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Christian Apologetics – The Necessity of Christ

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:53:05 GMT

Why was Christ necessary? The question might seem simple enough. Most Protestants might answer that we couldn’t save ourselves from our sins so he had to come to save us. The Romanist view differs in that Christ had to come to pay part and we had to pay part. Less-thoughtful Protestants and Catholics don’t have a clue why he was necessary. Really, it's the truth. Thoughtful Protestants might give a more refined view along the lines of Systematic Theology and penal substitution.

Van Til’s section on Christology starting on page 46 would seem to place him squarely in the Systematic Theology camp. This isn’t bad. He even integrates it with theological anthropology seamlessly within the context of presuppositional apologetics. That is to say that he points to Christ as Prophet, Priest and King where willful man assumes the role of prophet, priest and king for himself.

But one wonders presuppositionally whether the necessity of Christ is primarily due to man’s sin. In other words, was Van Til an infralapsarian? For the supralapsarian, God’s elect was part of the design of his creation. The infralapsarian holds that God’s election was made after the fall and therefore was not part of the original design of history.

So then if God’s election was infralapsarian, then Christ was necessary primarily for salvation. If God’s election was supralapsarian, then Christ’s work of salvation for the elect is necessary primarily as a revelation of God. That’s not to say that it wasn’t important for the salvation of the elect, for the necessity of Christ as a full revelation of the Father must entail the central point of his visible work – and indeed be the central revelation. Christ came to save the elect by design of all creation as the pinnacle of the revelation of the Creator.

For the record, I’m supralapsarian. Perhaps I’ll get into what the gospel of Christ reveals to us about God in some later article. The fact that Van Til doesn’t go into this here doesn’t really say anything about his -lapsarian views, but this is all about what I get out of reading Van Til rather than being a full exposé of what Van Til wrote here.

Depressive Realism – Undone By Truth

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:03:19 GMT

Isaiah was brought into the presence of the Lord. He issued his first prophecy against himself: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the a King, the Lord of hosts!” (Is. 6:5 ESV)

The King James translates it “Woe is me! For I am undone…”

So what kind of awful revelation is this that someone would be “lost” or “undone”? In Revelation 1:17, John describes himself as falling at his feet as though dead. God tells Moses in Exodus 33:20 that no man can see him and live.

Surely a true vision of the Almighty is a great revelation of him, an infusion of the knowledge of truth so tremendous that one is overcome with one’s own guilt, even to the point of death. There’s a reason God feeds truth to us slowly through the process of sanctification.

I recently heard of an interesting psychological proposition called Depressive Realism (DR). It’s contested, but research so far suggests that mildly depressed individuals have a higher sense of reality than optimistic people. The scope of the research is limited by equating the cynicism of depression with pessimism, or by ignoring pessimism altogether. I’m going to explain the research thus far by refining this understanding.

This fallen world is difficult. It’s dirty, hard and deadly. But we have the industrial intellect to make it more comfortable. We don’t have to dig with our hands. We don’t have to walk for miles to get where we need to. We have machines. At the end of the day, we’re not sleeping on a hard mat on the floor. We can kick back in out recliner and watch TV for a while. We don’t need to cook all day every day just to survive. We have instant food. Pop a pizza in the oven or a meal in the microwave oven. Then we can climb up on a mountain of foam and air and snuggle under thick covers to keep warm from our cold air conditioner.

But the fallen world is spiritually difficult. While we have medications to make the pain go away, we must still face reality. And the reality is that people are sinners. This means that everyone has a nature that works to keep us estranged from our Creator. Not only that but this nature works to keep us estranged from each other. We are even internally estranged from ourselves bearing psychological conflicts that we hardly understand.

But we have coping mechanisms that help us to not be completely undone. Pessimism is the act of weighing the negative heavily so that expectations are unreasonably low. This has the effect of making the world make sense and relieving internal conflicts. Expecting that other people are not to be trusted serves to justify treating them with friendly contempt. The fact that nothing anyone can do will please the pessimist allows the pessimist to blame others unreasonably. This is generally detrimental to the other person, but the pessimist doesn’t care. They happily go on their way having stirred up the trouble they figured was there to begin with.

