Always Ready: Chap. 9: Inescapable Revelation & Inescapable Knowledge

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All right. We're in presuppositional apologetics, and that's just the review slide that we've been using at the beginning of each one.

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Each one of them, remember, we're using 1 Peter 3 .15 as our main text, always being ready to make a defense, and that is where we get the word apologetics from.

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We've concluded section one in the book, if you're following along in the book Always Ready by Greg Bonson.

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The first section was called The Lordship of Christ in the Realm of Knowledge, and those are the six chapters.

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Now, we've gone through each of those five chapters. We waited on the summary.

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Last week, we began section two of the book, which was titled The Conditions Necessary for the

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Apologetic Task. Chapter seven, we introduced the three major arguments against presuppositionalism, and then chapter eight, humble boldness, not obscurantist arrogance.

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That was the first criticism, and we went through that. So today, this week, we're going to go through chapter nine, inescapable revelation, inescapable knowledge, and chapter ten, common ground, which is not neutral.

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That's the direction we're headed in. So chapter nine, inescapable revelation, inescapable knowledge.

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The chapter opens with these words. Having dismissed the taunting accusation of obscurantist arrogance in presuppositional epistemology, we go on to consider a second kind of criticism that is commonly leveled against the position.

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So we're looking now at the second of the three criticisms, and that is a biblical theory of knowledge, which is, that's what presuppositionalism is all about.

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It's a biblical theory of knowledge proclaims the absolute requirement of God's revealed truth as the tacit foundation of understanding and knowledge.

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Now this is true. This is just setting up what the criticism is.

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This is true. We hold to a biblical theory of knowledge, and we proclaim very unashamedly that it is a requirement for any true foundation of knowledge and understanding.

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Against such an outlook, it has been urged that the unbeliever would be reduced to the level of inescapable stupidity, deprived of any knowledge whatsoever.

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That's the charge that's leveled against our position, all right? And it continues.

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If Christian presuppositions are necessary to understanding, then allegedly the non -Christian cannot understand anything at all.

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You see where they go with this? What they're saying is that if our presupposition is true, that is that you have to base all knowledge on the revealed will of God, then the non -believer who does not accept

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God's Word as the standard of truth can't understand anything at all. Yet, what we see in the world around us and from what we read in history, it's clear that unbelievers have attained knowledge of many things.

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Notice where they're going. They're saying, well, if it's true that they absolutely have to have the revealed

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Word of God as the knowledge, they reject that, and that means they can't understand anything.

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But yet, if we look around the world, we see that non -believers have made gains. They do have a certain amount of knowledge.

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Thus, it would appear that the presuppositional epistemology implies something that is patently false, in which case presuppositionalism itself is false.

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They've set up somewhat of a syllogism, not an exact syllogism, but if this is true, if this is true, if that's true, then this is the result.

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Then the result is that presuppositionalism is false. So what do we have to say?

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Firstly, the critic has taken the proposition too far. In fact, the presuppositionalist claims that only his epistemological position guarantees that unbelievers can make positive contributions to the edifice of knowledge.

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I just want to pause here. Notice what Bonson has done in his, and this is just the beginning of his answer to the criticism.

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He doesn't allow the person to make the definitions and use his own definitions.

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He's coming back. He says, no, that's not the case. The presuppositionalist is not saying that the non -believer can have no knowledge.

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Of course, that's patently false. All right. Bonson then goes on the pro side of it and takes action himself being a proponent of presuppositionalism, and he says the fact that the presuppositionalist claims that only his epistemological position, do you realize how difficult this is?

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I know you are. The only guarantee the non -believer has is by accepting our position.

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Is that better? Okay. Let's continue.

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What the critic has erroneously inferred, all right, and notice what he says.

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What the critic has erroneously inferred, all right, is that if revealed presuppositions are necessary to understanding of the world, the non -Christians are totally ignorant since they do not admit to revealed presuppositions.

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That's an erroneous inference, all right. The presuppositionalist maintains that the unbeliever can come to know certain things despite his espoused rejection of God's truth.

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Again, I just want to pause there. This is why it's so important that we who are defending the faith, and especially whether it be in apologetics or a debate or in sharing the gospel, that we know what our position is.

