Covenantal Apologetics Stated and Defended: Eli Ayala & Scott Oliphint

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. And today I am super excited to have a guest with us, Dr. Scott Oliphin of Westminster Theological Seminary to discuss what is popularly known as presuppositional apologetics.

But of course, anyone familiar with Dr. Oliphin's work, they will understand that he's not a big fan of the terminology and I agree with him. The term does have some ambiguity in it. And so he has kind of worked towards changing kind of the nomenclature there into a covenantal apologetics, which I think grounds the methodology in scripture.

And so I very much resonate with that. And so we're going to just welcome Dr. Scott Oliphin in just a few moments. If you're wondering, you're seeing my face on the camera there and Dr. Oliphin has had a makeover.

He, now he just looks like a gray circle there. He will not be appearing via video, but his audio will be there. And so I'm sure this video will still prove useful as well. Those of you who are also following the Revealed Apologetics podcast, I will be taking this audio and putting it up on the podcast as well so that anyone who is interested can avail themselves of this material.

Also, just before we formally introduce Dr. Oliphin, he will be taking live questions. So if you have any questions, you can put them on the comments and then we'll put them up on the screen. Just as a heads up, we are taking questions that are pertaining to apologetic methodology, not some idiosyncratic view that, you know, Dr. Oliphin may or may not hold and get into some of these other side issues.

So I want to try and keep the questions specifically to our topic at hand. I greatly appreciate that. And of course, keep your questions sustained and short and to the point. Without further ado then, I'd like to welcome Dr. Scott Oliphin.

Why don't you say hi to the audience there and tell folks a little bit about yourself if maybe they don't know who you are.

Dr. Oliphant’s Background and the Case for Covenantal Apologetics

Right, thank you.

Yeah, I'm currently at Westminster Theological Seminary, professor of apologetics and systematic theology. I've been here since 1991, originally born and raised in Texas. And we moved here in 91, have three children and 11 grandchildren.

So that's the story.

Okay, living the life, man.

Yeah.

All right. And you are a proponent of what some people would call Vantillian apologetics. Why don't you define for us your specific flavor of presuppositionalism and then we'll take it from there.

Okay. Yeah, well, I hope it's not my flavor. What I hope to do is take Vantill's approach and make it more accessible, more explicitly theological, more understandable. And so one of the things that I recognized early on when I was thinking about apologetics, this was before I even came to Westminster.

So it was over 30 years ago that I was speaking to a well-known apologist. Name's not important, but he was not happy with Vantill's approach. And so we were speaking together and he said, so are you a presuppositionalist?

And I said, yes.

And he said, so are you Schaefferian or Carnelian or Clarkian or Vantillian? So off he went and listing these things. And that's the first time I'd heard that. I'd read Schaeffer, but I just hadn't organized things in that particular way.

And it bothered me a little bit because I knew enough about Clark and Carnel. And as I said, I read Schaeffer to know that there were significant differences, whatever the overlap between those men, there were significant differences.

So I think what the word presuppositionalism does is it provides a kind of overarching category for just about anybody who thinks presuppositions are important. And that's not really what Vantill was after.

So the term itself was one that was actually given to him in the late forties, you may know, in an article that was printed. It was said orally before that, but it was printed first in the late forties.

He was called a presuppositionalist and it stuck and Vantill didn't mind. So he just let it stick, but it wasn't a term that he himself gave to his approach. And I think one of the problems with it, let me just say, first of all, of course the label's gonna stay.

It's been there, it's sort of written in our history and history of apologetics. So it's going to stick around. I think that's an unfortunate fact. It's going to stay, but it's so ambiguous, number one.

It includes, I think, a kind of breadth that doesn't help in specifying what it is. I'm not against breadth. I'm just saying the label itself is too broad to really specify what Vantill was up to. And I think the third thing, almost as important, is that it gives the impression that apologetics is primarily, if not exclusively, philosophical.

And it's just not. I mean, apologetics has had to deal with philosophy through the years, centuries, because philosophy has been known to attack Christian belief. And if you're gonna attack Christian belief philosophically, it's a good idea to answer it philosophically if you're able to do that.

But apologetics isn't fundamentally philosophical. It's fundamentally Christian and biblical. And I think the word presuppositionalism is just a long, philosophical, abstract, ambiguous term that is of virtually no help in our day and time.

I mean, I hear people say this still. They say, you know, I have presupposition, so I'm a presuppositionalist. That's not what it means. Or back in the heyday of postmodernism, people would say, well, Vantill was the first postmodern because he recognized that everybody has their own interpretation of the world.

