Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: Greg Bahnsen

  • Introduction to Apologetics Seminary Course

    Lord willing, I will be teaching AP8521 Introduction to Apologetics at the Huntsville, Alabama extension center for Birmingham Theological Seminary on Monday nights from 7:30-9:30pm starting in September. Please find more details at http://birminghamseminary.org/ and pass this information along to anyone you know who is interested and lives in the area!…

  • Falsificationism And Christianity

    Another difficulty with religious language (and hence, Christianity) that non-religious people have concerns itself with “falsifiability,” or the aspect of any claim which states it must, in principle at least, be capable of subjecting to certain scientific criteria by which it can conceivably be proven false, in order to be considered meaningful. Like Verificationism, Falsificationism assumes an empiricist worldview, and so is subject immediately to some of the criticisms of Verificationism, including for instance, the seeming arbitrariness of the foundational principles undergirding it. Falsificationism was articulated as a way to circumvent the problems inherent in Verificationism. While Karl Popper …

  • 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. …

  • Pat Mefford on Multi-Valued Logic as an Objection to the Impossibility of the Contrary

    Introduction

    I will be responding to this post – http://servileconformist.typepad.com/servile-conformist/2012/12/can-presuppositional-apologists-account-for-logic-.html#

    Atheist Pat Mefford offers a rather ingenious means of getting around the transcendental method as used in covenantal apologetics. Now, I know Pat, so let me begin with a bit of friendly ad hominem. The argument of Pat’s post strikes me as illustrating the dangers of familiarity with a little bit of philosophy and a lot more sin. Pat proposes non-classical views of logic (in some cases held by an extreme minority of philosophers) in an attempt to overturn a presuppositional apologetic argument. Frankly, if that is the best …

  • Presuppositionalists Are Too Negative

    Transcendental arguments are traditionally used in response to skepticism. See Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Strawson, Grayling, and Stern.

    Transcendental argument in Van Til and Bahnsen is likewise a response to skepticism. They were not arguing for skepticism, they were arguing against it. It just so happens that the only answer to skepticism is the Christian worldview.

    Presuppositional apologists often appear to argue for skepticism because their opponents attempt to respond to it through rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatic schools of thought. But it is unreasonable to assume, given the evidence, that any of these three general responses to skepticism really works.

    Thus …

  • Jamin Hubner Reviews “Biblical Apologetics” By Clifford McManis

    http://www.realapologetics.org/blog/2012/11/20/review-of-clifford-mcmaniss-biblical-apologetics/…

  • 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

    …

  • 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 …

  • 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 …