, more fully is the God of the Bible attested by the Holy Spirit. Van Til claimed that all other logical starting points lead people to make empirical evidence or logic more ultimate than God. Instead of showing the Bible s fitness to facts and to logical consistency, apologists should have declared the Scriptures self-authenticating by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The empiricists and rationalists held that the Holy Spirit attests the Word through means. But Van Til charges that in using evidence or logic, they made men and women or human logic autonomous, blasphemously higher than God. Most others refer to Van Til s approach as a presuppositionalist approach. In my testing Christianity s truth claims, I designated it as biblical authoritarianism since no justification was given for starting with the full authority of the Bible. But his biographer, White, and one of his successors at Westminster, John Frame, think the distinctive of his approach and starting point is self-authenticating Scripture. And I had brought that in, in my discussion secondarily. You can check Frame s chapter on Van Til in The Handbook of Evangelical Theologians to which I referred earlier. Epistemologically then, Van Til s starting point is self-attesting Scriptural authority. Although many since Kant have held that the mind must never subject itself to any authority beyond itself, they have led the world to the point of self-destruction according to the moral crises of the present time. Van Til, in contrast, taught that the only way to find truth is to bow before authoritative Scripture. Only divine omniscience knows the true meaning of all facts. Since God has chosen to disclose some of that meaning in written form, the Bible gives us the proper interpretation of things in their ultimate relations. This does not mean that every discussion must begin with an explicit reference from the Bible, but that in principle, the Bible s authority is basic for 7 of 11
every meaningful thought. The natural person who tries to find a meaning in facts apart from biblical revelation, virtually ascribes to him or herself the attributes Christians ascribe to God alone. The natural person must make a full surrender and accept or reject the whole Christian system. Van Til says there is no middle ground and no piecemeal approach. When Van Til then speaks of knowing facts, he does not refer to brute facts or facts interpreted from any other philosophical assumption but experiential data interpreted according to the Bible. No consignment of God to the gaps in scientific theory can possibly make room, he says, for the God of orthodox Christian faith. We cannot present all that the Bible teaches at once, however. But the teachings we should present to the unsaved include God s self-explained existence, God s creation of all things, the creation of men and women in the image of God, the fall into sin, and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. Unless the Bible is true in all that it teaches including these doctrines, it will be impossible to find meaning in anything. The very essence of knowledge is to bring our thoughts into agreement with God s revealed Word. We must presuppose God in all our thinking. This means that we must regard His revealed truth as more important and more certain than any other and find in it the norms or criteria that all other knowledge must meet. We must be more interested in what God s Word says than in what any secular thinker has to say. A Christian does not just take a secular philosophy and dress it up with a few biblical quotes out of context. We have seen his starting point epistemologically as the Bible. Metaphysically, Van Til s starting point presupposes the existence of the Bible s triune God. The ultimate reality is not nature, humanity, reason, causality, or the laws of logic. It is the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Unless Trinitarianism is first presupposed, none of the other reference points is dependable. Apart from God, all things could change into their opposites without notice. Van Til s one theistic argument goes as follows. Unless God exists, unless He is more than a concept in the mind of man, human experience would be meaningless. By God, Van Til means one who is absolute, autonomous, and self-contained. That is, God does not depend in His being, knowledge, or will upon the being, knowledge, or will of His own creatures. The divine attributes are not next to Him or above Him but identical with God s being. And the unity and diversity in the Trinity are 8 of 11
equally basic and mutually-dependent. Although finite persons are limited by principles of truth, goodness, and beauty; God is unlimited by them. Although Clark, like Augustine, held that knowledge of changeless truth conforms to truth in the mind of God, Van Til thinks that all our knowledge of God is at best analogical because of the great difference between God and man. Although God does not contradict Himself, our knowledge of God, Van Til says, is bound to come into what seems to be contradictory. That is, our knowledge of God is paradoxical. Clark denied any irresolvable paradoxes. This term reminds one of some (wag s) definition. A paradox is a pair of docks. The first of Van Til s alleged humanly irresolvable contradictions asserts that everything happens according to God s fixed, eternal plan; but prayer changes things. What Van Til overlooks is that prayers and their answers were in God s mind from eternity. Van Til may have been unable to resolve this paradox. But other theologians may not find it to affirm and deny the same thing at the same time and in the same respect. Another of Van Til s paradoxes is closely-related. All things in history are