Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

by K. Scott Oliphint

The third theological truth that significantly impacts the way we think about persuasion is God’s universal mercy over all that he has made.

In an attempt to understand Scripture’s affirmation of God’s universal mercy, then, three basic aspects of that mercy, all interrelated, have been emphasized. 1. The first aspect of God’s universal mercy includes the fact that God’s attitude toward his creatures made in his image is one of wrath, because of sin (Rom. 1:18), but is also one of mercy and kindness toward them.

2. The second aspect of God’s universal mercy has to do with the restraint of sin in the lives of individuals and of society.

But here it ought to occur to us that amid this corruption of nature there is some place for God’s grace; not such grace as to cleanse it, but to restrain it inwardly. For if the Lord gave loose rein to the mind of each man to run riot in his lusts, there would doubtless be no one who would not show that, in fact, every evil thing for which Paul condemns all nature is most truly to be met in himself. 13

The reason that the unregenerate are not as bad as they would be is the universal, restraining mercy of God toward them.

3. The third aspect of God’s universal mercy is a consequence of the first. It includes the fact that the unregenerate can perform “righteous” acts, even though still slaves to sin. This point need not be developed here. It is a vitally important theological truth, however. It means that there is much religious good that an unbeliever can participate in and accomplish without himself being regenerate.

Owen makes a good and proper biblical distinction between the gifts of the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and the fruits of the Spirit, on the other. The former—the gifts of the Spirit—are such that anyone can participate in them; the fruits of the Spirit are reserved only for the regenerate. Gifts come from the outside; fruit grows from within.

there is a common manifestation of God’s universal mercy in that he may, at times and for his own sovereign purposes, give to those who are not a part of his church gifts of the Spirit, which are good and virtuous gifts, but which, in the end, do not in any way flow from a regenerate heart. 16

So the very fact that unbelievers do not, at all times and in all places, seek the darkness of their own hearts is owing not to a vestige of goodness in their hearts, but completely to God’s merciful disposition toward those who are his enemies and thus are under his wrath.

The “Trivium” of Persuasion

a theological “trivium”—the principial nature of Scripture, the sensus divinitatis (i.e., knowledge of God), and God’s universal mercy—that provide the foundation for a biblical view of persuasion in apologetics.

the educational trivium and theological trivium now in place, we are ready to discuss the “trivium” of persuasion, three aspects that help us understand something of the structure of persuasion itself.

to Aristotle, “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”

of the reasons that the “evidential challenge” and the emphasis on proofs for God’s existence has been prominent in apologetics has to do with the influence of the Enlightenment.

There has been since the Enlightenment a hegemonic emphasis on reason. The reigning princes of this influence have been Descartes18 (the rationalist philosopher), Hume (the empiricist philosopher), and, supremely, Kant (who tried to synthesize the rational and empirical). From Descartes to the present, the predominant mode of thinking, whether in philosophy or in theology, has been, for the most part, unduly dependent on these schools of thought.

praise of all things scientific at the expense of true, biblical faith. “Faith,” in a Kantian context, can only have experience as its governing principle, not knowledge.

shift the emphasis, in a covenantal apologetic, from the notion of proofs or evidences per se to that of persuasion.

We are not saying, in other words, that the two sides (proofs/evidences, on the one side, and persuasion, on the other) are mutually opposed to each other or in any way contradictory.

Thus, the theological trivium discussed in the previous section (along with the ten tenets) must be firmly embedded in our thinking if we are going to see the necessary place of persuasion in a covenantal apologetic approach. Let’s look at the structure of persuasion in its proper theological

Ethos Now to the trivium of persuasion. Aristotle delimited three “kinds” or categories that were present in any and every persuasive discourse: Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character [ethos] of the speaker; the second kind on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind [pathos]; the third on proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself [logos].21 So,

First, we need to focus on the ethos of persuasion, which means, generally, one’s character.

therefore, cannot be measured solely by those to whom we speak. If our audience is the sole judge of our character, then we might be tempted to compromise our message in order to gain a hearing. The ethos of Jesus himself, we will remember, was called into serious question by some. He was called a “Samaritan” and was accused of being possessed by a demon (John 8:48, 52). The measuring rod by which we judge the ethos of persuasion, then, must be something other than what our audience, be it many people or one person, might think; it must be Scripture itself.

This type of sophistry was obviously present in Corinth. Notice Paul’s references to the notions of “speech,” “wisdom,” and “knowledge” in the Corinthian letters:

was not simply speech and wisdom that Paul was concerned to demonstrate, but speech, knowledge, and wisdom in Christ, and in demonstration of the Spirit and of power (see also 2 Cor. 6:3–7; 8:7). Paul’s summary statement of this false kind of sophistry is evident

While we want to be concerned with how we present the message (grammar), while we want to follow basic rules of thinking so that our speech and our message are coherent (logic), while we want to be concerned with persuasion and with our rhetorical technique (rhetoric) (Paul was concerned with these things as his letters show), we must never let those things be the basis upon which we have hope or upon which we rest as we present our message.

hope,

To be gentle and respectful does not, of course, obviate boldness. Paul

So obvious is this that Aristotle himself thought ethos to be central to the art of persuasion: “It is not true, as some writers assume in their treatises on rhetoric, that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.”

neglected aspects of Christian living currently. Someone whose ministry is focused exclusively on college-aged people recently said to me that the burning need among that age group of Christians is holiness. It may just be that the cultural pressures are winning a subtle victory in this regard. If that is true, then it is serious indeed. Scripture is clear that without holiness no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). In wanting to be “relevant” to those who are not in Christ, we may be displaying more of a life “in Adam” than we might think. This bodes ill for the art of persuasion in covenantal apologetics. If Christianity makes little difference in the way we walk and talk on a day-to-day basis, we should not think that there will be any obvious reason for others to want to consider a life in Christ.23

This Enlightenment attitude of “partisanship as pejorative” is based on a supposition of neutrality.

assumes that the very diversity of ideas is itself an end, rather than a means to an end. The problem that pluralism produces is that it destroys itself in the process. Contradictory and opposing ideas, by definition, cannot all be held and applied by one society. Some partisan notion will always dominate and, in so doing, will smother any notion of pluralism.

