Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Convos, Observations, and Quotes

  • Convert Syndrome

    Dr. White has a nice description for a certain problem you can find in just about every walk of life. “New Convert Syndrome.” There are quite a few people, who having left their former beliefs, make their names on a reputation of being an “expert” on those former beliefs in a systematic sense. Now, in some cases, this claim to expertise is warranted. They really did have extensive and systematic training and experience in teaching or expounding those beliefs. Others, on the other hand, had only the most superficial of training, and did little or no exposition of those beliefs …

  • Chasing the System

    Imagine your confession of faith, or your church’s doctrinal statement. Imagine what would happen if you started to play mix and match with the statements contained in it. This is a site dedicated to presuppositional apologetics, obviously, which almost inevitably means that we have to, at some point, personally examine our stance on things like Reconstructionism/Theonomy, along with confessionalism, the paedo/credo divide, eschatology, and other issues along those lines. Here’s what I want to point out, and want to stand out. Be wary of sudden swings, and be mindful of your theological stability (or lack thereof). This is a “mixed” …

  • Application and Practicality

    There seems to be, at least in my experience, a common objection to Covenantal apologetics that goes something like this. Emphasizing all of these arcane and/or obscure concepts, focusing on theology proper; it just doesn’t address the real world practically. There is no application to be made – it’s all theoretical. There are a few variants, and I’ll bring up a couple. First, the objection is made that we are being “obscure” – Bahnsen, as you may know, addresses this in “Always Ready,” along with an admonishment against “obscurantist arrogance.” Here’s an excerpt.

    “In the last study we heard three

    …

  • “How To Speak and Write Postmodern”

    Although postmodernism is losing ground in the academic world, it has trickled down to us at the layman and student level, and it seems to be trying to camp there. So instead of scholars debating it, most don’t take it seriously anymore, and for good reason. However, it’s free game to your average college student taking introductory philosophy, soon after the realization that they don’t really believe the faith their parents professed.

    That being said, I was linked to a satire by Stephen Katz,  who is a Professor of Sociology, at Trent University and thought it would be appropriate. It …

  • Why I Believe

    I was in an conversation in our chat room the other day with an atheist – one that I thought was a total waste of time, until a friend of mine suggested I review my side of the conversation and encouraged me to post it as a synopsis of why I am a Christian, and what our method of apologetics “looks like” to the outside world.
    The result is the attached PDF. Hopefully it will be of some benefit to you as you think about why it is that you believe, and how to best share that with others.

    Why …

  • Evangelical Textual Criticism’s Top Ten Essential Works List

    Over at Evangelical Textual Criticism they have compiled a Top Ten Essential Works list for textual criticism.

    Check it out here: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.se/2012/09/top-ten-essential-works-in-new.html…

  • Theology Still Matters

    Even in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, such as the Aurora shootings (Alan’s comments about whether comments on it should still be going on aside), there are common themes in responses to tragedy, and what answers you have to give concerning it. As Dr. White is fond of saying – and I’m fond of repeating – theology matters, and your theology determines your apologetic. I had this story linked to me, earlier this evening. It sounds truly remarkable, and I appreciate that he related this story. What I didn’t appreciate, however, was the answer he had to give …

  • Trueman on Papal Authority

    [T]he rise, consolidation and definition of papal power is an historically very complex issue; and, indeed, as scholarship advances, the story becomes more, not less, convoluted and subversive of papal claims. For some converts to Roman Catholicism, papal authority is somehow seen as an obvious riposte to problems with the perspicuity of scripture. In other words, it is the answer to an epistemological/authority problem. For those of us who have spent the best part of our lives reading late medieval and early modern history, however, papal authority is not an epistemological solution to much of anything at all; rather, it

    …

  • On an Apologetic for Doubt

    C. Michael Patton is hardly my favorite blogger, as you might have guessed by now. The reason I have him in my RSS feed is because the sorts of things he typically says are symptomatic of what is wrong with most of non-confessional “Calvinism.” What I’ve dealt with most from him, of course, is the subject of “doubt”. The subject of doubt, for some reason, seems to be a fascination with Mr. Patton. As one who is focused on the apologetic implications of theological stances, his “advice” on this subject often horrifies me. Case in point: “On Talking to …

  • One Less God?

    With the recent controversy over McFormtist’s recent post, I figured this video might be a good reminder that this subject is nothing new, nor does it lack a prior context. Ignoring this context does nothing to advance the discussion, nor does a simple mention of Roman references to Christians as “atheists” get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that the claim being expressed is, at base, an appeal to neutrality which we both do not and cannot accept – an insistence on the equal footing of all “gods” where the atheist is rejecting …