Intro To Presuppositional Apologetics - Episode 1| The Academy w/ Eli Ayala

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It has been famously said somewhere by someone that the

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Bible is like a lion, just let it out of its cage and it will defend itself. Now that sounds cool, but that is definitely not the biblical picture that we get in terms of doing apologetics and defending the

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Christian faith. It's true that God doesn't need us to defend him, but it's also true that God doesn't need me to feed my children, yet God has ordained means whereby certain ends are accomplished.

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And it is, I consider it an honor and a pleasure to be part of the means whereby the gospel of Jesus Christ is defended in the world today.

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And so God calls us to engage in what we call apologetics. And so this here is part one of a six -part series that will talk about presuppositional apologetics more formally and more colloquially, biblical apologetics.

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And so we're going to dive deep into different aspects of this apologetic methodology. And so I welcome you and hope that this series is beneficial and educating for everyone who listens.

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So I have six objectives in this first part. First, I want to define key terms.

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I want to unpack key assumptions. I want to explore the nature of unbelief.

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We're also going to survey the biblical grounds for apologetics. And we're going to talk a little bit about the importance of establishing the certainty of our faith as opposed to the probability of our faith.

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And then we're going to explore the question, how do we proceed in the apologetic task? So that's kind of the outline that I'm going to be following in our first part here.

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So let's take a look. I'm going to start with a simple definition, and then I'm going to give a more nuanced and sophisticated definition of apologetics.

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Okay? Now, the simple definition of apologetics is simply to defend the faith. It's to give an answer.

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And everyone is familiar with the popular scripture passage, 1 Peter 3, verse 15, which we will be exploring in this lesson.

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But to give an apologia is simply to give an answer, to make a defense. However, since we're covering what we call presuppositional apologetics, which is connected with the

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Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til, I want to give Van Til's definition of apologetics.

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And it's here that I think is going to set the groundwork, the context for this entire apologetic method and the rest of the following lessons.

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So I want you to pay very close attention to how Van Til defines apologetics. And here's what he says.

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He says, apologetics is the vindication of the Christian worldview over against the non -Christian worldview.

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Or he says in another place, apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life over against the non -Christian philosophy of life.

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Now, I want you to pay very close attention to that definition. That is a beautiful definition that really captures the essence of the situation we have when you have a believer in the context of engaging an unbeliever.

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Notice Van Til's emphasis on worldviews. When doing apologetics, we are defending a

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Christian worldview. We're defending a Christian philosophy of life. And what we're not defending are piecemeal individual facts.

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Facts are understood within a particular context. And so our worldview, our system of belief, creates the context for understanding individual things within our worldview perspective.

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So what I believe about item A is understood in light of the context of my other beliefs.

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And that's our worldview. When I was in a debate with an atheist there on YouTube, we were talking about the resurrection of Jesus.

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And he says, well, listen, I can grant you the resurrection of Jesus. It doesn't mean that there is an all -powerful

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God that exists. Now notice what he did there. He removed the event of the resurrection of Jesus from the broader context of a worldview that posits an omnipotent

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God who raised Jesus from the dead. And so I was sure to point that out in our discussion, showing that my belief about the resurrection is connected to my broader worldview commitment to the omnipotent

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God who's revealed himself in Scripture. And so understanding apologetics within this worldview context is going to be vitally important.

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Presuppositional apologetics is a worldview apologetics. And so I just want to keep that in, I want you guys to keep that in mind when we're doing apologetics or when we're engaging with the unbeliever,

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I want you to see the unbeliever as a walking worldview, okay? Whether he acknowledges it or not, he has a system of his own.

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As Christians, we have a system of our own, which is rooted and grounded in God and his revelation found in Scripture, okay?

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Now what is presuppositional apologetics? So we know what apologetics is, the defense of the faith, more simply put, the vindication of the

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Christian worldview over against the non -Christian worldview, a little more nuanced definition there. But what about presuppositional apologetics?

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Presuppositional apologetics is an apologetic method. So growing up, I woke up every Saturday morning in my home to the sound of terribly dubbed martial art movies.

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My dad used to love those old Asian kung fu flicks where, you know, the people's mouths would be moving and the words wouldn't really match up very well.

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And so that was my morning. And when I would wake up and watch these movies with my dad, the storylines were always the same.

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There was some guy trying to protect the honor of his specific, you know, dojo or, you know, the place where they kind of promoted a particular style of martial arts.