That's not what he's saying. That's not it either. So Vantill's gotten a lot of bad press, a lot of misunderstandings out there that remain. There's a cultural narrative that's taken hold that just perpetuates itself about all the problems with Vantill's view.

And I think most of those, I'm not trying to be naive here because I know there'll always be detractors, but I think most of those could be cleared up if the discussion revolved around theological and biblical concerns in the first place.

And then if we want to move to philosophical things, we can do that, or others can do that if they want to. But the primary impetus behind everything Vantill did was who God is and the authority of his word.

And those are the two foundational presuppositions of everything that happens and everything that is in the world. And without those, there is nothing. So all he was trying to say to us is those have to be our presuppositions, our foundations, not only when we're living in this world that God has made under God's authority, but also when we're speaking to others who don't want to abide by that authority or who don't believe in God or who aren't sure whether there's a God.

In any case, the fact of the matter is still that God made the world, he is who he is, and he has said what he says, and what he says is the truth from Genesis to Revelation and what he says in creation is the truth.

So those are all theological points, biblical points that need to be stressed.

Right, and I think the biblical aspect's very important. This is one of the reasons, I have to be careful not to say presuppositionalism. I do agree with your way of phrasing it. So what drew me closer to covenantal apologetics is its very biblical nature, but I think a lot of people's access point to presuppositionalism is often through that philosophical route.

And of course, Van Til's language is just covered with idealistic philosophical vocabulary of which he didn't hold to those idealistic philosophical systems and points, but he filled it with Christian meaning because as you know, he was very much bathed in scripture from his youth, and these were the categories that he thought, but I think it's very important that we get back to those scriptural issues.

And just another point too, I think, and I agree with you here, that the term presuppositionalism is very ambiguous. I've heard people equate presuppositional methodology as fideism because they define presupposition as an assumption that is taken on its own authority and you cannot validate it externally.

And so they'll say, it's kind of like, they'll equate it with like an axiom, which is by definition, unprovable. And so is that something you see people make mistakes at the scholarly level as they critique it, or is this just more at the popular range?

Presuppositionalism Is Not Fideism

Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's at all kinds of levels. Once you tell somebody that my responsibility is to presuppose the truth, and in speaking to people who don't believe in God or who don't believe his word, that we're presupposing those things, their automatic reaction is, well, then, you've got nothing to say to somebody who doesn't believe it.

Well, you've got a world of things to say to somebody, literally a world of things to say to somebody who doesn't believe it, because even in their unbelief, they are still having to presuppose the existence of God and what he has said.

Now they don't believe that, but the presupposition at that point is more dealing with the state of affairs than it is their own belief system. And I think that's a legitimate way to talk about presuppositions.

Man, Till does it that way. So there's no leaning toward fideism here. It's just, to me, it's another one of those narratives that's out there that people wanna use just to try to sort of throw an ad hominem out and dismiss it because who would believe in fideism?

It's that sort of boogeyman that they put out there. Faith is important. Christian faith is necessary to us. But to say that presupposition is fideistic is really to take it out of the Christian context altogether.

That's right. Okay, just a real quick shout out. They're just gonna give two books here for people who are interested. This comes highly recommended by Dr. Oliphant. It might be his favorite apologetics book, Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisen.

I'm just kidding. If you guys are interested in Dr. Oliphant's work, you can definitely check out his book, Covenantal Apologetics, Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith. One of my favorite definitions of apologetics is I heard it from you first, Dr. Oliphant.

And again, it just gets back to this issue of the biblical nature of the presuppositional method is that in one context, and you can maybe expand on this, you defined apologetics as the application of biblical theology to unbelief.

And I really liked that. Why don't you expand on why you phrased it that way, or maybe I'm misquoting you and you wanna clarify.

Apologetics as the Application of Biblical Theology to Unbelief

No, thank you.

Yeah, and again, what I'm trying to do is, I think Van Til would say amen and amen to that. What I'm trying to do is try to help people understand that if all of us as Christians are required by scripture to do apologetics, 1 Peter 3, 15, then God has given us what we need to do it.

And what we need is the truth of his word. Of course, we need the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. And when you have those things, then you're capable. And then what do you do? You bring in the other things that you know, maybe you're an expert in computer science.

So you're able to talk to somebody in that field. Maybe you are an expert in philosophy. So you can deal with these things philosophically. But whatever else you bring in, those are sort of addenda to the foundation, which is biblical truth.