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Far too often I've seen Christians completely falter in their explanation of the faith because they're misdefining or taking somebody else's presuppositions as though it were true.

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That's why you've heard, how many times have you heard me say, whenever you start an inference, make sure you define your terms, all right.

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And that's what Bonson is saying here. The presuppositionalist maintains that the unbeliever can come to know certain things even despite his rejection of God's truth, all right.

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Now, why is that the case? Why? Because he is still being made, he is still a being made in the image of God and therefore has certain knowledge of God.

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Just by virtue of being a creation of God and being an image bearer of God, we can know certain things about God.

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And this is true even if he denies that he is a being made in the image of God, okay.

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You're following along, all right. In other words, one of the important things, how many people have ever heard the

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Greg Bonson Gordon Stein debate? A few of you, all right.

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That is one of the classic debates and I love that debate not only because Bonson is brilliant in the debate, but because you see his presuppositional method, he never allows

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Stein to take control of the debate and define the terms, all right, and allow him to go off into his rabbit trails making the inferences that are erroneous, okay.

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You saw, it was only the men's group that saw Eli recently, right. That's too bad,

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I wish everybody had seen that. But Eli Ayala who has, well, no, no, we saw, we had him here for Wednesday, right.

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But his debate, he did exactly the same thing. His opponent was always trying to sneak in something else and take him off on a different direction, but he always brought him back, said, no, no, no, that's not what we're saying.

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And you have to be bold when you do that. Thus, according to biblical epistemology, all right, while men deny their creator, they nevertheless possess an inescapable knowledge of him.

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I've actually frustrated quite a few people when I had discussions with, especially with a non -believer.

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I have a former brother -in -law, in fact, he's passed on now, but a former brother -in -law, my wife's sister's husband, okay, who was a dyed -in -the -wool atheist and he denied the existence of God.

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He, you know, it was, and he loved to debate creation versus evolution and things.

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And whenever we'd go visit, he always got me involved in one of those discussions. And he'd say, well,

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I don't believe God, in God. I said, yes, you do. And he said, but no,

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I don't. I said, yes, you do. I said, whether you admit it or not, I said,

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I'm not going to keep going back and forth like this, but you do. You know in your heart that there is a

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God. You know that. So don't tell me that you don't. He said, yeah, but I don't. Yeah, but you do.

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But anyway, yeah.

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That's true. That's true. Or as I told my dentist who was also an atheist, walked out of his office, he says, well, he says, you know,

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I just don't believe. I says, well, God doesn't believe in atheists. So anyway.

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And because they know God, even though they know him in curse and reprobation, notice that.

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They know God, even though it might be in curse and reprobation, they are able to maintain a limited understanding of the world.

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Why do we have so many scientific advances from people, from the non -believing community?

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It's because of that, because they are still image bearers of God, whether they deny it or not.

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Therefore, it's proper to say that men both know God and do not know him. Now, normally I would say that's an illogical fallacy.

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But in this case, it's not because it's a different kind of knowledge. They don't know him in a saving sense.

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The knowledge they have will not bring them to salvation, but they can know him in his creation and what's called natural revelation, which we will get to a little bit later.

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Is everybody following that? So there's different ways of knowing God. Just like when you say, does

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God love everybody? You've got to be careful. You have to define love. There's different brands of love in the scriptures.

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He can attain knowledge despite himself. The atheist can come to some sort of knowledge, even though if he were to be consistent with his worldview, he would never come to it.

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The reason an atheist can even think logically is because he accepts some of the presuppositions from the

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Christian world. If you want to see that really demonstrated, see the

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Bonson -Stein debate, where he just gets Stein, he ties them all up.

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In principle, his unbelief would preclude understanding of anything.

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Now notice, in principle, you're going to see that if you're just taking the principles and understanding the principles that a non -believer holds to, if he follows them logically, he really couldn't understand anything because he can't explain anything.

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He can't explain anything. He can't explain why he is here. He can't explain why he can think.

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He can't even say, well, I am thinking. Remember what

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Augustine said, one must believe in order to understand. Now, here's the caveat.

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However, in practice, the unbeliever is restrained from consistent self -destructive following of his unbelieving profession.

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In practice, there's a difference between in principle, which is the theory, and the practice.