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Well, it's no different in apologetics. You have different styles of apologetics. You have the evidential method.

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You have the classical method. And there are some other variations within that. And then, of course, you have the presuppositional method.

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So before I define what presuppositional apologetics is, I really want to draw into focus what differentiates the traditional methods of doing apologetics and the method that I'm going to be discussing throughout the course of this series.

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Let's take, for example, evidential or classical apologetics. Evidentialism or evidential apologetics focuses on, well, you guessed it, it focuses on the evidence, right?

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And it typically explores issues of the possibility of miracles and things like this. Classical apologetics is kind of a, kind of takes a one -two punch approach.

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The first punch is demonstrate the existence of a theistic god. And this is typically done through various traditional arguments such as the

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Kalam cosmological argument, the teleological argument, which is the argument from design, the moral argument, things like this.

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And when the existence of a god is established, then the second punch is to focus on what kind of god is being demonstrated here.

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It's the god who has raised Jesus from the dead. And so the first punch is demonstrating the existence of a deity.

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And the second punch is to demonstrate that this deity has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ and has demonstrated the truth of Christ by raising him from the dead.

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Okay? Now, the unique thing about the classical and evidential approach to apologetics is that they are what

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I'd like to call a bottom -up approach to apologetics. Okay? And what

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I mean by bottom -up approach is that both the evidential and classical methods start at the bottom and work their way up to the conclusion, therefore,

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God exists. But the presuppositional apologetics takes a completely opposite perspective.

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It's actually what I like to call a top -down approach. We are not working our way up to the conclusion that God exists, but rather we're starting with, as a presupposition, the existence of God and his revelation in Scripture, and we argue from there.

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We argue that if you reject God and his revelation, that you lose the foundation for making sense out of anything, whether that be science, anything that relates to philosophy, mathematics, history, anything, you name it.

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The Christian God and his revelation provide the necessary, what we call, preconditions for knowledge and intelligible experience.

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So presuppositional apologetics is a top -down approach. And I think the great thing about having a top -down approach in this respect is that it gives the proper place of the authority of God.

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We do not work our way up to a God, subjecting this God to the standards of human understanding.

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Rather, we start from the authority of God and allow him and his word to be the context whereby we judge anything else.

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Okay? So that is the difference between a presuppositional approach and the more classical and evidential approaches.

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So let's kind of give a more focused definition. What is presuppositional apologetics? It is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the

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Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. This is believed to be true on a

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Biblical basis itself. For example, in Psalm chapter 36, verse 9, we read,

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In his light we see light. Now that's kind of a very simple Biblical statement, but I want you to consider the implications of that passage.

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In his light we see light. God is the light by which we see and understand everything.

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Okay? The presuppositional approach takes passages like this very seriously and allows them to be the context as to how we are to understand any and every created fact in existence.

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So in his light we see light. In Proverbs 1, 7, we read, The beginning of knowledge is the fear of the

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Lord. That is the basis of our epistemology. Now that's a $20 word that I'm going to define in our second part to this series, but I want you to keep that word in mind.

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It's going to be very important later on. So the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. Colossians 2, 3,

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In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And one of my favorites here, Romans chapter 11, verse 36,

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For from him and through him and to him are all things. Okay? The reality is that God is the creator of all things.

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He is sovereign. He is the foundation for knowledge. Genesis chapter 1, 1, I mean, we have the very foundational assumption within the

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Christian worldview that provides the context for what we call the creator -creature distinction.

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In the beginning, God created. The opening words of the Bible, you have a distinction between the creator and that which is created.

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And understanding that basic foundation is going to be really important to everything else we do when we're engaging in apologetics.

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Now, you might be wondering, well, why is he talking about all these biblical passages and kind of these theological commitments?

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You have to understand something, that a biblical apologetic must flow, it must grow out of a consistent application of theological and biblical truth.

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The Bible, the scriptures, theology is the soil out of which our apologetic grows.

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And so apologetics is theological. And so that's kind of why I'm trying to incorporate these simple biblical truths and relating them to having a biblical worldview, and then talking a little bit later as to why that's important in terms of doing apologetics.

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Now, what I want to explore next is, and this is another important element of apologetics, number one, understanding that we're engaging in worldview conflicts, the

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Christian worldview or the Christian philosophy of life, and the unbelieving worldview, the unbelieving philosophy of life.