So what we're doing in apologetics, because it's Christian apologetics, is we're trying to help people understand why we believe what we do. And if we don't believe what we do, we really have nothing rational or cogent that we can believe.

That's a kind of impossibility of the contrary. That's what Van Til liked to call it, sort of transcendental. And that's a nice way to think about it. If we really believe that Christianity is true, and we do, we don't believe Christianity is true because we believe it.

It was true whether we believe it or not, but we believe it's true because it's the only position that's cogent and rational according to what God himself has said. So we can't just measure rationality as some sort of neutral thing, because we've seen in the history of thought where that's gone, that always devolves into an utter subjectivism, and nobody can live with an utter subjectivism.

So we understand that what is rational is what God has said. And if we don't understand God in that particular way, then we really have nothing but our own subjective belief. And people recognize intuitively, because they're made in the image of God and know God, they recognize they can't live with an utter subjectivity.

No one operates that way in the world, no matter what they want to argue.

The Transcendental Argument and Van Til’s Method

Now, when people come into contact with presuppositional methodology, there is often a blurring of the lines between presuppositionalism as a methodology and the transcendental argument as a specific argument.

Why don't you explain for us, is the transcendental argument equivalent to presuppositionalism, or is it an application of presuppositionalism in a particular instance? So are you familiar with the conflation of those two concepts?

Why don't you kind of iron that out for us?

Yeah, I am. And I'm, I guess, true confessions here, I'm not terribly interested in the transcendental argument side of folks. Nothing against those. I mean, people can make those applications and that could be

Come on, I love the president's life. Come on, man.

Yeah, no, but okay. So having spoken of it in that way, let me tell you what I think Vantill was trying to do was something different than what these folks are trying to do. And again, I want to say, if you can do it, do it and more power to you.

It's just not my particular interest, but what Vantill was up to, and again, this is because you alluded to this earlier, this is because of his training. His training, you know, he moved from Calvin College, reading Bob Ink and Kuiper to Princeton Seminary.

And at Princeton Seminary, he became a little uneasy because especially in his apologetics course with William Brenton Green Jr., he was getting common sense realism. And that can be proven. That's not debatable because at least in our library here at Westminster, we have the syllabus from William Brenton Green's apologetics course.

He's getting common sense realism and that disturbs him because he says, wait a minute, the reform stuff I was reading at Calvin doesn't comport with this apologetic methodology. Now, if you read Vantill's works, he praises his apologetics professor.

So there's nothing personal here, but he recognized some inconsistency. So he leaves Princeton Seminary and goes to Princeton University and writes his dissertation on idealism, God the absolute. So it's Christianity and idealism.

In other words, idealism is not Christian. And there were some during Vantill's time who were saying because idealism touts an absolute, it really is Christian because we believe God is an absolute. And Vantill was saying, no, no, no, that's an absolute that requires a relative.

God doesn't require a relative. God is absolutely absolute requiring nothing else. He's in need of nothing at all. He is, I say, is and always has been. So when Vantill's reading all of these authors of idealism, one of the things that he becomes very astute in is Kantian idealism.

Now Kant's philosophy is very technical and difficult for anybody to understand. But one of the things that Kant was trying to do in the wake of David Hume's empiricism, which had led people even during Hume's time, led people into utter skepticism.

So just for your listeners in Western history, and again, this is a gross generalization, but I think it has some truth to it. The rationalists tried to show that everything could be understood strictly by way of the rational axioms or by way of the intellect.

Begins with Descartes, I think, therefore I am. That proved to be a failure. So along come the empiricists, and it was sort of gradual from Locke to Berkeley to Hume. And by the time Hume comes along to try to be a consistent empiricist, what he finds out, Hume himself recognized this.

He says, I go out of my study and play backgammon, and then I come back in my study and none of my philosophy makes any sense because he was arguing for the non-reality of cause and effect and things like that because they can't be proven empirically.

Well, that leads you to skepticism. So Immanuel Kant is studying away, interestingly, he's studying metaphysics, nature of ultimate reality, and he comes across Hume's writings.

And what does he say?

He says, Hume woke me up from my dogmatic slumber. So what did Hume do? He woke Kant up to the reality of the problems of metaphysics. And so Kant begins to develop, in his critique of pure reason, what he calls a transcendental approach.

And the reason I use the word approach is because it wasn't in Kant's day meant to be a strict, formal, logical method in the way that there were other formal, logical methods available to people at that point in time.