Whenever we speak of the pathos of persuasion, though the word itself has reference, roughly, to one’s emotional state, we are thinking much more broadly than just how those to whom we speak might feel.26 When we think of pathos, we are interested in a proper and personal understanding of those to whom we speak. In persuasion, it is the task of the speaker properly to construe his audience, with a view toward communication that is “adequate to the occasion.”

matter the audience, the apologetic subject matter to be discussed was always going to be causality or contingency or gradation of being or design (or some combination of these).

theologians [and apologists!] have very rarely elaborated on their notion of the audience. This reticence can be attributed to a number of factors. First, given the rise of rationalism and the simultaneous demise of rhetoric in the modern period, the specificity and uniqueness of the audience has gradually been replaced by the assumption that the arguments are universal and self-evident. Second, the modern emphasis on pluralism and diversity rebels against the imposition of a single point of view.

In our persuasive construal of the people to whom we speak, that is, the pathos, two central aspects are always in play and must be considered by the covenantal apologist. These two we can denominate as (1) the aspect of suppression and (2) the aspect of the sensus.31

the midst of his address on Mars Hill, Paul quotes two Greek poets. Why would Paul, in a defense of Christianity, choose to use statements by pagans? Here Paul employs what we have dubbed the suppression aspect of pathos. Paul, in the interest of persuasion, has properly construed his audience; he knows something of their culture and beliefs. So he seeks to identify with his hearers by using statements that they themselves know and many of them believe. In using such statements, he automatically draws them into his discussion.

Suppression of the truth always manifests itself in terms of idolatry.

given the paucity of interest in persuasion today, most current apologetic methods would simply “tell the truth” without concern for connecting with the audience.

the only concern were to tell the truth, then the Areopagus address would begin, “Men of Athens, I see by your rampant idolatry that you are all suppressing the truth in unrighteousness and worshiping something created rather than the Creator. Repent!” But Paul is wiser than that.

Once returned to their proper context, however, these parasitic ideas—these suppressed, twisted, and exchanged truths, turned into lies, of the Greek philosophers and the Athenians—take their rightful place as absolute truths about the Christian God.

The good news for a covenantal apologetic, the news that truly bridges the gap between what we are communicating and what our audience claims to believe, is that, with any and every audience, any and every person, God has already and always been there, revealing himself both within and without them in such a way that they already, really and truly, know him.

I said above that the notion of persuasion is not antithetical to the rational or evidential; it simply puts the rational and evidential in their proper context. In Descartes’s philosophical method, he sought to doubt everything that it was possible to doubt in order to arrive at some indubitable truth (he likely took this basic method from Augustine). As Descartes began to doubt everything, he recognized that there is one thing that he could not doubt: that he was doubting. And if he was doubting, then he was thinking. The supposed indubitable that Descartes adopted was his now famous dictum Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”

The problem was that Descartes thought he was able to generate and locate such a truth in and of himself.

The content and application of the sensus bodes well for the art of persuasion. We never come into a context in which our audience is a tabula rasa (blank slate). Instead, every person, every audience, is a

slate that is exhaustively marked from top to bottom with the revelation of God’s character.

Logos We can be brief in our explanation of the logos (translated as “word”), in part because all that we have said throughout this book about the principles of a covenantal apologetic (including the ten tenets) deals in some way with its message. The logos of persuasion focuses our attention on the actual arguments, including the content of those arguments, that we aim to present to a given audience.

In our trivium of theology, above, the first point that we set out was the foundational and basic (i.e., principial) status of God’s revelation in Holy Scripture. We will recall that it is just because of this status that persuasion can take its proper place in our covenantal defense of Christianity. If our apologetic did not include the principial status of Scripture, but instead saw the Bible as something the status of which needed to be rationally or evidentially proved, then the central place of persuasion would necessarily recede into the background.

Understood in this way—and this is undoubtedly how the Athenians would have understood it—we can begin to see Paul’s persuasive logos in his Mars Hill address. When Paul tells the Athenians that God has given pistis to all that judgment will come by his raising Christ from the dead, Paul is, in effect, saying that God’s rhetorical proof, God’s persuasive word, that all men will be judged is the resurrection of Christ.

Paul could have easily used other words for proof; there were others available to him. The use of pistis, however, was meant to move his hearers not simply to an abstract, cognitive conclusion, but, given its close connection with the Greek word for faith, and given its connotation of a whole-souled change of mind and heart (remember that pistis is most often translated as faith), Paul was making it clear that his listeners were responsible to commit themselves to his message. He was not interested in a syllogistic conclusion; he was intent that the Athenians would come to faith in Christ. Thus,

you say when someone says x?” will likely have many possible answers, since that question is abstract as it stands. A proper response requires a fuller pathos. What cannot change is the ethos and the logos of what we say. In any situation—apologetic or otherwise—we are meant to be holy as God himself is holy. And in any situation—apologetic or otherwise—we are meant, when the opportunities arise, to communicate that which is in and consistent with the Word of God. The pathos, however, calls forth from us the application of wisdom. We have to be able to take what we know and to apply it in the given situation we are in at that moment.