Someone pointed me to the following quote on facebook yesterday:
The Baptist is inherently an evidentialist. They must look to subjective always changing evidence to prove covenant membership.
A Presbyterian assumes an objective, universal standard for membership that can be known with certainty.
A Baptist cannot claim certainty.
Granted, this is a non-sequitur in its own right as it stands. It seems to be a post meant to start what those of us who have been around Internet discussions a while call a “flame war” about the subject of baptism in some purported presuppositionalist sub-group. I choose to ignore that for now to address something else entirely.
I want to address the seeming conflation between having certainty on the one hand and being uncertain on the other; where the implication is that being uncertain “makes one inherently an evidentialist.”
1. Contributor C. L. Bolt addressed the confusion regarding Van Til’s argument and the certainty/uncertainty dilemma on May 20, of 2012.
2. The idea of certainty assumed by the quotation is much more inline with the scripturalism of Clark and Cheung than Van Til.
3. Evidentialism is not simply making judgements from evidence. If this facebook poster were to be consistent in maintaining that the use of looking at evidence and making a judgement was evidentialism, then the command to judge prophets (though the use of prophet in Matthew 7:15-20 is a very broad sense meaning anyone who speaks for Christ, i.e. preachers, teachers, evangelists, etc.) on what they produce in the living of their lives would make each and every Christian an evidentialist by divine command. I doubt the poster would accept such a proposition.
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