Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Sola Scriptura

  • A Response to Jeremiah Bannister (paleocrat)

    I will be responding to this post  – http://jeremiahbannister.com/?p=154 – which is written in response to my post here – https://choosinghats.org/2012/11/canon-and-roman-catholicism.

    Justin Scheiber of Reasonable Doubts recently linked to one of my posts on the canon of Scripture. I do not really have a way of following Justin, although I did notice an announcement that he is available for speaking engagements and debates. Perhaps one day he will debate me, but I am not holding my breath. In any event, Justin linked to me, and Jeremiah Bannister followed that link. Bannister is better known as “paleocrat.”

    Some of you …

  • A Brief History of Covenantal Apologetics

    From In Antithesis, Vol. 1 No. 1 September, 2011

    The covenantal apologetic method is that method of defending the faith prescribed and described in Scripture. In order to avoid an obvious anachronism one might more properly speak of Scripture setting forth the foundation for the method which would later become known as “covenantal apologetics.”

    Some of the texts of Scripture traditionally used to support the contention above include Proverbs and other wisdom literature, Acts 17, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 1, Colossians 1, and Ephesians 2, though many other texts appear in the relevant literature.

    Rudimentary versions of covenantal apologetics …

  • The “Self-Attestation” of Scripture (Part 1)

    People (and I mean believers and unbelievers alike) are generally confused about the so-called “self-attestation” of Scripture. Let’s think about the concept of self-attestation outside of the context of Scripture.

    To “attest” is to declare that something is the case. For example, “The sky appears to be blue.”

    Now consider another example, “This sentence appears on a website.” The sentence declares something to be the case. But its declaration is about itself. The sentence makes the claim that it appears on a website. In this sense it is self-attesting.

    Or consider one more example, “This sentence is true.” The …

  • Admitting the Possibility

    (4:50) “Please pray for us? It seems to me as though Joshua’s prayer leading up to this debate, and my prayer, are a bit different. I’ll let you follow his posts so that you can check that out. My prayer for the upcoming debate is not that what I think is the truth will in fact be made out to be true. Because I quite frankly admit the possibility that I might be wrong about this; I don’t think that I am, and I think that the Scripture is clearly in support of the position that I’ll be advancing. But

  • Perspicacity and Ignorance

    If I assert that there is a black cat in the closet, and you assert that nobody knows what is in the closet, you have virtually told me that I am wrong in my hypothesis. So when I tell Mr. Black that God exists, and he responds very graciously by saying that perhaps I am right since nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” he is virtually saying that I am wrong in my hypothesis. He is obviously thinking of such a god as could comfortably live in the realm of chance. But the God of Scripture cannot live in

  • Van Til, Kuyper, Calvin, Aquinas, Grace, the Donum Superadditum, and Immortality

    For the believers, Scripture is the principle of theology. As such it cannot be the conclusion of other premises, but it is the premise from which all other conclusions are drawn.

    From what has been said it is not to be concluded that Kuyper has no great appreciation of the knowledge of God that may be obtained from nature. The contrary is true. he lays the greatest possible stress upon the idea that the Bible is not a book that has fallen from heaven. There is a natural foundation for it. This natural foundation is found in the fact that

  • Book Recommendation: Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God

    4. What a folly and boldness is there in sin, since an eternal God is offended thereby! All sin is aggravated by God’s eternity. The blackness of the heathen idolatry was in changing the glory of the incorruptible God (Rom_1:23); erecting resemblances of him contrary to his immortal nature; as if the eternal God, whose life is as unlimited as eternity, were like those creatures whose beings are measured by the short ell of time, which are of a corruptible nature, and daily passing on to corruption; they could not really deprive God of his glory and immortality, but they

  • The Second Paragraph of The Fire That Consumes

    “In the public square, fire and brimstone are definitely out of vogue. Hell shows up in conversation often enough, but generally as an expletive rather than as a serious subject. Hell is not unique in this regard – the same can be said of Jesus Christ. More troubling than hell’s absence from secular society is its general disappearance from many Christian pulpits. Interestingly, although nearly all evangelical pastors and teachers firmly believe that Jesus will ‘come to judge the living and the dead,’ a considerable number of them cannot remember when they last preached or taught on the subject. Might

  • What Few Essentials

    Fudge: “It’s like any other subject that Christians differ about, among the realm of those who are confessing Jesus Christ as Lord; we have to make room for people to understand things differently, even if we think they’re mistaken.”

    Date: “As long as they don’t violate what few essentials there are to the Christian faith, right?”

    Fudge: “That’s right.”

  • Initial Thoughts on the Upcoming Debate

    I’m finding lots of commentary by folks who want to somehow separate the doctrine of the soul’s immortality from the doctrine of eternal punishment. Since, after all, we believe in Sola Scriptura, that necessarily includes “Tota Scriptura”, and the necessary relation of every doctrine to the others. This is a fundamental point of Reformed theology. No doctrine exists in isolation. The denial, or modification of one doctrine will quite necessarily have an effect on a host of others, due to the nature of Scripture, and the theology we affirm from it. In the introduction to Van Til’s Christian Theistic Evidences