How To Defend Your Faith

The Defense and Confirmation of the Gospel

When I read this, it's obviously great and it's a big chunk of mission of God devoted to. I think the way you describe it is the same way the Apostle Paul does, the defense and confirmation of the gospel.

That's what apologetics is and how you define it. And then I think you go into it and you actually compare what would be called the presuppositional method of apologetics versus, say, the evidentialist perspective or the existentialist perspective of doing apologetics.

Can you take a minute and articulate why it's so important in a day and age in which we live now, where there's hostility against the gospel, where people are railing against all things church and religion, why is it important to define apologetics in this way and have a recovery of what would be the more what we would call Vantillian apologetic?

I think he goes so far as to define it as apologetics as the vindication of the Christian faith from all other worldviews. So can you talk a little bit about why it's so important to recover this branch of defending the faith for our modern day?

Augustine, Calvin, and the Roots of Van Til's Apologetic

Well, of course, Vantill would have argued that the root of what he was saying is found in Augustine and his sort of great civilizational apologetic and as a direction that Vantill derives from Calvin.

And fundamentally, it's about going to the root, the very roots of the problem, to going to the very roots of the challenges that are confronting us in the Christian church today from the culture. The other approaches to apologetics, and I try to do that in the book, is track something of their development and how and where they arose and so forth.

We, of course, recognize as those who are committed to a transcendental or presuppositional apologetic that we're not averse to using evidences and telling people about the evidences that are there for the, for example, the truth of scripture and so on, but we position them openly within a Christian biblical understanding of reality.

That's fundamentally the difference. The other types of apologetics tend to have a sort of piecemeal approach to these things. They think, well, maybe we can just defend the basic, the idea of God and then move from there to the idea of the sonship of Jesus Christ and from there to the idea of the doctrine of the Trinity, let's say.

The Triune God as the Starting Point for Human Thought

But of course, what Van Til was trying to say was, look, there is no bare idea of God. Any God that is not the God of scripture, the triune God of scripture is an idol. You can't defend the existence of an idol.

You can't defend the notion that as Christians, we can't identify some blank idea of God as the Christian God and then try and work our way up or basically work our way around to the idea of the Christian God from some sort of pagan conception of God.

So at root, what this is about is our preaching and our defense of the faith, our preaching of the truth of the gospel and our defense of the gospel being consistent. They have to cohere with each other.

They have to make sense of one another. And so fundamentally, this particular approach to apologetics is about going to the root of the problem, not just dealing with branches of the problem, not just trying to prune branches, but going to the very root, laying the axe to the roots of the tree and essentially asserting that without this God, without the transcendent God of scripture, Father, Son and Holy Spirit as the very foundation and starting point for human life and thought, it is impossible to make intelligible sense of human experience at every level.

Answering Unbelief with a Consistent Christian Worldview

So we don't let the non-believer get away with claiming reason and logic and language and so forth as though they can have all those things and account for them and justify them to attack the Christian faith.

It's about in a hostile environment, in a context now which is root and branch denying the Christian world and life view, we're responding to systematic unbelief with systematic belief. And that's really what this is about, systematic consistent response.

I absolutely love that description.