Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics

By C.L. Bolt

• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics – Introduction
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 1 – There are two worldviews.
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 2 – Everyone has presuppositions.
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 3 – There is no neutrality.
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 4 – Evidence that Christianity is true.
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 5 – Arguments that Christianity is true.
• An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 6 – Arguments that Christianity is true refuted.
• An Informal Introduction to

By C.L. Bolt

What I endeavored to accomplish in the pieces preceding this post was not to provide an exhaustive account of all things presuppositional but to grant the readers a very basic level knowledge of Van Tillian presuppositionalism also known as Covenantal Apologetics without fancy terminology or at least with definitions when technical language was used. My hopes were to write something merely from memory as opposed to turning to sources and then collecting them in a Works Cited or Bibliography. I did not mean to go back and correct much of what I wrote or to answer objections …

By C.L. Bolt

Non-Christians suppress the truth in unrighteousness, distorting every fact. Unbelievers are both spiritually and intellectually lost, believing themselves to be final authorities with respect to their own intellectual evaluations of the world. Yet in appealing to one’s own authority one appeals to a shifting foundation that certainly does not serve as a norm. Truth itself is relative in this scheme. The standards, purpose, meaning, motivation, etc. for reasoning are completely lost in this assumption of the possibility of thought independent of God. This series has sought to show in some detail how the creaturely mind asserting its …

By C.L. Bolt

Islam is much more similar to the Christian worldview than atheism or agnosticism. Some varieties of the non-Christian worldview are so much like the Christian worldview that they actually admit to borrowing from the Christian worldview, and Islam is one of these. Islam states that faith is the starting point and Muslims place their faith in the Bible “like” the Christian does (on the surface). When the Bible is claimed as the starting point by an unbelieving system of thought, how might we begin to answer that system?

Many Christians are unaware that Muslims claim that the …

By C.L. Bolt

Since Romans 1 teaches a universal belief in God, if the Christian world view is true, then agnosticism is contradictory and thus false. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that agnosticism is true, and the agnostic really does not know whether or not God exists:

If God exists, then everyone knows that God exists;
The agnostic does not know that God exists;
Therefore, God does not exist.

The agnostic’s position of agnosticism assumes at the outset that God does not exist. But this is atheism, not agnosticism. For agnosticism to both be agnosticism and not …

By C.L. Bolt

So much work has been done regarding atheism that one hesitates to add much more concerning it in an introduction to covenantal apologetics. The atheist must be pressed for consistency in every area, and her inconsistencies immediately pointed out. The problems of skepticism described in this series are so easily applied to atheism that those new to this method of apologetics sometimes mistakenly think that the method is only applicable to atheism.

The atheist will mockingly demand evidence for the existence of God all the while pretending as though she is neutral with respect to any evidence …

By C.L. Bolt

Polytheism posits that there are multiple entities which go by the label “god,” but these entities are often so much like humans that they do not merit the label. Positing all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful gods in the plural results in a number of contradictions between those attributes such that these conceptions typically only possess slightly above and beyond what humans possess in terms of knowledge, presence, and power. They are nothing like the God of the Bible. It is not difficult to see why, given what has been discussed in this series; polytheism fails to provide an account …