But it was actually meant to be, transcendental approach was meant to be an argument that showed how, unless you presuppose whatever Kant thought you presupposed, unless you presuppose something, let's keep it general, then you can't prove anything else.

So that any proof has itself a foundation and a presupposition on which it rests. Now for Kant, that was a convoluted series of qualities and conceptual ideas. So Van Til takes that, it's a long answer to your question, but Van Til takes that idea of transcendental and he says, wait a minute, that's really what we're saying in Christianity, that unless you presuppose the reality of who God is on the basis of what God says in his inerrant word, unless you presuppose those things, then things like logic and the empirical, the rational, these things sort of float in the air and have no real foundation.

So again, I wanna say, people that are wanting to try to formalize transcendental argumentation, that's great. I'm just saying, that's not my interest. What Van Til was up to was, you have to have those, this is a necessity of the created order.

You have to have those things, who God is and what he has said, and those things have to be laid out side by side because you can't have one without the other. Who God is and what he said, given that then we can properly understand logic and the empirical, the rational, without those things, it's impossible for those things properly to be understood.

So the transcendental argument can be formulated as a specific argument, but you would say that what Van Til was thinking was, he was trying to present to us a biblical way of, the way we must think, that we find ourselves in this context in which these things must be true in order for anything else to be true.

So in one sense, generally speaking in conversation, we present the Christian way of thinking and outlook and why it's a necessary foundation. But perhaps some people have tried to formalize that within a different context, maybe in a debate or trying to make a point to an unbeliever.

Yeah, good way to put it.

Exactly right. So again, the latter, the one you mentioned that nothing wrong with that, but what I'm saying is Van Til didn't have interest in that. I don't have particular interest in that. What Van Til was trying to say is, you could put it this way, this gives some objectivity to it.

Van Til would say, look at the history of philosophy. All right, they've had 4 ,000 years, at least in the West, to work on three basic questions, the nature of ultimate reality, the nature of knowledge and the nature of ethics, right and wrong.

They've got those three categories. Where are they 4 ,000 years later? They're still wondering about the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge and the nature of right and wrong. Now, what's the problem?

The problem is that philosophy itself has failed to give an account of those things. And the reason for that, and I'm speaking generally here, of course, you've got all these sorts of specifics underneath that that you can argue about.

But the reason that there has been that failure, the reason that Descartes couldn't prove what he wanted to prove, the reason that Hume couldn't get to where he wanted to get to, is because they were all trying to do this without recognizing that this is God's world.

God has spoken. There's a connection between a human being and the world because God has created that connection covenantally at the beginning and maintains and sustains it all along. Unless you have those things that sort of transcend the subject and the object, there's no way to bring the subject and the object together.

So that's why Van Til called it the impossibility of the contrary. Any position contrary to the Christian position is impossible consistently to believe and to live. That was the point he was trying to make.

So that's the impossibility of the contrary.

All right, so let's jump into this now. So, because primarily this show is apologetic in nature. So if someone asks you, from a presuppositional perspective, how do you know Christianity's true? I'm an atheist.

I don't believe all this. You guys give cosmological arguments, this, that, the other thing. I don't see how you Christians can demonstrate that your perspective is true. I know you guys believe it. I know you guys are very passionate about it, but I have yet to see an argument that can demonstrate conclusively that Christianity's true.

What say you, Dr. Oliphant?

Yeah, well, as you know, there are about 100 to 200 ways to begin to address that. One of the things I try to impress on people, I'm not an expert in this by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the things I try to impress on people is one of the first things you ought to do is ask questions to the questioner.

So I would say something like this. Could it be possible that the reason you don't see it lies in yourself and not in the arguments themselves? Is it possible that there's something wrong with you and that's why you don't see it?

Or is it just strictly that there's so much wrong with everything objective you've looked at that there's no possibility for you to see it? And he would say, probably it's all the objective. And then the next question would be, so what will it take in your mind for you to believe this to be true?

What exactly do you need in order for you to believe this to be true?

So let me respond with a popular answer that people who do apologetics on the internet would be very familiar with, okay? I don't know what it would take to convince me of your God, but if your God exists, he should know.

That's a popular one.

People will say so.

So how would you respond to that?

I would respond by saying, well, again, I could ask some questions, but I don't wanna be too obnoxious here. But instead, when I got to the indicatives, one of the things I would say is, guess what? God does know, he knows exactly.

And he's already told me. And by the way, I can tell you what he said about that. So this is not, God is not the problem here. It's not that God hasn't made himself known. It's not that you don't know who God is and yourself to be a creature of God.

