Covenantal Apologetics Quotes

“We know that when we speak the truth found in Christianity, we are automatically “connecting” that truth with the truth that God has given through his creation.4 No other religion makes that connection, since every other religion is a suppression of the truth.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“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. In that light, Kant hasn’t even broached the most basic truths of the Christian God.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“Just like Jesus’s earthly father, his heavenly Father is a carpenter. He is building a footstool for his Son”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“So the mystery that is God’s character is not utter darkness at all. It is a mystery that has as its expression, for us, the revelation of God’s character and the work of God in creation and in redemption. What God has revealed himself to be, in creation and redemption, in his Son and in his Word, is exactly who he is in himself. He is more than what he has revealed, but he is not contradictory to what he has revealed. There is mystery, but there is also real knowledge and not utter darkness. To be sure, the triune God is and will always remain incomprehensible. But what he has made known to us is exactly (though not comprehensively) who he is.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“We do believe that God is one God in three persons. That is indeed a mystery. We do not know how God can be the kind of tripersonal God that he is. We have no experience of such things, neither do we have a rational principle that can exhaustively comprehend it. But we need not have such if we base what we know on his revelation to us. You see, since God’s revelation reveals himself, and his will is a part of that self-revelation (not, as in Islam, disconnected from him), we can, therefore, affirm God’s character as triune (as well as his will) without destroying the rational or the empirical. It is the rational and empirical that are, themselves, revelatory of that character. And it is his spoken Word that tells us what his character is like. We see, then, the rational and the empirical through the lenses of what he has spoken in Scripture.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“Unbelief cannot sustain itself; it is unable to make sense of the facts, many of which are the most obvious facts of the world; it assumes, rather than shows, that there is no God, that the world is not created by him, that his character is not obvious in creation, and so on. Then it proceeds to argue its case not by attempting to support those assumptions, but simply by assuming them and then arguing as if the assumptions themselves are, or must be, universal if one is to be “rational.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“Since, however, a covenantal apologetic affirms Scripture as foundational, it will be obvious to us that it is Scripture’s content that must be highlighted as the primary and preeminent logos of persuasion. The content of our discourse and all of its arguments must have its genesis in Scripture. What we wish to communicate, in other words, as the logos of persuasion, is the logos, or Word, of God himself, and ultimately God’s Word made flesh, who is the Lord Jesus Christ.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“In Adam we will, even if it kills us, do all that we can to avoid what is patently and clearly made obvious to us by God himself.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“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”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“So it is also that in the act of knowing, to the extent that we know something truly, we know it as created, that is, as having its origin and its sustaining existence in God. 7 To claim to know something while thinking it to be independent of God (or to deny that there is a God) is to fail to know it for what it really is. Whatever it is, it is created and sustained by God at every moment.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“In creating man, God voluntarily determined, at the same time, to establish a relationship with him. That relationship is properly designated a covenant; it is established unilaterally by God, and it places obligations on man with respect to that relationship. It comes to man by virtue of God’s revelation, both in the world, defined here as every created thing, and in his spoken word. This has sweeping implications for apologetics. Given that all men are in covenant relationship to God, they are bound by that relationship to “owe obedience unto Him as their Creator.” That obligation of obedience comes by virtue of our being created—we were created as covenant beings. We are people who, by nature, have an obligation to worship and serve the Creator. That much has been true since the beginning.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“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.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“The lordship of Christ is basic to our defense of Christianity. Christ now reigns. He is Lord. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. That authority is the prerequisite to the command to make disciples. Without that authority, baptism and disciple making in and for the church are meaningless.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“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.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

“There really is no naked, simple gospel. It must be spoken in human language and argued carefully.”
― K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith