More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 17 - September 19, 2013
Every person lives coram Deo, that is, before the face of God, and thus is responsible to God for his every thought and action.
5. All people know the true God, and that knowledge entails covenantal obligations.
6. Those who are and remain in Adam suppress the truth that they know. Those who are in Christ see that truth for what it is.
7. There is an absolute, covenantal antithesis between Christian theism and any other, opposing position. Thus, Christianity is true and anything opposing it is false.
8. Suppression of the truth, like the depravity of sin, is total but not absolute. Thus, every unbelieving position will necessarily have within it ideas, concepts, notions, and the like that it has taken and wrenched from their true, Christian context.
9. The true, covenantal knowledge of God in man, together with God’s universal mercy, allows for persuasion in apologetics.
The answer is twofold. First, because people always and everywhere know the true God, whenever we speak God’s truth to them, it “gets through” and “connects” to that knowledge that God is continually giving to them. Second, because God’s universal mercy restrains their sin in various ways, the depravity that might otherwise hinder our conversation is also restrained.
10. Every fact and experience is what it is by virtue of the covenantal, all-controlling plan and purpose of God.
The explanation of the fact itself is not sufficient unless and until the context and purpose of that fact is known and acknowledged. For example, it is not enough simply to say that lions instinctively seek their prey because they are such good hunters; the real story includes the fact that the young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. (Ps. 104:21) It is God who provides for the animals, not instinct.
The Ten Tenets 1. The faith that we are defending must begin with, and necessarily include, the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who, as God, condescends to create and to redeem. 2. God’s covenantal revelation is authoritative by virtue of what it is, and any covenantal, Christian apologetic will necessarily stand on and utilize that authority in order to defend Christianity. 3. It is the truth of God’s revelation, together with the work of the Holy Spirit, that brings about a covenantal change from one who is in Adam to one who is in Christ. 4. Man (male and female) as image of God is
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There is not an atom of the universe in which his everlasting power and deity are not clearly seen. Both from within and from without, God’s witness speaks to us. God does not leave himself without a witness, either in nature or history, in heart or conscience, in life or lot. This witness of God is so powerful, accordingly, that almost no one denies its reality. All humans and peoples have heard something of the voice of the Lord.
Christian theology has derived the character and attributes of God initially and primarily from his names.
The covenant that God has established is a covenant that, by God’s own free decision, binds him. That “binding of God” is guaranteed “by two unchangeable things.” It is guaranteed because the God who cannot lie has taken an oath.
It means, at least, that the way in which God occupies a particular place is different from his omnipresence. God, as Spirit, is present everywhere. There is no place where God is not present. His free decision to condescend, however, includes a presence that is covenantal.
Lest there be any confusion, John tells us explicitly that in the beginning, “the Word was God.” But we also read that this One who was God in the beginning, was also “with God.” As in Exodus 3, where the angel of the Lord is himself the Lord, so also here in John’s prologue, we are introduced to One who is both God and distinguished from God. Given what we understand explicitly in the New Testament, we can see that John is explaining to us part of what it means that God is triune.
The all-too-brief answer to this question is that the lordship that is now Christ’s is a lordship that assumes the completion of his redemptive work. It is a lordship that could only take effect once the Son of God took to himself a human nature, walked in perfect obedience to his Father, gave himself up to save his people from their sins, and was seated at the Father’s right hand. It is, we could say, the full and complete redemptive lordship of the Son of God become man. This can be understood most clearly in the so-called status duplex, the two states of Christ.
So this lordship of Christ, which Peter commands us to set apart in our hearts, includes both his cosmic lordship—by which he sovereignly ruled and rules his creation from the beginning—and his redemptive lordship—which is his because his work of deliverance is completed, and thus God has highly exalted him.
Immanuel Kant is arguably the most influential philosopher since the Enlightenment.11 Many, if not most, of the post-Enlightenment arguments against traditional Christianity have as their backdrop Kant’s monumental work The Critique of Pure Reason.
he set out to remedy both schools (the rationalist school and the empiricist school) by developing his own “critical” philosophy.
In this way, Kant thought he was proposing a “Copernican Revolution.” The “Copernican Revolution” in Kant’s philosophy was this: all previous philosophy had assumed that knowledge comes to us when our external experiences impose themselves on our minds; Kant was now arguing that, on the contrary, we impose our mental categories on those experiences in order to know or understand them. Knowledge is not from the outside in; it is from the inside (mental categories) out (experiences).14
he is forced to conclude that there can be no real knowledge of those things that reason alone assumes.
by definition, cannot be known; there is no experience of such things.
“I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Since it is not possible to know God (because he is a part of the noumenal realm), our positing of the existence of God can only be a matter of faith, and faith can have nothing to do with real knowledge and understanding. This conclusion with respect to reason is the foundation from which Kant begins to critique the historic proofs for the existence of God. He critiques both Anselm’s “ontological” proof and Thomas Aquinas’s proofs.
First, Kant argues that the concepts of reason are nothing more than concepts:
Any idea that has no experience undergirding it is “a mere thought-entity.” Thus, and secondly, when we speak of God, we should be aware that we will never be able to move from an idea in the mind to an external reality. So,
That is, since there is no experience of God, all that we are able to produce by the category of reason is a concept. If we want more than a concept, that can only come by “making room for faith.” But that faith can have no access to real knowledge; it cannot be known, only (blindly) believed.