determined by God, but man has free choice. But it is God in His sovereignty who gave us the ability of selfdetermination and its use is foreknown. It is no embarrassment to God. Again, prior to creation, God was perfect needing nothing, but God created the world to glorify Himself. But that need not be considered contradictory, for the reason for God s creation was not to get anything He lacked but to give of Himself in agape love for others. Van Til then wants to put the Word of God above all challenges. But if it contradicts itself as far as humans are concerned, we cannot even follow what God has said. In Van Til s approach then, can we find any points of contact with non-christians? What is his view of common ground? John Frame, in writing on Van Til in The Handbook of Evangelical Theologians, finds that sometimes Van Til teaches that unbelievers know God according to Romans 1:20, and at other times they have no true knowledge at all. And He has nothing in common with them. Frame admits that it is difficult to make sense out of all this. Try to follow the different respects nevertheless as I show how I have made some sense of it. Metaphysically, both Christians and non- Christians are creatures who live and move and have their being in God. All are actually dependent upon God for their temporal existence consciously and responsibly. Morally and spiritually, however, all share in common a personal rebellion against God. 9 of 11
Psychologically, all are aware of the experience of violating God s law and of suppressing God-consciousness. Epistemologically, however, Christians according to Van Til have no common ground with non-christians in principle or ultimately. The intellect is present in the unbeliever, but its moral uses are turned away from the honor of God. The believer uses reason to interpret divine revelation. The unbeliever invariably uses reason to suppress or pervert it. Unbelievers cannot even test revelation claims. The whole person, Van Til maintains, must be regenerated before the tool of the mind can be used correctly. Until then, the non-christian makes himself rather than God the principal of interpreting all things. One cannot even start with man, because unsaved persons misinterpret everything including themselves. Thomists and Arminian apologists mistakenly seek common ground because they imagine that consciousness of self and others is to some extent intelligible without reference to God. Reformed theologians who seek common ground forget that the benefits of common grace are wholly rejected. In sum, Van Til is saying that unbelievers may have much truth without owning Christ as truth, just as a little child may slap his father in the face only because the father holds him on his knee. So proximately and relatively, non-christians have some truth and do some good and work with the same laws of chemistry, logic, cause, and other things as Christians. But formally and linguistically also, there are points of contact with non-christians, for they can formally understand Christianity even though continuing to worship and serve the imaginary ultimate of their own heart. Christians who use the language of non-christian philosophers should put Christian content in it. What about the criteria by which to test conflicting philosophical and religious truth claims? In Van Til, we see both negative and affirmative positions. Negatively, non-christians are incapable of testing a Christian s claim that the God of the Bible exists. Apart from God, they have no basis for trusting their sense experience or their existential experience or their logical principles? Furthermore, God, Christ, and Scripture cannot be subjected to any more ultimate court of appeal. The Christian s belief in the God disclosed in Scripture is self-authenticating. That belief is not verified by anything other than the Bible itself as attested by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Hence, the Bible s claims for itself carry divine authority. 10 of 11
By way of preliminary evaluation, keep in mind that Latter Day Saints claim that the Book of Mormon is attested by the Spirit and so is self-authenticating. Since that book and the Bible contradict each other, both cannot be attested by the same Spirit. People get converted from Mormonism and give it up when they find discrepancies with fact and local contradictions in the Book of Mormon. So the claim that a book is self-authenticating does not sustain itself in isolation from logic and fact. And the same principles apply to Scripture. In the order of existence or metaphysics, Van Til is correct. There is nothing more ultimate than God, and every unbeliever is dependent upon Him. But in the order of knowing truth, Van Til is incorrect. Atheists do know truth in history, geology, chemistry, math, logic, etcetera. Van Til imagines that what is the case in the order of being must also be the case in the order of knowing. But the order of knowing varies from person to person and culture to culture. Van Til has become very controversial because he is saying that every other apologist has compromised the very faith one seeks to defend. We will need to evaluate Van Til at much greater length. We will have some additional considerations at the beginning of our next lecture. Meanwhile, try to consider his idealistic standpoint from the whole picture. And as you do, consider the fact that he seems to assume the very thing to be proved. He seems to be reasoning in a circle. And that is not acceptable in any form of logic. That is not acceptable logic. That is fallacious. Van Til s approach, then, must face that basic criticism of circular reasoning. We ll look at it further next time. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 11 of 11