Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

by K. Scott Oliphint

Creation, in covenant with man, fell because we fell. 2. As with God’s lordship over us, our lordship over creation is not one of equals.

George Whitefield, “Do you know why the cats hiss and the dogs bark when you walk by? They know you have a quarrel with your Maker.”

Because God is who he is, all of his dealings with us and with creation presuppose his voluntary condescension.

For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to “lisp” in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.

God’s Unabated Revelation But the second theological truth that informs Paul’s Areopagus address is that God is not hindered by our pretended contexts and supposed barriers. His revelation comes through; it bombards us externally and internally. He continues, always and everywhere, to reveal himself to those who are his image. And that revelation always and everywhere meets its mark and accomplishes its goal. As image, we know him, and that knowledge makes us covenantally accountable to him (tenet 5).

Let’s frame Paul’s affirmation of the sensus in terms of a threefold and mutually related truth: (1) The sensus, as a central aspect of our being made in God’s image, is God’s revelation to us. (2) As revelation it is implanted in us by God himself. (3) Given (1) and (2), as Paul makes clear, the sensus

is knowledge of God, a knowledge that is universal and infallible. We will take these three in reverse order.

we all nevertheless know God.

The truth that we suppress in unrighteousness is simply this: the “clearly perceived” (v. 20) and “understood” (v. 20, NASB) knowledge of God. This is no obscure knowledge; nor is it knowledge that is beyond our capacity to understand. This knowledge that we have is both perceived—clearly perceived—and something that we somehow understand.

This seems altogether consistent with God’s character. There would be something amiss if God chose to create us but then to hide himself from us, either leaving us without a witness to himself or, perhaps worse, leaving us to ourselves to try to figure out what he is like.10

The second aspect of the sensus is God’s internal implanting of this knowledge in us.

The sensus, then, is not a doctrine or teaching that is learned, but rather something that is present within us “from our mother’s womb.”

We must acknowledge, therefore, that the context, the situation, the environment, for all men everywhere, no matter what the language or custom, is the presence and knowledge of the true God, a knowledge that comes by way of God’s self-attesting natural revelation. The implications of this for Christian epistemology (theory of knowledge), and for Christian apologetics and philosophy generally, are multifold and abundant, exciting and stimulating, but we cannot pursue them here.14

One important qualifier needs to be added here and should be developed, but cannot be elaborated. Since this knowledge of God that all people have is implanted by God through the dynamic of his revelatory activity, it is a knowledge in many ways quite different from most (if not all) other kinds of knowledge that we acquire. It is a knowledge, we could say, that is presupposed by any (perhaps all) other knowledge. For this reason, it may be best to think of it as more psychological than epistemological. 16 It is a knowledge that God infuses into his human creatures, and continues to infuse into them, even as they continue to live out their days denying or ignoring him (in Adam).

Another implication of this formulation of the sensus is that true theistic belief of this kind always and everywhere is infallible.

Proving the Proofs The notion of proof is multifaceted.

a valid argument makes no pronouncement on its truth.

there are at least two significant and global limitations to the notion of proof.

First, absolutely conclusive proofs are hard to come by.

The other limitation, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, is that we cannot operate or even think in a context in which every assertion requires a demonstrative proof.

Plantinga’s assertion that there really is no successful case for the existence of “other minds” (i.e., other people). No philosopher has successfully argued for that existence, since it cannot be established on an empirical or a nonempirical basis.

the impetus behind his argument is that belief in other minds is rational, even though not (yet) proven.

Using this definition, we might want to say that, strictly speaking, the existence of God cannot be proved. However compelling the evidence, it is not its cogency that compels acceptance; rather, it is the Holy Spirit alone who can compel agreement.

So the notion of proof is complicated. And notice that we have not even begun to discuss the complexities of sin’s effects on the mind and the radical changes that are caused by regeneration. Those truths play a major role in a discussion of proofs for God’s existence, so that the complexity is made more obvious, and is increased, for those who trust in Christ.

One book on critical thinking defines the “burden of proof” in this way: “The burden of proof rests most heavily on the side of the issue that, from the point of view of educated common sense, is most implausible or unusual or unbelievable.”

