Tag: Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics

By C.L. Bolt

The apparent implication of some of what we have said is that there is some sort of relativism with respect to objective arguments. Whether or not arguments have true premises, are valid, etc. appears to be completely dependent upon one’s worldview. But the Christian will want to reject this relativism! Of course, we are not proposing that the unbeliever is right to view things as she does, and there is objective truth. But it must be understood very clearly that when we are speaking to people we are dealing with entire worldviews and presuppositions that are completely …

By C.L. Bolt

The answer to the enslavement of the unbeliever to anti-Christian presuppositions is not to throw up one’s hands and walk away. It is true, very true, that the Holy Spirit must regenerate the unbeliever in order to give her new presuppositions. None but the Holy Spirit can persuade. As they say, no apologetic argument has ever converted anyone, and this much is true.

But there is a very real sense in which apologetic argument has served to convert people. We might want to think of this whole touchy matter in terms of reason and cause. There are …

By C.L. Bolt

Objections to the evidence and traditional proofs for the existence of God or truth of Christianity or whatever other Christian tenet is in question are rejected or at any rate called into question by the unbeliever because of their fatalities and weaknesses in terms of the arguments themselves. Some are rejected simply due to persuasion; they are not persuasive to unbelievers. There is, after all, a difference between proof and persuasion. One can offer a perfectly sound proof and yet still have people who are not persuaded by it. The unbeliever has generally valid complaints with respect …

By C.L. Bolt

Believers often take traditional proofs for the existence of God and other evidences as proving much more than they were intended or take them to function apologetically when the proofs may have never been originally intended to function that way. We believe in any given Christian tenet because that is what the Word of God says, and not upon the basis of any piece of reasoning or natural theology alone. Natural theology here just means some piece of reasoning or argument that is based off of observations of the world around us or some other a priori…

By C.L. Bolt

There are many arguments that Christian tenets are true. For example, we believe that everything that begins to exist has a reason for its coming into being. Intuitively we believe that something cannot come from nothing, and so everything that comes about must have a cause for its coming into being. If there were no conditions to be met through a cause before something could start existing, then it seems that things would pop into being right away and saturate the entire universe with entities of all shapes and sizes. We are impressed by performing arts magicians …

By C.L. Bolt

Sometimes presuppositionalists place so much emphasis upon presuppositions that others think we must assume that evidence is just useless. While it is not useless, sometimes evidence simply will not convince people that their position is wrong. This is because their presuppositions prevent them from taking some evidence seriously. For example, Jesus told a story where a man was told that even if someone should rise from the dead, the man’s family would not believe. Instead, the man’s family had Moses and the prophets. Not even the evidence of the miracle of a person raised from the dead …

By C.L. Bolt

Presuppositions are held firmly at the very most basic level of thought and are what people use to make decisions regarding evidence. Not only do we all have presuppositions that we approach evidence with, but these presuppositions disallow neutrality. Putting together everything we have learned so far, we see that there are two worldviews, the Christian and the non-Christian, and that within the non-Christian worldview there are variations or manifestations which we label appropriately. All of these manifestations are simply variations on the one theme of the rejection of the Christian worldview. They are all predicated upon …

By C.L. Bolt

Presuppositions are beliefs that people take to be the case as they come to some other belief or piece of evidence. A person who comes to the barber shop with a credit card and wants a haircut presupposes that the barber shop accepts credit cards as a means of payment. Note that presuppositions might be true or false in this sense. To ”presuppose” something is to “suppose” that something “beforehand;” “pre-suppose.”

People have all sorts of presuppositions as you can likely imagine. However when we speak of presuppositions in this treatment of covenantal apologetics we will speak …

By C.L. Bolt

There are only two worldviews. Within these two worldviews, or at any rate within one of them, is a whole plethora of other entities usually referred to as wordviews. A worldview is a network of presuppositions, beliefs, concepts, ideas, etc. through which an individual or individuals view the world. Every person has a worldview; every person has a network of presuppositions and beliefs by which he or she views the world. By viewing the world here I mean thinking in terms of what is right and wrong, good and bad, logical and illogical, sensical and nonsensical, worthwhile …

By C.L. Bolt

What I endeavor to accomplish in the following pieces is 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 is used. My hopes are to write something merely from memory as opposed to turning to sources and then collecting them in a Works Cited or Bibliography. I don’t mean to go back and correct much of what I write or to answer objections that people might …