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In practice, he is restrained. What do you think?

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We're going to get into it a little bit. What's restraining him from a consistent self -destructive unbelieving profession?

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Being made in the church of God, common grace is one of them, that's a big one, and the restraining of the

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Holy Spirit. If the unbeliever were a total idiot, that's not my quote, if the unbeliever were a total idiot, he would be free from guilt.

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Think about it. In other words, if he was unable to think, he would be free from guilt.

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But Paul's point in Romans 1 is that the unbeliever's rebellion is willful and knowledgeable.

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He sins against his better knowledge and is thus without excuse.

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Why is the non -believer without excuse? Because he's sinning willful and knowledgeable. And he has that knowledge through common grace and through just natural revelation.

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God's law is written on his heart. You're following this?

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Yes? So sorry, this I follow. I had a question about the previous slide.

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So you said that the Holy Spirit is restraining the unbeliever? Yeah. Through common grace, the

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Holy Spirit can restrain the unbeliever from being as bad as he could possibly be. Remember, our doctrine of total depravity, it does not say that unregenerate man is as bad as he could possibly be, only that every aspect of his being is infected by sin.

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And it's the restraining, God's restraining on him, giving him common grace, that allows him to be a decent next -door neighbor.

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But we would attribute that to the Holy Spirit? I'm just asking because that wouldn't just be common...

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Yeah, the way God hardens Pharaoh's heart, he doesn't squeeze it or inject fresh evil into it, he releases his restraint on his heart and allows

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Pharaoh to do what Pharaoh wants to do naturally. The evil is in his heart, the

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Holy Spirit is restraining it. In order for God to harden Pharaoh's heart, he just lifts that restraint and allows him to sin fervently.

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So then the argument wouldn't be that we receive the Holy Spirit when we're believers, it's that the

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Holy Spirit is omnipresent. He's present in us in a different way than he is in unbelievers.

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But he does act in their... The king's heart is in the Lord's hand, he turns it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.

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I always kind of attributed that to the Father's will though, I didn't think it was like... He does it to, he did it to the

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Assyrian king, he did it to many of the kings. Cyrus? Yes.

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Right? So the Holy Spirit is active in the world and does and works supernaturally through human beings' hearts.

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He directs them where he wants them. They don't do it unwillingly, the person's doing it willingly,

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God's releasing the restraint on their heart to do what God's plan is. Like Joseph and his brothers, you know, what you meant for evil,

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God meant for good. You look at the cross, Herod punches Pilate, the Jews and the

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Gentiles all did what your hand predestined them to do. They wanted to do it, God could have restrained it, the

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Holy Spirit could have restrained them from killing Jesus, but God's intent in that act was the salvation of his people.

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Does that make sense? Yeah, I've always believed that God's will is acted within the hearts of man.

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I just always thought that was attributed to the Father's Holy Spirit. I was just intrigued by this.

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I don't know, I probably heard it subconsciously, but never thought about it until it was said just now.

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Does that make sense? Yeah, but I think you're confusing a couple of things.

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What does it mean, God's will? How does God accomplish his will on earth?

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More often than not, it's through his Spirit. The Spirit of the Lord came over.

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You hear that phraseology all the time. And while he suppresses this better knowledge in unrighteousness, notice better knowledge.

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What is the better knowledge? Saving knowledge, the knowledge of he works. In unrighteousness, that knowledge provides a foundation of his limited but real understanding of God's Word, God's world.

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So in other words, again, this is where it's important that we define our terms.

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When we talk about the believer coming, having a saving knowledge, that's different, and that's what

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Bonson is saying here. There's a lower knowledge as opposed to the better knowledge, but it's because he has this knowledge that makes him inexcusable for not coming to salvation, even though that knowledge can't lead him to salvation.

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That's Romans 1. That making sense? Yes. The unbeliever is stuck in God's world, and because he's an image bearer of God, he uses the things that God gives us while rejecting the offer of salvation and to know him on a personal basis.

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So you could not, on atheism, you could not have rationality. You could not have morality.

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You could not have intentionality. You couldn't even reason because all you are are molecules in motion. You couldn't know anything on that view.

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Exactly. And Calvin says we have the senses divinitas, right?

