Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: Cornelius Van Til

  • 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

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  • 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

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  • Robinson Reviews McManis’ Biblical Apologetics

    Mike Robinson, the prolific book reviewer, presuppositional author and blogger, reviews Clifford McManis’ introductory offering, Biblical Apologetics: Advancing and Defending the Gospel of Christ.

    See Chris’ take here (and make sure you read the comments!).…

  • 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

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  • Chris Date Receives Bad Advice

    Chris Date (not to be confused with Chris Bolt!) is an annihilationist who will be debating Choosing Hats contributor RazorsKiss on the following resolution: “The final punishment of the risen wicked will be annihilation, the permanent end to the conscious existence of the entire person.”

    See for example:

    https://choosinghats.org/2012/04/debate-annihilationism-with-chris-date

    https://choosinghats.org/2012/04/initial-thoughts-on-the-upcoming-debate

    https://choosinghats.org/2012/04/against-heresies

    When I came home tonight I saw a trackback to a post where Date quotes what is in his words some of the “best advice” he has received concerning the upcoming debate:

    http://www.theopologetics.com/2012/04/10/some-of-the-best-advice-ive-received

    I am not familiar with Date. I do not intend to be rude. However, Date …

  • 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…

  • Carl Trueman on The Unintended Reformation

    Check this link out. See if you catch what I found most interesting about the whole discussion. See any familiar subjects, Van Til readers?…

  • Point of Contact and Human Reason

    It’s quite common to find the following objections made – just check out who is answering them as well as giving them for consideration.

    What has been said up to this point may seem to be discouraging in the extreme. It would seem that the argument up to this point has driven us to a denial of any point of contact whatsoever with the unbeliever. Is it not true that men must have some contact with the truth if they are to receive further knowledge of it? If men are totally ignorant of the truth, how can they even become

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  • Some thoughts on the upcoming debate

    In my preparations for the debate on Sunday, and in dealing with the quite providential example Paul Copan gave us last week of the importance of the subject, I felt it might be valuable to give a few impressions I’ve had along the way. My opening statement has been written for a week or so now – prior to Dr. Copan’s comments, in fact – and my first thought after reading it was this. I wouldn’t change anything I had to say. First, because Dr. Copan’s comments weren’t anything we hadn’t seen before. Second, because I’m giving a positive presentation …

  • Questioning Copan

    The Gospel Coalition is running a series on apologetics, and today’s entry was by Paul Copan, entitled “Questioning Presuppositionalism”. What struck me, while reading his take on the subject, was how superficial and inaccurate it was. He introduces Van Til, and then says that Gordon Clark supposedly “generally followed” his methodology, along with Bahnsen and Frame, and then called it “variegated”. Well, given that he’s simply wrong concerning Clark, and that Frame consciously departed from Van Til as well, I’d supposed that’s an assumption guaranteed to result in a certain conclusion, wouldn’t you? It is not the case that …