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An important element of understanding the presuppositional approach and creating kind of a foundation from which to engage in apologetics itself is to understand the nature of the unbeliever.

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Now, this is very important. A lot of people will engage in apologetics, really not thinking about what the Bible says about the unbeliever himself or herself, okay?

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We're kind of caught in a corner here. Do we believe what the unbeliever says about himself, or do we believe what

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God has said about the unbeliever? That is a simple issue that really boils down to who are we going to commit ourselves to, what

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God has to say and what he has said with respect to the unbeliever and the apologetic situation, or what the world says that situation is like, okay?

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The Bible says in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17 through 18, that the unbeliever's thinking is veined and he is dark, he's veined and darkened in his understanding.

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The unbeliever's thinking is characterized by intellectual futility and ignorance. He holds to a philosophy that is not after Christ, but after the elementary principles of this world.

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The unbeliever bases his philosophy in such a way that he sets aside God's Word and makes it void, according to Mark 7, 8 through 13.

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Unbelieving philosophies do this by beginning with elements of learning dictated by the world.

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So the unbeliever has a foundation that is not rooted on the firm rock of God's Word, whereas the believer is having their feet firmly planted on the truth of God's revelation.

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And so we need to keep this in mind because oftentimes when we engage the unbeliever, we will often remove ourselves from that firm foundation so as to meet the unbeliever where he is.

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And in doing so, we really are taking the rug from under our feet.

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And so we want to make sure that we are sticking to our foundation and we're engaging with the unbeliever in a way that is consistent with Scripture and in a way that honors the authority of God's Word.

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And we want to understand the unbeliever in a way that has been revealed to us in Scripture because that informs us how we are to engage the unbeliever.

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Let me ask you a question. When we are giving reasons for the Christian faith, are we giving reasons to an otherwise ignorant person or are we showing the reality that the unbeliever is wearing a mask?

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And that mask must be removed to show that the unbeliever actually has a knowledge of the God whom we are presenting.

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How you answer that question is very important. I do not believe that the unbeliever is ignorant.

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I do not believe that the task of apologetics is giving information to an otherwise ignorant person. Rather, apologetics is exposing what

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Romans chapter 1 speaks of, the suppression of truth. And so because the Scriptures tell me that, it actually tells me the nature and the state of the unbeliever, that's going to affect the way

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I interact with him. So keep that in mind. Now, what about the biblical foundations for what we're doing?

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The Christian worldview comes from the Scriptures. A Christian worldview is a biblical worldview.

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And the command to defend the Bible comes from the Bible itself. And so the important thing to understand when we're talking about how we do apologetics, we understand that number one, the

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Bible commands us to do apologetics, and it also tells us how we are to do it.

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And so it's there where we get really the, we hit the rub here as to the presuppositional method really being derived from Scripture itself.

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And that's why we should be enthusiastic about following this approach. Now, let's consider Jude chapter 1 verses 3 through 4.

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Rather, you know what, let's actually unpack 1 Peter 3 .15. It's a traditional passage, and it's often brought up anytime anyone's speaking about apologetics.

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And so the temptation is to pass it over because, yeah, we kind of know what 1 Peter 3 .15 says, but I actually want to stay here for a little while because it's super important.

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So let's read it real quick. But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and respect.

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Now, there are a couple of things that stick out to me and should stick out to you as well when you're looking at 1 Peter 3 .15.

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Number one, the beginning, which is often skipped over. Oftentimes people run right to the always be ready, right?

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And they talk about you need to be ready no matter if it's the professor or a family member at the dinner table, you need to be ready to give an answer.

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And of course, that's important, and I agree with that. But you have to understand that there is something that comes before that, right?

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And that is to sanctify Christ as Lord. We set apart Christ as Lord. So what sticks out to me in 1

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Peter 3 .15 is sanctify, to set apart Christ as Lord.

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He is the Lord of our hearts, okay? Now, this is very important because the heart in Scripture almost never refers to the organ in your chest.

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Rather, it refers to the seat of the will, the center of one's being. It actually is related to that intellectual faculty that goes into decision making, okay?

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The reasoning process, Christ is to sit on the throne of our hearts. And everything we do, everything we reason about is dictated by His Lordship.

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We are bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And so, of course, that is followed by the command to always be ready.