The point that needs to be stressed, however—and this is a point that can be applied to countless objections to the Christian faith—is that, for Kant, there is absolutely no category for the Christian reality of God’s covenantal condescension.
Kant’s philosophy, with all of its substantial influence, is singularly unconvincing as an analysis of God’s existence. He is right that we cannot move from the finite to the infinite, but he has not considered that the infinite has moved to the finite.
Only a god who has not condescended to be the Lord could be reduced to a pure concept. The true, triune God, who is the Lord, has come from the infinite to the finite. He has condescended, covenantally, so that we might have “fruition” of him. Apart from that condescension, there is no hope of knowing him; he would only be, at best, “a mere thought-entity.” But since he has condescended, and since the One who condescended is the cosmic and redemptive Lord, we are guaranteed, for eternity, to have true and certain knowledge of him. Whether we suppress that knowledge (in Adam) or rejoice in it
...more
An ad hominem argument, when used in a fallacious way, is an attack on a person’s personal character rather than a response to that person’s arguments. It is, in sum, character assassination.
An ad hominem argument that is not fallacious is one in which a person’s position is challenged based on what that person claims. It is an ad hominem argument because it goes to the challenger’s own beliefs; it seeks to question the consistency of what someone believes, argues, or maintains in light of other beliefs or arguments that he claims to hold.
First of all (though the order here is not important), it is crucial to attempt to articulate just why and how the position one is opposing cannot do what it purports to do. Let’s call this the Quicksand Quotient. In applying the Quicksand Quotient, we attempt to show that the position that we are opposing is sinking sand and cannot stand on its own.
The other, more persuasive and effective way to apply the Quicksand Quotient is to show that the position, based on its own principles, cannot stand. The “ground” chosen by the position is insufficient to support its own principles. In that context, the solution of Christianity can take its proper, persuasive place.
Thomas Aquinas was convinced that one can know God’s existence and his “oneness,” or simplicity (as well as some other attributes) by reason alone, without the need for revelation. So Thomas’s initial discussion of God is a view that, initially, since it is acquired by reason alone, any Muslim or Jew could affirm, and one that is content with a list of (abstract) attributes that supposedly follow from God’s simplicity (as that simplicity is understood by reason alone).
What Kenny, therefore, has to recognize is that the truth of the incarnation requires that “absurdity” take on a different meaning than the one he likely intends. That which is truly absurd is whatever is in opposition to God; and surely the incarnation is not. Absurdity, therefore, has to be measured not in terms of what we can comprehend, but in terms of what God has said to us.
What we are saying, in other words, is that the notion of absurdity itself is loaded with assumptions and cannot be taken at face value when lodged against the Christian position. That which is foolish to those who are perishing is, in reality, the very power of God himself (see 1 Cor. 1:18–25).
What must have moved Paul was not that the religions in Athens were expressions of honest seekers. Rather, what provoked him was his knowledge that the plethora of idols all around him were evidence of rebellion against the true and triune God. And the only remedy for that rebellion was the gospel of Jesus Christ.
is instructive for us to recognize that Paul’s preaching did not appear to take one form in the synagogue and another in the marketplace. He did not speak of “Judeo-Christian” truths in the synagogue only and then of generic theism in the marketplace.
brief excursus might be helpful here, by way of clarification. We should not draw too hard a line between preaching, on the one hand, and apologetics, on the other.
In whatever mode of communication, whether preaching, evangelism, or apologetics, it is the gospel of Jesus Christ that has to be our focus.
Paul’s choice of topics and truths to discuss at the Areopagus took these philosophies into account.
In other words, the logic of Paul’s argument is that because God has raised Christ, and because Christ now lives as risen from the dead, he has authority to judge everyone else who dies. And everyone dies.
Paul was not content merely to get their notion of God adjusted. He was not attempting to change their polytheism into mere monotheism. Neither was he interested in giving them a generic or abstract description of God’s attributes. The attributes that he does give them (e.g., sovereignty, aseity, omnipresence, etc.) are all charged with covenantal meaning and obligations. And they all find their true reference point in Christ’s authority and resurrection.
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. . . . My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet
God’s Inescapable Image First, Paul made clear to the Athenians and their philosophers that they were all responsible creatures of God, and that they owed their very existence to him (Acts 17:28–29). He made clear to them, in other words, that they were all covenant creatures made in God’s image. It is this image of God that is the presupposition behind everything else that we are.
this voluntary condescension is called God’s covenant.
We all, as human beings, live coram Deo, in the presence of him in whose image we are.
This is one reason it might be helpful to remember the analogy of a mirror image. If
Two aspects of lordship should be highlighted here. 1. As Lord, God has committed himself, for eternity, to his creation. He has promised not to annihilate what he has made, but rather to keep it for himself forever. This covenant commitment of God the Lord to tie himself to what he has made will go on without end. 2. Because he is Lord, the relationship that obtains between us and him is not one of equality. God’s commitment to us does not entail that he has become an equal partner in this relationship. He is and remains God, and we are and will remain his creatures. He neither depends on us
...more
It was that inbreathing, the imparting of the very breath of God in us, that made us “image of God.”
