Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: Scripture

  • You Didn’t Build That

    You wake up in the middle of a cornfield.

    You sit up and rub your eyes, and then you look around. Instinctively, you stand up and start walking. As you push your way through thousands of stalks you suddenly find yourself in a small clearing, a row of flattened corn stalks. Considering you’ve been navigating through fully grown, standing stalks, as far as you’re concerned this clearing is nothing short of odd. You continue on past the clearing, back into the stalks, and a minute later you find yourself in another clearing, this one sort of curved. After a half …

  • Stockholm Syndrome And Sympathizing With Sinners

    We are an imperfect people. We believe God is perfect, and that He is perfecting us, conforming us to Christ’s image, who is perfect. But until we are perfected, we are sinners. We live in a world with limited privacy, and as such many of our mistakes are in public view. We profess there is a standard by which men should live, and yet sometimes we fail miserably to live by that very standard. Often, those who aren’t Christians are watching our lives, scrutinizing us, to see whether what we profess is true. When we stumble, we’re called out, and …

  • On God’s “Evil” Actions

    Probably one of the most common objections to Christianity that we hear is one that relates to the Problem of Evil. While the problem of evil asks, “How can an Omnipotent, Good God exist with evil in the world,” this particular one asks, “How can God be ‘good’ if he has done all these evil things?” Men will object to Christianity saying that God has done evil things. And from this they conclude God either doesn’t exist, or if he does exist he is not worth believing.

    We answer the former problem by demonstrating from the Bible that the …

  • Problems With Authority in Classical and Evidentialist Apologetics

    To the extent that attempts are made in order to distinguish between the “evidentialist” and “classical” schools of apologetics, in an effort to salvage the “classical” method, these distinctions nevertheless fail to dodge the criticisms leveled at evidentialism by Van Tilian presuppositionalists. It shouldn’t strike us as very coincidental that the problem presuppositionalists have with the classical/evidentialist methods primarily concerns the presuppositions of these methods. Furthermore, that practitioners of either the classical or evidentialist methods borrow aspects from presuppositionalism (which I would argue is inevitable as long as the practitioner is at least to some extent devoted to sola scriptura…

  • The Bankruptcy of Skepticism and the Glory of God

    Christianity is a naturally offensive truth. Not that it offends, but it exposes the offense that is part of the human condition and dares to hold humans responsible. The sinful nature of man, such as it is, detests any effort of the person who would dare to point at that nature and speak about it for what it is. The rebellious man has knowledge of his Creator because it is in the Creator’s image that he has been created. What the Creator of everything calls “truth” involves every single minute, meticulous detail of reality as we know it. Indeed it …

  • When Contra Munda isn’t All About You

    Back in the third century of the church, as I’m sure some of our readers are aware, there was a bishop named Athanasius – his tenacious defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, in opposition to the swiftly growing heresy of Arianism gave rise to the statement “Athanasius contra mundum” – Athanasius against the world. In a sense, this wasn’t quite true – there were other defenders of the Trinity around, but none so prolific, and none who were targeted nearly so heavily as Athanasius, who was ejected from his church five times, and was only vindicated after his death. …

  • 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 …

  • Why do we expect the future to be like the past?

    Why do we expect the future to be like the past?

    “Because in the past, the future has always been like the past.”

    This response begs the question. It assumes the very point to be proven. In the past the future has always been like the past, yes, but why do we expect that in the future the future will be like the past?

    “We don’t know for certain that the future will be like the past.”

    This response misrepresents the question. It assumes the question is asking about certainty with respect to the future. But the question …

  • Some Questions for Matt Oxley

    Matt Oxley describes himself as a “former Christian helping others work through the battle of a lost faith.” One aspect of his mission is “to promote intelligent discussion.” So he won’t mind my probing a bit concerning his claim, “I’m a former Christian.”

    Recall Scripture states, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2.19) Recently a professing Christian cited this verse for Matt. The implication …