The problem, however, is that what is “common” is also fraught with sin and confusion, so that “common sense,” from the point of view of the actual world that God created and controls, is often senseless.

thrust the burden of proof on us. We should happily accept it and then proceed to explain just how all that is has its final, foundational, and comprehensive explanation in the triune God who created

We need to make clear that the arguments we give will be in support of what we know to be the case, and will not, because they cannot, proceed on the basis of some kind of neutral notion of rationality or evidence.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is arguably the best intellect that the church has ever produced. Because of the sheer magnitude of his writing, discussions about what Thomas believed and how to understand him continue unabated. Whatever Thomas himself understood and believed, however, there is little question that his followers have been (mostly) uniform in their ascription and analysis of his theistic proofs.24 Our concern here, therefore, will be with the way in which Thomas’s proofs have been applied to apologetics.

Before we look more specifically at this proof, a couple of general comments are in order. The context in which most theistic proofs have been developed and offered is a context of so-called evidentialism. Using very broad strokes, evidentialism can perhaps best be summed up in a now-famous quote from the nineteenth-century ethicist-philosopher W. K. Clifford. In his essay “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford stated that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”27

Part of the problem with this evidential response (and any of its ilk) is that it seems to assume there are evidences that all of us will “read” in the same way.

He has just conceded that his discussion can proceed apace on exactly the same ground that the humanist affirms. We have already seen that the ground on which any unbelieving position stands is quicksand

there is no way for him, now, to move the discussion in the proper direction.

We can sense the struggle of the Christian in this discussion: he wants to affirm Christian principles, but has no access to the only means by which such can be affirmed—God’s revelation.

the “old days” (and by that I mean a few thousand years ago), a student’s curriculum would initially consist of three subjects, called the trivium. These three needed to be learned in their particular order, as each would build on the one prior to it. The first thing a student would be required to learn is grammar. In this discipline, students learned the proper way to understand languages (as well as other disciplines). Because there are rules to every language, it is important to understand and apply those rules in order to grasp and apply the basics of communication.

The second subject matter that students would take up was called dialectic or logic.

The last of the three basic subjects of the trivium was rhetoric. In rhetoric, students would begin to apply their knowledge of grammar and logic to proper ways of speaking and communicating. In this subject, the focus was on oratory in such a way that an audience could be properly informed, motivated, or persuaded.3

We must also note that none of these three subjects is neutral with respect to its understanding. Like everything else, all three are informed by one’s view of the world and one’s covenant status before God.4

This is not a flaw, but is endemic to the approach itself, and may be one of the reasons why some initially find this approach to be so daunting.

The reason why we must prefer persuasion in apologetics over strict, demonstrative proofs is deeply theological; it is a direct implication of tenet 2. Recall

This notion of a basic and foundational principle flies in the face of the “Cliffordian” maxim that we saw in chapter 3 (i.e., “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”). Clifford (and those who either follow or preceded him in working from this maxim) thinks that everything we choose to know or believe, in order to be rational, must have behind it sufficient evidence.

Clifford’s maxim cannot meet its own criterion for rationality.

The dilemma is obvious. There simply cannot be sufficient evidential propositions ad infinitum. There has to be some “place”—some proposition, some concept, some idea, some foundation of authority—that is sufficient to carry the conceptual weight of what we claim to know, believe, and hold.

Because the effects of sin were thought to be less extensive in their application to us (as compared with Reformation thought), in that sin was not seen as radically affecting our reasoning, there was an improper view of the faculty of reason, especially with respect to reason’s ability to understand and discern God’s revelation and his existence. Reason was regarded as fairly well intact, even after the fall, such

classical apologetics doesn't acct for total depravity. ...specifically in regards to reasoning.

During the Reformation, there was a radical shift in emphasis, from the medieval focus on the power of reason as a foundation of knowledge, to a central and foundational focus on the power and necessity of Scripture.

Because of sin’s effect on the mind, there is no way that reason can provide a needed foundation for knowing and believing.

So the first theological foundation that informs the priority of persuasion is the principial status of Scripture. The importance of this can hardly be overstated. Scripture serves as our most basic foundation.

second theological foundation

sensus divinitatis (sense of deity) that provides the connecting link between what we say in apologetics and what God is always and everywhere “saying” in and to his human creatures.

This is why, even though there are always (at least) two opposing views in every apologetic encounter, we can be assured that the Christian, covenantal view we are defending is “making contact” with those to whom we speak.