The optimist, on the other hand, unreasonably expects great things of the world. They work hard to bring about healing and reconciliation that they would expect to see. They dive into constructive activities expecting great things and are pleased to have positive results that they can point to. They tend to ignore and avoid people and things they don’t understand because these things challenge their optimism. They like to deal with little pains that can be helped, but run from the big pains for which there appears to be no solution.

But reality is full of great pains. There is always the potential for great things to happen, but this is to be tempered with the fact that nothing in this world is perfect. No one loves perfectly. Nothing good happens without a struggle. There may be positive benefits from great difficulties, but we may not ever know what they are. In this way, the one who pursues a true understanding of the world may over time become depressed. We have a need for human contact. We have a need to feel useful. However, human contact is imperfect, and often exceptionally so. For most of us, the world wouldn’t notice if we were never here. We’re not important. We really don’t have much control over our lives.

Those who realize things like this can become mildly depressed. Unless tempered with positive experiences of quality fellowship, mild depression can yield a distortion of reality that becomes more severe over time. This distortion of reality is a falsely-weighted set of observations where the few positive experiences are all but ignored and the bulk of negative experiences are dwelt upon. Thus is the downward spiral of depressive conditioning.

So optimism, pessimism and severe depression all involve a denial of reality and true reality tends toward mild depression. Optimism and pessimism are otherwise healthy coping mechanisms while severe depression is the result of a lack of these coping mechanisms where good experiences are not normative.

We need, at the onset of any activity, some sense that the activity will likely turn out well either because we believe factors are positive or because we believe that things can turn out okay in spite of the belief that factors are negative. It doesn’t help to have the correct observation that whether factors are positive or factors are negative, we have little to no control over factors and therefore little to no control over the outcome. We are unimportant and people could care less because they are otherwise deluded.

In my previous post, I asked where the line was between initiative and presumptuousness. To some degree, initiative requires irrational presumption that is either optimistic or pessimistic. Depressive realism cannot yield initiative for there is no opportunity for which we know the outcome aside from what God has specifically revealed to us.

In this vein Isaiah, Paul, Moses, David, Mary and Joseph, Peter, John and many others took their cues from specific revelation. The problem is that we don't seem to have these revelations these days. So does that mean that we shouldn't do anything? Of course not. We have a clear command to disciple the nations. The specifics will be taken care of according to the gifts and faith that God has provided. I know plenty of people who "feel led" to do something or "step out in faith" and their works are greatly used. I also know plenty of people who"feel led" to do something or "step out in faith" and fall flat on their face in failure. However, all things work together for good, no matter what delusions God afflicts us with.

It may be that science will determine that depressive realism is a false proposition. But I doubt it.

What's the Line Between Initiative and Presumptuousness?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:32:39 GMT

No one has perfect motives.

All Christians are called to some function within the Body of Christ for which we are told we must take initiative.

Many initiate things that are contrary to their calling. This is presumptuous.

If we are to take the seat of least honor so that we are called to a seat of greater honor (Luke 14) and not think more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3) then that presumes that we can think to highly of ourselves.

Do some not say that we would have a burning in our heart for our calling? That seems rather visceral.

So then, what's the line between initiative and presumptuousness?

I dare someone to answer (and I doubt anyone will).

There are two tracks of reason: Either: (1) we must have accountability from godly friends; or (2) God accounts for our presumptuousness;

...or both.

I heard a message recently that encouraged each Christian to have in their lives at any given time a "Paul" (mentor), a "Barnabus" (peer), and a "Timothy" (apprentice). What if a Christian lacks all three and lacks the capacity to obtain them? Doesn't God know we have this need and would provide? What if he goes for a long time without providing?

Well, if he doesn't provide then he doesn't require.

Therefore, either you are presumptuous as you bumble around trying to figure out what God wants you to do and trying a little bit of everything or you just have to sit back and never take the initiative on anything. That doesn't sound right, but there is no other conclusion.\

So I ask again:

What's the line between initiative and presumptuousness?

Christian Apologetics – Sin and Free Will

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:33:33 GMT

Van Til uses a term here that is explicitly descriptive rather than using the more nebulous term “free will”. He uses it in the section The Fall of Man on page 42. In this section, he investigates the substance of the fall. In other words, he addresses the question: in what manner was man disobedient to God at the moment of the fall? His answer:

“Man made for himself a false idea of knowledge, the ideal of absolute inderivative comprehension. This he could never have done if he had continued to recognize that he was a creature. It is totally inconsistent with the idea of creatureliness that man should strive for comprehensive knowledge; if it could be attained, it would wipe God out of existence; man would then be God. And, as we shall see later, because man sought this unattainable ideal, he brought upon himself no end of woe.”

