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February 9, 2020 - April 28, 2023
The Bible is authoritative not because we accept it as such, but because it is the word of the risen Lord. It has a claim on all people. Its truth is the truth for every person in every place. Why, then, would we be reluctant to communicate that truth in our apologetics? Perhaps because we have not reckoned with the actual lordship of Christ. Perhaps we haven’t really set him apart as Lord in our hearts.
Facts don’t care about your feeling
reality is what God says it is.
What we dare not do in a covenantal apologetic is let the enemy choose the weapon.
When I tell you a story story about a burglar
There is a burglar armed with a gun who tries to rob a man on the street he says the usual stick them Up give me all your money to which the man being Burgled replies I’m sorry no I don’t believe in guns the burglar taken aback by the response put his gun away and leaves to try and find someone else to burgle who does believe it guns
“destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
The difference with apologetics, however, is that it necessarily deals with a relationship between Christian faith and unbelief
doctrines—especially the doctrines of God, Christ, sin, and salvation—relate
In
apologetics is biblically to answer challenges that come to Christ...
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(1) be Christian and (2) have a theological foundation.
Kuhnian
death of a thousand qualifications.
Westminster Confession of Faith 7.1, “Of God’s Covenant with Man”: The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto Him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which He has been pleased to express by way of covenant.
not be interpreted as primarily spatial.
ontological
(WCF 2.1).
condescension
Creator and the creature.
He did not have to create,
In creating man, God voluntarily determined, at the same time, to establish a relationship with him. That relationship is properly designated a covenant;
owe obedience unto Him as their Creator.”
But there was still a relationship. It is not that man ceased to be a covenant creature after the fall. He was still responsible to God to obey and worship him.
(Rom. 1:18–23),
This was in part Calvin’s point in beginning the Institutes as he did. “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” 6 There can be no separation between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.
We are at war with our true identity. Always and everywhere in covenant relationship with God our Creator, we seek the utterly impossible and unobtainable; we seek autonomy.
Even as we begin to ask some probing questions, though, we cannot simply accept the unbeliever’s self-diagnosis, as if in his sin he is able and willing to assess his own condition accurately.
It will not do, then, for the apologist simply to start on the Yellow Brick Road with his unbelieving friend and assume that it will lead to Kansas. Once one begins on a make-believe road, it can only lead to more of the same; one cannot leave the land of Oz by taking a road that is, in its entirety, within Oz. The only way back to the real world of Kansas is to get off the road altogether and change the mind-set that trusted in the Yellow Brick Road in the first place.
transcendental.
And there is the real world, the world where the triune God reigns, controlling whatsoever comes to pass—even the unbelieving position itself. This apologetic approach, then, tries to make obvious both the presuppositions of the unbelieving position itself and the covenantal presuppositions that are at work in order to challenge the unbelieving position at its root. In that sense, it is a radical (from radix, “root”) approach. It attempts as much as possible to get to the root of the problematic position.
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
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Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, made the notions of paradigms and presuppositions much more commonplace than they were before.
(1 Pet. 3:15),
It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of this truth.
(Phil. 2:1–10).
(Ex. 3:14),
aseity
(cf. Acts 17:25).
(John 8:57–59).
Genesis 3:8,
Here the Logos-revelation is actually mediated through the subjective life which man in dependence on the Logos possesses. The life here naturally produces the light. The meaning here is . . . that the life which man receives carries in itself and of itself kindles in him, the light of the knowledge of God 8
Psalm 110 (the most quoted psalm in the entire New Testament). How can it be, we could ask, that the One who was from the beginning, who identifies himself with the “I AM” of Exodus 3, who is himself “the LORD” throughout the Old Testament, could be made Lord by God?
Philippians 2:6–11.
Heb. 1:1–4; Revelation 5).
“fruition”
(1) A perfect being is not subject to change. (2) A perfect being knows everything. (3) A being that knows everything always knows what time it is. (4) A being that always knows what time it is is subject to change. (5) A perfect being is therefore subject to change. (6) A perfect being is therefore not a perfect being. (7) Ergo there is no perfect being.
