Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Series

  • Peripatetic 8

    Is it consistent to be involved in youth ministry as well as CA?  I address this assertion sans argument in a short edition.…

  • Mr. White, Mr. Grey and Mr. Black VIII

    It’s been quite a while since there’s been a post in this series, hasn’t it? I apologize for the delay! This post will continue the discussion we left off in the last post, and pick up on the same page.

    Of course, what Mr. Black is doing appears very reasonable to himself. “Surely,” he says, if questioned at all on the subject, “a rational man must have a systematic coherence in his experience. Therefore he cannot accept as true anything that is not in accord with the law of noncontradiction. So long as you leave your God in the realm

    …

  • The Creator/Creature Distinction and Objections

    In our last post we looked at the centrality of the Creator/creature distinction to Christian theology, and to our apologetic. With this post, I’d like to look at the importance of it in regards to objections offered and our response to them. These objections can come in a variety of forms – the so-called problem of evil, the supposed “evil god” objections, objections to Scriptural tenets, or what have you. At bottom, however, I’d advance the theory that they all boil down to a denial of God’s transcendence. Why do I say this?

    At bottom, every objection that is offered …

  • The Centrality of the Creator/creature distinction

    As we spoke about in the last post, there seems to be a strangely persistent notion that emphasizing an actual distinction between the thought of God and man is a mistake. I’d like to add that there is a similar notion, despite lip-service to the concept, that emphasizing the transcendence of God in any sense is likewise considered to be a mistake of some kind. In my experience, this often stems from the fact that men are simply uncomfortable with God being absolutely other – and as such, not to be confused with anything they would be familiar with. While …

  • The Creator Creature Distinction

    There seems to be a strangely persistent notion that the insistence on an actual distinction between the thought of God and man is a mistake of some sort. That emphasizing that “My thoughts are higher than your thoughts” is somehow a bad thing, when it comes to not only the scope of those thoughts, but the nature of those thoughts. If God is, indeed, infinite, timeless, immutable and omniscient, along with all of the rest of who and what He is, it seems to be readily apparent that there is something, well… distinct… about the very nature of God’s thinking. …

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (10 of 10)

    I began this series with the claim that covenantal (or more popularly, “presuppositional”) apologetics are on the rise. I noted that I don’t have hard evidence that there are any more people now who know what presuppositional apologetics are than there were people who knew what they were ten years ago. However, I have spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with the method and its practitioners and feel confident in asserting that there are. My stated goal in writing this series was to provide an explanation of the aforementioned phenomenon. The series consists of my observations regarding why …

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (9 of 10)

    In my previous post for this series I provided a list of covenantal apologetic links. As mentioned in that post, a number of sites were likely left out. Like the previous post, this post will no doubt leave much to be desired in terms of how exhaustive it is. There are now enough new covenantal apologetics books coming out that it is difficult to list them all in a post like this one.

    Years ago books like Every Thought Captive and Apologetics to the Glory of God were, other than books by Cornelius Van Til, just about the only thing …

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (8 of 10)

    (Links in this post are temporarily down.)

    Today I met with another presuppositionalist for lunch. The Internet is where I first heard about him and wrote to him and eventually I was able to meet him in person. There have been at least a dozen other presuppositionalists I have met in like manner. I feared for my life in only about half of those meetings. The Internet has made it possible to have presuppositional discussions with people I would otherwise have never known exist.

    “The Internet” is an obvious answer to the question of what major factors have …

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (7 of 10)

    Sye TenBruggencate is the man responsible for restoring my confidence in a presuppositional method of apologetics. He is also responsible for introducing the method to countless other Christians who have heard his debates and seen his website.

    The popularity of Sye TenBruggencate seems to have skyrocketed following his appearance on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable where he debated atheist Paul Baird. But Sye has been around for quite some time. Those in presuppositionalist circles knew him from his unique proofthatgodexists.org website long before it hit the public eye.

    Sye writes:

    I’m 48 years old, single, and live in Ontario, Canada. I was

    …

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (6 of 10)

    One of the largest contributing factors to the recent rise of covenantal apologetics is, oddly enough, the response of its anti-Christian critics.

    Just in the last year or two, podcast after atheistic podcast has trumpeted everything from mere disdain for to the utter defeat of presuppositional apologetics. Podcasts that come to mind are Fundamentally Flawed, Skepticule Record, and Reasonable Doubts. There are others. Militant atheists are also mouthy atheists. On the one hand, they want to dismissively scoff at covenantal apologetics, making up some of the worst puns on “presuppositionalism” you have ever heard. On the other …