Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Convos, Observations, and Quotes

  • Going Deeper

    In our last post, we examined Philippians 1 as a bit of a survey, and covered some high points and contextual issues. Now I want to dig a little more into the text and bring out some points in higher relief. We started the post with the observation that neither Rome nor the health and wealth preachers are possessors of the Biblical Gospel. Rome, in particular, makes enough additions and subtractions to make the Judaizers look like amateur heretics. We then made the connection with the term “Evangelical” – which essentially means “those who are about the Gospel”. We hear …

  • A House of Mirrors

    Fristianity, as I’m sure you all know, is a hypothetical, or stipulated worldview which putatively provides the same “account” for all things whatsoever despite the addition of “just one thing” to the worldview. In other words, it is, in the words of Choi, “otherwise identical” to Christianity. In this post it might be apropos to note that there is a variety of “flavors” to “the” Fristianity objection. Sometimes, within the same objection, there are multiple “flavors”, sometimes contradictory flavors, offered simultaneously. The continuing discussions on our facebook page and in our comments illustrate this point rather clearly. Both Chris …

  • Aseity and Possibility

    From this attribute of God, he has one of his names, “Shaddai”, which signifies, who is sufficient, or all-sufficient; of which see Chapter 3. Three things may be observed under this attribute.

    1. That God is a self-sufficient Being, and needs not anything from without himself to support himself, or to make himself happy. He is the “first” of Beings, the first and the last; before him there was no God formed, nor will be any after him; from everlasting to everlasting he is God; and therefore his existence is not owing to any; nor has he received any assistance

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  • Doppelganger theism

    Ben Askins commented on a podcast done by RazorsKiss about Fristianity styled counters. I’m going to post my own responses here, and work out some of the ways we think about these kinds of objections.

    “The Fristianity objection is calculated to consider the assertion of the Trinity as the resolution of the “one-and-many problem,” in consideration of the strong modal claim in Greg Bahnsen’s formulation of a transcendental argument (i.e. “God is the *necessary* precondition for X” where X is some moral, metaphysical or epistemic given.).

    So step [1] with respect to Fristianity would require presenting reasons why a trinitarian …

  • Peripatetic 10 – Consistency of Theology and Apologetic

    Is what you believe, what you preach, and what you defend consistent with itself?…

  • The Issue of Authority – God Speaking

    C. Michael Patton’s recent posts, in his own words, look a whole lot like “I am shooting myself in the foot.” He rejects this characterization, of course – but as we have seen in my own posts responding to his over the last couple years, we have an entirely different view of the issues of certainty, and doubt. This recent series, of course, shows where this difference arises from – a different doctrine of Scripture. See, there’s a significant difference between the generally evangelical doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and the historic Reformed doctrine. Dr. White, TurretinFan, and I all …

  • An Experiential Apologetic

    Quite often, we hear the claim “I came to faith through evidence” – with the conclusion being, of course, that evidentialism must be a valid form of apologetic methodology. How would you answer such a claim for yourself?

    First, there is the confusion of “system” with “element.” Evidence is not evidentialism. The two are massively different things. Evidentialism is distinguishable (in some ways) from classicalism, and in a host of ways from presuppositionalism. These differences, of course, are not on the level of “which things in this world that get talked about in …

  • The List of Non-Essentials Just Keeps on Growing

    Subtitled: What a “Mere” Christianity does to orthodoxy.

    C. Michael Patton is one of the people I use to illustrate points, with great frequency. The reason I do so is due to the fact that he is out to do essentially the same sort of thing we are doing – but from a vastly different perspective, theologically. As such, his teaching can be clearly contrasted with our own.

    I realize that posts such as these have the potential to create quite a bit of heat and get me in a lot of trouble. As well, I don’t really want to

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  • The Cat Is Out Of The Bag

    I was pointed to a statement made by Matt Oxley (aka Raging Rev..) and it seems that he’s caught on to our Christian secrets…

     

     

    “I suspect, and I might be wrong, that History‘s The Bible mini-series might be one of the best things for atheism to happen in a long time. As the Bible is actively read by some 16% of Christians this is giving millions an opportunity to see parts of the cannon that are morally objectionable attributed to their god.

     

     

    After all of these years of successfully hiding those parts of the bible …

  • Peripatetic 9 – Fristianity Style Counters

    Some people think Fristianity is a “Silver Bullet” objection to Covenantal Apologetics. Are they correct?…