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We have that sense of the divine within us. Ecclesiastes says eternity is stamped on our heart, so we have this internal software running on the hardware that tells us that God exists.

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And that's what makes it that people are without excuse. Central to the position of biblical presuppositionalism is an affirmation of the clarity and inescapability of natural revelation.

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Notice, central to the position is the affirmation of the clarity and inescapability of natural revelation.

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The world was created by the word of God and thereby reflects the mind and character of God.

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See, that's what I get at when I tell somebody, yeah, you do believe in God because you can't look at this world and come away and say, you know, there's no

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God. It just screams, the world screams of a creator, but that's all they'll know him as.

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It doesn't bring him to redemption. Only the word brings to redemption.

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Man was created as the image of God and thus cannot escape the face of God, okay?

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God's natural revelation goes out to the end of the world and all people see his glory.

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Notice what Bonson is doing. He's just building and building and building, showing that throughout all of scripture, we see this idea of this natural revelation, which is screaming to the glory of God.

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Again, not to be confused with the glory of God and salvation. We're not talking about that at all.

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We're only talking in a limited sense of the person knowing and coming to understand facts of this world and it's only because it speaks of God, okay?

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Therefore, even when living in open, idolatrous rebellion, men are in the condition of knowing

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God, the living and the true God, and this is important, not merely a

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God. This is a point that Bonson makes very well, especially in that debate with Stein.

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He redefines the parameters of the debate right in the beginning of the debate. Stein wanted the debate to be there is proof or the proposition is that Bonson had to prove was there is a

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God. Bonson says, no, I can't prove there is a God. I can prove there is the

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God of the Bible. We don't believe in just a God. We believe in a personal

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God, the God of the Bible, all right? Now, Calvin addresses this issue in his commentaries.

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He says, for we know that men have this unique quality above the other animals and that they are endowed with reason and intelligence and that they bear the distinction between right and wrong engraved in their conscience.

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Thus, there is no man to whom some awareness of the eternal light does not penetrate the common light of nature of far lowlier things than faith.

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Notice, the common light of nature of far lowlier things than faith. Difference between faith and natural revelation, and you have to make sure you keep that distinction.

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That's from Calvin's commentaries. Van Til also observes the same thing.

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He says, the absolute contrast between the Christian and the non -Christian in the field of knowledge is said to be that of principle.

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This is what we're talking about. Remember, there's difference between being in principle and being in practice. Full recognition is made of the fact that in spite of this absolute contrast of principle, there is relative good in those who are evil.

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Follow what he says? There is relative good in those who are evil. You have a next -door neighbor who's going to watch your lawnmower so nobody steals it, right?

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Why would he do that being an unregenerate person? Because he has this idea that there is relative good in him.

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So far as men self -consciously work from this principle, they have no notion in common with the believer.

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But in the course of history, the natural man is not fully self -conscious of his own position. Basically, what he's saying there is if the non -believer were fully aware of his condition, he would probably be as bad as he could possibly be.

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But he's not fully aware of it. And again, that's because of common grace and the work of God. He continues, he has within him the knowledge of God by virtue of his creation in the image of God.

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But this idea of God is suppressed by his false principle. And what is that false principle?

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The principle of autonomy. This principle of autonomy is in turn suppressed by the restraining power of God's common grace and by the striving of the spirit.

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Then their hostility is curbed in some measure. And as such, they can cooperate by virtue of ethical restraint of common grace.

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I think the word that does it for me is conscience, right? Because that means with knowledge.

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So you would ask an atheist or an unbeliever, do you have a conscience? Yes. So that means with knowledge.

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What do you have knowledge of? What is it that you have knowledge of? It's born with a conscience.

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And there, Van Til spells it right out there. Hostility is curbed in some measure, not completely.

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And as such, they can cooperate by virtue of the ethical restraint of common grace. You've heard me say that we did a study in common grace, did we not?

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It was in the mentoring group. I did preach on it, but that's a few years ago now.

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I think it's one of the most undertaught and to our detriment that we don't understand how common grace works more than it does.

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The Bible is filled with common grace. And it's a very important doctrine.

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When properly answered, even this criticism strengthens the presuppositional position.

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Those are my words. All knowledge, even the knowledge possessed by the unbeliever in unrighteousness, must be founded upon the accepted truth about God.