The term I mentioned above as found in this quote is “absolute inderivative comprehension.” For will is founded on knowledge. Will is only free where knowledge is complete. The footnotes provided by editor William Edgar on this term reads thus:

“In Van Til’s terminology, ‘comprehensive knowledge’ means exhaustive knowledge. ‘Absolute’ and ‘inderivative’ mean autonomous, without recognition of creaturely dependence upon the Creator”

The way that I have quickly described it in debating Reformed theology is that there is nothing we know outside of God’s created order. God, being the Creator, has knowledge outside his created order. The word “inderivative” here means that knowledge that is outside of the created order. This is knowledge that is required for us to make decisions autonomously. As it is, even the knowledge we have is not exhaustive of everything IN the created order. While we can claim to make somewhat informed decisions, we cannot claim fully informed decisions.

Talk like this could lead to a huge debate where those Christian brothers and sisters who hold to a non-reformed theology would think that I’m questioning their salvation for believing that they have free will over God’s sovereignty. I assure you that’s not the case. There is a difference between the academic proposition of libertarian free will and the functional rebellion of exerting what doesn’t exist. In other words, many who believe that they can make decisions using knowledge God didn’t give them aren’t necessarily practicing it to their spiritual death by doing so. Rather, the unconscious illusion of libertarian free will results in the sin of conscious desires that counter God’s clear commands. This in turn results in behavioral disobedience. But one can easily consciously hold the illusion of libertarian free will to be true and yet be submissive to God in intentional practice.

So then, the sin of the fall being the illusion of libertarian free will, or “absolute inderivative comprehension”, foremost establishes presuppositional error. This is why Presuppositional Apologetics is historically aligned with Reformed Theology.

Christian Apologetics - The Presuppositional Nature of Evangelism

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:17:40 GMT

In my understanding of presuppositional apologetics so far, one of the lynchpin tactics is to challenge the presuppositions of the non-Christian and demonstrate first that they are borrowed from Christian presuppositions and second that without Christian presuppositions their conclusions cannot stand.

This applies particularly well to morality and Van Til discusses it briefly in the section on ethics. From page 37:

“There is no alternative to the Christian view of the will of God as ultimate but the idea of man’s moral consciousness itself as being ultimate… It is therefore the business of Christian apologetics to challenge the non-Christian view of morality and to show that unless the will of God be taken as ultimate, there is no meaning to moral distinctions.”

On a fundamental level, this is what happens in true evangelism. The non-Christian will always detect that he is internally conflicted with regard to his own state of morality. There will be some agreement that some “natural law” exists from which to derive moral judgments. However, it is a matter of submitting to the truth that any morality so held as true has been transgressed by the one holding it true. The conflict comes from self-justification for such transgressions. Why self-justify if man is his own moral arbiter?

So the evangelist presents the gospel as our need for salvation in the justification of Christ on the cross. Only the gospel of grace so places morality ultimately on the nature of God’s will. True submission to this truth and trust in God’s grace requires the recognition of God as the natural creator and arbiter of morality.

Therefore, evangelism is the highest practice of presuppositional apologetics and such draws its strength directly from the gospel of grace.

And I bet you thought that all this Christian philosophy and apologetical musing was merely academic.

Christian Apologetics - Logic of God

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:41:09 GMT

I was glad to read this from Van Til (page 33):

“Romanism assumes that God and man stand in exactly the same sort of relation to the law of contradiction. To think and know truly, it is assumed, both must think in accordance with that law as an abstract from the nature of either. …Hence man’s dealings in the realm of truth are not ultimately with God but with an abstraction that stands above God, with Truth as such.”

He goes into detail with regards to the implications of this for various theological, apologetical and philosophical thinking. I’ve written about this before.

In short, God’s logic is not altogether other than our own capacity for reason. However, his logic is transcendently foundational to our capacity to reason. To sum up what I’ve written, we temporal creatures require the law of contradiction (aka bivalent logic) to reason. That is, we need conceptual contrast to perceive, apprehend and cognitively process an idea. God, however, being eternal, has the law of identity as central to his nature. That means that there can be nothing eternal against which to compare God.