It's that you have an innate capacity and desire to subdue and rebel against what God himself has done. There's a way out of that. But if you really wanna be out of that, you've got to listen to what God has said about it,.

Not reject it.

Now, if someone says, okay, I guess I kind of see where you're trying to get with that, but what's your argument, man? Give me premises, I wanna follow your logic because we can have this conversation back and forth.

You could ask me questions that maybe I can't answer, fine. But give me an argument that God exists. How would you do that from a presuppositional perspective?

Yeah, well, I mean, you could do it a number of ways. So I'm talking to you, a hypothetical person here. I don't know much about you. So maybe I could talk to you a little bit about my own testimony, all right?

So that's not illegitimate, that's an argument.

Okay.

But if I didn't wanna do the experiential, I could do the more objective and say something like I said to you earlier, I would say something like, tell me what's happened in the history of philosophy while philosophers have been trying to wrestle with the nature of ultimate reality.

What is their conclusion? And I would ask this person, what is their conclusion and what conclusion do you find tenable? And why would you find it tenable? So I would wanna put the burden back on them.

Then they would say, no, no, I'm talking about you. What's your argument? And I would say, here's my argument. My argument is this, the reason I'm asking you those questions is because it is not rational for me or anyone else to, in and of ourselves, by ourselves, rationally produce the conclusions necessary that would compel us to believe in God.

Can you say, can you repeat that again? I'm sorry, I think that was important.

Maybe, it's not possible for you or for me to assume that we can rationally produce in and of ourselves the conclusions necessary to produce rational belief in us. That's not possible.

So basically you're saying, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's impossible to produce an argument to get to that conclusion autonomously, in and of ourselves. So you're pushing the point that if we wanna go that route, we need to already rely on the context of the reality of Christianity.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I may say something like, the reason you're having such a problem here is because in your attempt, whether it's sincere or not, in your attempt to say, I want a rational argument, underneath that attempt, what you're saying is, and don't you dare tell me who God is and what he has said.

And I'm saying to you, if you won't let me say that, then you have disallowed the possibility of belief in the first place.

Okay, in other words, give me an argument, but don't bring in this revelation stuff. And you're saying that unless you start with that revelation, you can't even reach any, not just the argument to conclude that the Christian God exists, without the Christian context, you couldn't rationally conclude anything because you lack that worldview context to ground the very things we're engaging in.

That's right, and I would say, you don't have the right in our discussion to tell me to disallow what I'm saying to you is the only possibility of rational belief. You don't have the right to do that.

So if you don't wanna talk to me, except in your terms, then let's go have a cup of coffee and we'll have another discussion later when we can have a meeting of the minds.

Okay, okay, so that's good for an everyday sort of conversation, like, hey, listen, we have that foundation, we ask these questions. What about within the context of an actual debate? How would we structure more formally what you've just said?

Is there a way you can lay out? Because basically what you're giving is a kind of transcendental argument and couched in conversational language. But if we were gonna engage in a debate, maybe let's throw a bone to some of our internet apologists who engage in these things in this context.

How might they construct a logically structured argument transcendentally? Is it possible to formulate a transcendental argument deductively in which you lay out a deductive argument and defend one of the premises transcendentally?

What are different ways and different routes that some apologists can use in that regard?

Formalizing the Transcendental Argument in Debate

Yeah, I think your latter question, yeah, it's possible. Again, I'm not as interested in that. It's possible to lay some of those out. I think the quintessential example that probably most of your listeners know about is Greg Bonson's debate with Gordon Stein.

I think one of the reasons that that turned out so well is not only that Greg was such a good debater and a capable apologist, but it was also that Stein had no idea what was coming at him. So he sort of assumed he had a standard tomist on stage with him and it just so happened, Bonson agreed with him that those proofs aren't useful and off he goes.

But when you listen to Greg in that debate, I mean, he's got it exactly right. Maybe it's not in that debate, but at one point when he's debating, he says, I wanna thank so-and-so for being here. You've just proven the existence of God.

What's he doing there? What he's doing is trying to help people recognize that if you're an atheist and you come to a debate, you're already presupposing that there's meaning in what you and I are saying, that when the words leave my mouth and reach your ears, that they're the same word and that you can understand that and communicate back.

None of that makes sense on an atheist worldview. So I think part of what you would wanna do that Greg was so good at was try to show people how their worldview is in reality, number one, meaningless and number two, meaningless because it's based on their own presuppositions, which are nothing more than subjective decisions and biases that they've chosen.