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Now, they'll deny that, but it's true. Therefore, both the unbeliever's knowledge and God's common grace should be used not to encourage neutrality, but to press home the demands of God at every point.

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You following? What did we start with? What was the second criticism?

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That's what we're looking at. That was the whole subject. Yeah, the unsaved people can't know anything.

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And the criticism is, if that's true, then it can't be true because we see that non -believers do have certain knowledge of things.

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What we're showing here is he does have knowledge of things, but it gives the reason for him having knowledge.

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Again, if you take the atheistic position, there is no reason to believe that a non -believer or that any man could have any knowledge whatsoever that's meaningful.

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Why? Because if all we are, if everything that I'm doing here is just a response of my synapses and neurons firing in my brain, where is the purpose?

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Where is the reason? Where is their intelligibility to that? Van Til says, common grace is not a gift of God whereby his own challenge to repentance unto men who have sinned against him is temporarily being blurred.

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Common grace must rather serve the challenge of God to repentance. It must be a tool by means of which the believer, as the servant of Christ, can challenge the unbeliever to repentance.

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And this is what we need. This is why it's so important even in apologetics. Believers can objectively show to unbelievers that the unity of science can be attained only on the

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Christian theistic basis. Now, obviously, this takes a little bit of work, and it takes a little bit of study, and you have to know the word.

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So then this is the conclusion that Bonson comes to. He says, we see then that the criticism laid down at the beginning of the study does no damage to, but rather serves to point up even more the strength and necessity of presuppositional epistemology.

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Questions? So one of the differences between the believer and the unbeliever, the unbeliever can know things, but he can't know them with certainty.

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Yes. Right. Like Bonson's, one of Bonson's illustrations is an unbeliever and a believer can balance their checkbook.

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Right. They can count, but the unbeliever can't account for counting.

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Exactly. The believer can't, because obviously numbers are an immaterial, abstract item, and that only exists in a world that has an invisible realm to it.

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Right. On an atheistic worldview, where everything is just material, where do numbers come from?

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Where do laws of logic come from? Where do moral laws come from? They're using immaterial, objective, and universal truths to, borrowing from the

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Christian worldview, to try to destroy it. Yeah. Yeah. One of the methods that you see presuppopologists use all the time is they'll ask their opponent, who's strictly a material world person, he says, do you believe in anything immaterial?

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No. Do you believe in logic? Yes. Is that material or immaterial?

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It's immaterial, so you don't believe in logic. You see, you can't have a consistent worldview apart from the truth of God's Word.

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God's Word accounts for the immaterial world. We understand that this world is both material and immaterial, and the only accounting for it is answered by the

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Word of God. Does that make sense? So, criticism number two, again, far from being a problem, actually proves that the biblical presuppositions are true.

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And that's as far as we can go today, because there's no way I can, in ten minutes, do the next chapter.

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Yes? What would you say to somebody that says, okay, I believe in an immaterial world, but how do you know that Christianity is the right religion, versus all the other ones?

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You want that answer? I don't know, I just...

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I didn't know if it was going to be a quick answer. I would say, I know it the same way I know my mother's name.

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He told us. He wrote it. He did the Bible. He reveals Himself to us through God's Word.

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It's as simple as that. The quick answer is, because of the Word of God. Remember, what is our basic first presupposition, other than God is there?

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That's the basic. In the beginning, God. That God has revealed

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Himself to us in His Word, which is inerrant, infallible, and all -sufficient. So, that's how

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I know. And you can't ever yield that. If you give that up, you're walking into His worldview of neutrality, and you're going to go down the rabbit trail, and you're never going to get out of it.

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So, that's it. The Word of God is true. Okay?

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And this, again, somebody was telling us that they were watching a

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Christian debate, a Christian debating, and he was asked, is it possible that your

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God doesn't exist? And the Christian answered, yes. That's, no, you can never do that.

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You can never do that. Because now you're saying, well, I believe in something, I believe in something with all my heart that may not exist.

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Yeah, I have a relationship with a God who may not be there. Yeah. I had an invisible friend when

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I was a boy, but I gave that up when I became a man. No, we stand firm on the principles, the basic principles of the

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Word of God. I think that's the quickest answer we can give you. Okay?