This is why existentialism and its philosophical kin are not viable philosophical systems and why we must move from the error of projecting bivalent logic onto our understanding of God’s knowledge. We must approach an understanding of God’s nature using bivalent logic because that’s the tool that God gave us to use, but God himself is beyond that logic in his sovereign thinking. And as simple as this truth seems, it appears that most people miss it altogether. It’s nice to see that Van Til recognizes it and handles it appropriately.

Christian Apologetics - Revelation in the Trinity

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:34:01 GMT

In the first chapter of Christian Apologetics, Van Til outlines the basics of Christian theological studies from a Reformed perspective. Being Reformed soteriologically, I agree with him. As such I agree with his orthodox understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. The only reason I mention this is to discuss an item or two that Van Til doesn’t discuss.

One item is a hermeneutical issue. I wrote an article on this recently where I pointed out the flaw in a principle of hermeneutics used by many preachers. That is that the more something is mentioned, the more important it is. Well, since the doctrine of the Trinity is never explicitly mentioned, then by this principle we must conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity must not be very important. Either that or the hermeneutic principle is flawed.

The fact that the doctrine is integral to the nature of God and foundational in the biblical authors’ thinking, albeit not explicitly handled as a whole, indicates that this is a substantial doctrine, with regard to the revelation of God in particular. That is to say that a fundamental aspect of the deity of Christ is the visible representation of God. The primary work of the Holy Spirit is the life-giving revelation of Truth.

In this, the doctrine of the Trinity is important to apologetical thinking. No matter what method we use or purpose we have for the defense of our faith, we must consider the person of Christ and his work among us as the centermost evidence and the Holy Spirit and his work in us as the centermost presupposition, both bearing the vision of the Father and the fulfillment of his will.

Oh that I could leave off right there with that jewel of an observation. However, I have one more:

The thing that bothers me most about the doctrine of the Trinity, which isn’t that big of a deal, is the lack of analogy in the created world. Every aspect of creation bears some analogy to the nature of God in one way or another. This is the only part of God’s nature that apparently lacks a true analogy in what we know of the universe. The closest one I can think of is in quantum mechanics where extreme temporal displacement gives emitted subatomic entities both the nature of a particle as well as the nature of a wave. Both natures contain the same substance and are manifest in a single temporal frame of reference either nature at any given moment. Well, there are only two natures here that I know of.

Yet this isn’t a perfect analogy as such. So there goes my theory that every aspect of God is represented analogously in creation. How much more of God is there that we know nothing of? I can’t wait to find out!

But inasmuch as the analogies of God as evidence of his hand are infused in every aspect of creation, so we are given a wealth of evidence to present alongside any otherwise good presuppositional line of argumentation.

Christian Apologetics – The Existence of God

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:43:14 GMT

I discussed briefly in my first article the existence of God. Van Til put forth in his discussion of Systematic Theology that Theology seeks to answer two fundamental questions. First, does God exist? And second, what sort of God is he?

Now it would seem that Van Til is following the existentialist trap here. However he goes on to state that we must first know what sort of God he is before we can meaningfully discuss whether he exists or not. This is a great statement and is an indication to the purposeful approach Van Til presents here.

There is further evidence that he has considered the difference between the logical presuppositions and the epistemological or pedagogical presuppositions. In his discussion of the knowledge of God on page 26 he observes the historic debate between Lutherans and Calvinists whether "one should reason" from experience of God back to the nature of God or start with the nature of God and derive the Christian experience.

Regardless, God is eternal and we are temporal. I've written about this before. The essence of God goes far beyond merely a description of what kind of God he is. It's certainly true that we cannot discuss the existence of God without agreeing on the nature of God. However, an understanding of the nature of God can only be discussed among us in temporal terms.

In this vein, Van Til discusses whether God’s knowledge is analytical or synthetical. (These are two categories from Bloom’s Taxonomy. To analyze is to take a unified concept and break it apart into sub-categorical observations. To synthesize is to take observations as premises and conclude a unified concept.) Largely, the use of either word is merely semantic because the meaning is a matter of perspective. God is absolute and our understanding of him is not. God’s essence is absolute and absolutely unified. To understand him temporally, we must analyze God. To approach an eternal understanding of him, we must take what we know observationally and synthesize an understanding of his unified character.