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And that's really, it can be very intimidating, always, you know? What if I'm caught off guard? Well, as a believer, you're called to not be caught off guard.

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You are to be so ready that you are ready in season and out of season. That's intimidating, but it is very important.

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And then the last part, where a lot of people kind of skip over, we are to, check this out, sanctify

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Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that's in you, yet with gentleness and respect.

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Now, I'm very active in the online apologetics community, and unfortunately, I've seen a lot of presuppositionalists get a really bad rap.

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Not so much for the arguments and the debate points that they get when they're interacting with the unbeliever, but it's this issue of gentleness and respect.

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We want to be very careful that we do not act like jerks when giving the truth, right?

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If I speak the truth, but I'm being a jerk in the process, it's really going to fall on deaf ears.

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And so we want to make sure that we're being gentle and respectful when we're interacting with unbelievers.

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And by the way, when I speak of a biblical method of apologetics, that includes not just the content of what

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I'm saying, but the way in which I communicate that content. So the content must be biblical, but the medium through which

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I express that content has to be biblical as well. So if you give a presuppositional argument or a presuppositional apologetic, but you're not doing it with gentleness and respect, you are not following a biblical apologetic.

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So we want to do this in a way that is consistent. Now I want to take a look at Jude chapter 1, verse 3, and I love this passage here because it really highlights the importance of doing apologetics.

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And Jude writes, Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you, appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.

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Now there are a couple of things here that I want you to zero in on, okay? Notice the language of necessity.

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Jude points out the necessity of addressing the apologetical issues that are found within the context of this letter.

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He commands his audience to contend earnestly for the faith. Notice that it's not something that's kind of just like, hey,

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I just want to let you know there's some issues you might want to address and that, no, he says this is necessary. We must contend earnestly.

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Contend earnestly for what? Contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered.

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What is that? What is the faith once for all delivered if not the content of apostolic teaching?

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And so this is very important. We are, it is necessary that we engage in apologetics.

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We are to contend earnestly for the faith and what we are contending for is the body of Christian truth.

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And so if you want to be a good apologist, generally speaking, and if you want to be a good presuppositional apologist more specifically, you must be acquainted with the body of Christian truth.

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You must be acquainted with what has been handed down to us. And this is going to highlight the importance of knowing your theology.

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Now before I kind of wrap things up in just a moment, I want to focus a little bit on the importance of knowing your theology.

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Now when you study apologetics, the most intimidating thing about apologetics, apart from the fear of having to interact with someone that you disagree with, is that most people get the impression that they have to know so much in order to interact with the atheist or the

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Muslim or the Mormon or the Jehovah's Witness. And it's true, you want to be familiar with other perspectives and you want to be able to navigate those different views.

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But in my experience, 99 % of the attacks upon the Christian faith are actually based on misunderstandings of the

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Christian faith. Just a real quick story, when I was picking something up at the supermarket for my wife, I was walking out of the supermarket and I was carrying all these bags.

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I look like one of those homeless people who, they're riding their bike and they have like all the garbage bags. You couldn't even see me,

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I had so many bags. And as I'm walking to my car, a gentleman asked me, hey, you know, can

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I have a few minutes of your time? And I'm like, oh boy, this guy, I can't see him. My hands are literally full.

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And I was like, you know what, fine. Can I just drop my bags off at the car? And he's like, yeah, yeah. So I dropped the bags off at the car and then

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I look at the gentleman, I say, hey, what's going on? He goes, well, I just wanted to share a little something with you.

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And he says that the scriptures teach us that there is a father God. And I said, yeah, yeah,

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I believe that. And he goes, but did you know that the Bible teaches that there is also a mother God?

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And I was like, oh boy, here we go. Here we go. I was on my way to my car after going shopping and now

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I'm going to have this full out conversation with someone. Now, I wasn't familiar with the particular cult that he was a part of.

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He was part of a cult. But what I found very quickly was that the majority of my conversation was not so much navigating the ins and outs of his perspective, but it was defending biblical doctrine.

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I had to talk about the doctrine of God. We differed over views of salvation. So I had to know my, what we call soteriology, right?

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The doctrine of salvation, the deity of Christ. We spoke about, here's a $20 word, anthropomorphisms, when

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God is described with human characteristics. And so the majority of what was required of me was to defend my theology.

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And so knowing theology, I think is the first step in really being grounded and rooted in a biblical apologetic and everything else will flow from there.