So Van Til would say, I have presuppositions that are necessary in order for me to speak, in order for me to know, in order for me to live, in order for me to recognize anything. Tell me about your presuppositions.

What are those? And Van Til would say, let me get on your ground. Let me get on the unbeliever's ground and let's work with this a little bit and see how this goes. And you really don't have to get that complicated when you get to the end of it because as Schaeffer liked to say over and over again, your basic option is time plus chance plus matter.

And there's not much else available to you at that point.

And if that's all you've got,.

You've got a lot of chemicals sort of mixed up in a bottle and that's who we are. Now, of course, agnostics and atheists are gonna reject that, but you wanna try to find out why and how they reject that.

And that's where the asking questions comes in. And this is an important point too. And I just wanna speak a little bit to people listening is that you don't successfully demonstrate the truth of your position merely by asking questions.

This is one of the things that accusations that are made towards many presuppositionalists online that we just are following this script to trip up the unbeliever. Questions are asked for a purpose. They're not just for setting up a trappers or avoiding having to kind of put forth your own positive case.

I think asking questions is vitally important in clarifying and even using that kind of Socratic method of asking questions so as to allow the person who you're engaging with to understand, oh, wow, that is problematic within my view.

Ask them the question and the manner in which they answer it actually is its own refutation. I think that's very, very important. Okay, I'm just gonna stop. Yeah, go ahead. Did you wanna follow up on that?

Yeah, I just wanna say one thing. You're exactly right. So one thing you might wanna do is say, let's say to the person you're talking to, let's do it this way. I'm gonna ask you a series of questions.

I'd be very interested to answer. Then when I'm through, please either use those same questions or ask me your questions and then we'll have some substance of debate in order to go back and forth. So the questions I'm asking you, please feel free to ask me because I'd like to give you answers to those as well.

That's another way to think about that. And then you're into a real debate and a real argument about assumptions and ideas and presuppositions, all sorts of things.

And that's not because you want to avoid giving an argument. I think you're trying to get to the foundation that why go through an argument that will not address the issues. Because you have not first addressed the foundations that affect how we're going to even interpret those arguments and engage in the premises.

Right, and as I was saying to you earlier, unless you lay the ground rules for that, you're not gonna be able to get into the discussion in the first place because typically what the other person is doing is gonna disallow you to presuppose what you know.

You have to presuppose in order to have a discussion at first.

All right, excellent. Let's take a few moments to take some questions, if that's okay. We're gonna put it up on the screen there. And I would imagine you're not gonna say pass, but if there's a question, you'd be like,.

I don't know, we don't know everything,.

But you're a pretty sharp guy, so I hear.

No, I do not know everything, that's for sure.

That's right, that's right.

Okay, so here's a question.

Daniel asks, what is the role of arguments outside of the transcendental for believers and atheists? So basically, if we're gonna, as presuppositionalists, are we only relegated to using different forms of transcendental arguments or is there a place for other sorts of arguments outside of that?

Other Arguments, Persuasion, and the Use of Scripture

Yeah, again, I think it's a really good question because I wanna say this in the proper way. I don't wanna sound negative here, but we don't need to make too much of the transcendental. The transcendental is very important.

I think for those who understand it properly is the impossibility of the contrary because it recognizes Christianity is true and nothing else is. That's an important point to make and that's an objective point.

That's true whether we believe it or not. But I would say, again, I'm trying to make things here as accessible as possible. Look at the way Jesus argues and he has different ways of arguing with different people, but when he's arguing with the Sadducees about who's this woman gonna be married to, what does he do?

He goes right to the Pentateuch, which is what the Sadducees believed in. They didn't believe in the rest. And he talks about why their belief in no resurrection, and he basically concludes how their belief in no resurrection is absurd based on their own Pentateuch, that is based on what they claim to believe.

So what's he doing there? He's persuasively turning their own views against them in order to apply pressure to not believe those views anymore. And he's doing it with what they themselves claim. So I would say one of the best arguments that we see in scripture over and over again is those who use what the others believe in order to show the reality and truth of what we believe.

That's a kind of persuasive subversion that I think can be used very well in apologetic discussion. And you don't even have to talk about transcendental if you don't want to. I think that's a nice way to begin to think about argumentation.

I'm working right now on a little book on apologetics and persuasion. I hope it'll be a little clearer to me and everyone else by the time I'm finished with that. But I think it's sometimes a missing link in our apologetic discussions.