Parenthetically, by the use of the term "unified concept" I don't mean to imply that God is in some way impersonal. Rather, I mean that God's eternal essence does not subsist as a multiplex of distinct items of knowledge but as a single concept that consists of the unification of all the qualities we can attribute to God. So I also use the phrase "unified character." Van Til uses the expression "a single internal act of intuition" on page 27 to indicate the same thing and spends much of his discourse on theology up to this point expounding on this. I would say that while he uses different words to say it, Van Til is explicit enough about this and we agree in general.

The philosophical lie that has permeated the thinking of fallen creation is that existence is preeminent. That is to say that the manifest analysis of God is preeminent and the synthesis of a unified understanding is subjective. To be sure, we fall short of a true understanding because our synthesis will be flawed until such a time as our knowledge is made whole. But to presuppose that the unified concept of God is not preeminent because our synthesis to know him is flawed is fallacious.

Rather, the unified concept of God is preeminent to his existence and our attempt to understand him is merely tertiary. The subsequent charge that it’s circular reasoning is therefore flawed. The primary human knowledge of God is organic in such a way as a baby knows its mother. Only as we mature do we learn more of God as the child learns more of his mother as he grows up. There may be more on this later, but I'll stop there because the text doesn't warrant a discussion of it yet.

Christian Apologetics – Van Til’s Categorization

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:45:35 GMT

Intelligence is the capacity to understand and evaluate categories of information and recategorize it meaningfully. That’s my definition and I suggest it’s a more helpful definition than the one in the dictionary for thinking epistemologically. That is, we categorize information because we have a general level of intelligence as human beings.

Take M and M’s for example. You can categorize them in two groups: Plain or With Nuts. Now that might be helpful with regard to a taste preference, but perhaps you find it more helpful to categorize them by color. You can have perhaps yellow, blue, green, orange, brown and red. Well, if you need both sets of categorizations you can sort them two-dimensionally where each color would also have a Plain or With Nuts subcategory. But the Mars company has a need to create an ongoing category list that we are unfamiliar with. They categorize by lot number. This is practical from a manufacturing standpoint but most of us never think of that categorization.

I gave a system of categorization of theological thought in my first article in this series. The system of categorization I typically employ helps establish relationships of logical dependency between categories. This is useful for presuppositional thinking.

Van Til, in the first chapter under the heading “Theological Encyclopedia”, gives a different system for the categorization of theological thought. His system seems to be based on the departments in a seminary and are subsequently more pedagogical in the relationships between them. His army analogy is helpful for understanding how these different categories work together. His system may be more practical than mine for actually formulating a debate tactic and the purposes he gives seem to be limited to this area of practicality. I wonder how he will use his system in a discourse of presuppositional apologetics.

As it is, his system uses the following categories:

1. Biblical department: Old Testament
2. Biblical department: New Testament

Both of these, he observes gives “a defense as well as a positive statement of the truth.”

3. The Apologetic deparment

Here he observes that apologetics cannot be left solely to the Apologetic department, but the Biblical departments must also give their defense because “the specific truths of Christianity must be defended once they are stated.”

4. Systematic Theology (he stops using the word “department” here for some reason)

This categorizes the rest of the departments into an “organic whole”

5. Church History

This gives us insight into how the “preaching of the Word has fared throughout the centuries.” I observe that this is one area that’s not explicitly covered in my categorization scheme. This is precisely because I hold church history pretty low in my estimation of Christian theology. It’s helpful for hermeneutical consideration as well as for understanding some arguments of challengers to the faith, but too many have gotten too much too wrong too often in the history of the Church. Well, that’s helpful for determining what not to do, but too often the temptation is to overreact into similar error. For example, overreaction to the effects of hierarchical apostasy often generates small-group legalism or unbalanced teaching like snake-handling or utter separatism, such as unchecked by ecclesiological accountability.

Do any of you have a system of categorization of theological thought?

Schrödinger's Other Cat

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:46:49 GMT

I stole this photo from anth0nyc. (If you want to see some of the most interesting photography on the Internet, check out his site.)

And...

If you know something of theoretical quantum physics - or own a cat, you'll get the humor of this.

The theory is that there's only one cat.