Presuppositional Apologetics & Persuasion

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

I have another guest with me. Last show, I had Dr. Douglas Grothuis on to talk a little bit about his new book,

Christian Apologetics, the second edition, which I highly recommend. The first edition's really good, and I'm looking forward to getting into some of the newer portions that Dr.

Grothuis has added to his already massive work. But today, I have

Dr. Scott Olyphant of Westminster Theological Seminary here with me. He is a professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.

And of course, those who follow my channel know that we love to talk about presuppositional apologetics.

And so, I'm happy to have Dr. Olyphant on with me today to talk about that along with some other stuff.

And I'm looking forward to an exciting conversation. So, welcome. I know folks are just starting to kind of roll in and tune in.

So, if you have any questions, and I'm gonna be repeating this throughout the conversation, if you have any questions,

Dr. Olyphant has been kind enough to agree to take some questions from the live listening audience. So, be sure to preface your question with the word question so that it doesn't get lost in the sea of comments that is usually filling up the comment section as these discussions go on.

So, just wanted to throw that out there. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my guest,

Dr. Scott Olyphant of Westminster Theological Seminary. How are you doing, Dr. Olyphant? I'm fine, thanks

Eli, good to see you. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I don't know if you know this, but all the way back when

I started this channel, you were like my first kind of like, in my eyes, kind of like, yes, someone, a scholar that I can get on and talk about important issues on presuppositional apologetics because COVID hit and all the professors were home.

Yeah, yeah. So, I'm happy to have you back on. Thank you so much. Well, thank you.

And I just apologize to you and your listeners or viewers or whoever, I didn't do video last time.

I just am not of the age where that was really comfortable for me. But since COVID, we've had to do a lot of that.

So, I think we're back in. I think we're good at this. You look good. You look very modern with the

AirPods. You got the scholarly beard. You're good, no worries. Yeah, it's amazing what you can do on camera.

That's right, that's right. No special effects, no filters, but anyway, okay. So, why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself in terms of your focus in your scholarship.

And then we can kind of go into a little bit about a new book that just came out. Maybe we can kind of take things from there.

Yeah, sure. Well, I've really been focused on apologetics, reform apologetics, gosh, for 40 plus years now.

It's what drew me to Westminster as a student. I had the privilege of interacting with Ben Till in those early days through correspondence, letter writing.

And then I was living in Texas and he came down to Texas and stayed with us for a few days. And we chatted back and forth.

So, I eventually made my way to Westminster to do a master's degree. And then I did a THM after that in apologetics.

Westminster didn't have a doctoral program in apologetics then. So, I did a THM in apologetics and wrote my master's thesis.

And I wrote my thesis on a comparison of Cornelius Van Till and Herman Doyle Beard. There were things in the air at that point about who's really transcendental, who's got the transcendental method.

And, you know, the Jerusalem and Athens sort of brought that out in a pretty big way. And this was a bit after that, but it was still there.

So, I did that and then went to pastoral ministry after Westminster back to Texas and then moved back here 1991.

So, I've been here since 1991 and I've tried to focus my attention on apologetics and some theology proper in the way that it impacts and feeds into apologetics as well.

So, you interacted, you said you interacted with Dr. Van Till through letter correspondence, not in person, you kind of just wrote back and forth?

Well, we wrote back and forth and then eventually I wrote him and said, would you mind coming to Texas? And, you know, we did a kind of a weekend conference with him and he said,

I'd be happy to do that. It just so happened his wife had passed away at that point and he wasn't teaching. So, he said,

I've got a lot of time, I'm happy to come. So, we had a great time. He said, the one condition is you're gonna need to take a walk with me each day that I'm there.

And I was like, this won't be a problem. The guy was in his eighties. So, but I mean, he would pick them up and put them down. He was, you know, he was in his eighties and it was a two mile walk and we were clipping along and he was huffing and puffing and I was peppering with questions and it was a great time.

I wish I'd had a quarter of the whole time when I told him. Yeah, I've always found Dr. Van Til a very interesting person, not just in his thought but just the kind of person that he was.

I had a mentor here while I'm in North Carolina now. When I was on Long Island, New York, I had a mentor.

He was a pastor, OPC pastor. His name was Bill Shishko. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. Yeah, Bill Shishko, folks who might think that name is familiar.

He actually, he's an Orthodox reformed pastor he debated

James White on the topic of baptism which I thought was an excellent debate if folks are interested in looking that up.

To be perfectly honest, I'm more of the Baptist persuasion but I actually think that Shishko had

Dr. White, you know, give him a run for his money there on that topic. But at any rate, Pastor Shishko knew

Van Til as well. And I was able to con him out of a copy of the defense of the faith, a signed copy of Van Til had given him a while back.

And I remember going out to dinner with Pastor Shishko and asking him, you know, what kind of person was

Van Til? Not the scholarly stuff, like just the person that he was. And he paused and gave it some thought.

And he says, you know, when I think of the type of person Van Til was, he says, I can summarize

Van Til in this way. He was a child living in God's world, in his father's world.

And he explained that Van Til is as brilliant as he was. You know, you remove all of the technical, philosophical and theological jargon.

He really just wanted to live in a world that is understood based upon what

God had revealed. He just wanted to believe his father and how that played out had various technical applications given his context.

But I thought that was very interesting kind of summary of Dr. Van Til. You know, if I could just tell you the story,

I think I've put this in writing somewhere, but when I was gonna come to Westminster, I wrote Van Til, I said, it looks like I'm gonna be a student at Westminster and I'm excited.

Just wanted to let you know. And he wrote back immediately and he said, when you come look for housing, stay with me. So I stayed with him for two weeks in this house here.

And again, we had to go on our walk each day. He liked to do his daily constitution. And the thing that struck me, and I just remember as a youngster,

I didn't think I was young, but I was young, watching him, every neighbor that he would introduce me to, and there were three or four, it wasn't like 10 or 20, but three or four different people out.

And he would introduce me as he went on his walk. Everyone would say something like this. He's probably talking to you about Jesus, isn't he?

Because that was his reputation. His whole neighborhood knew when he's out, if you're gonna have a discussion, he's gonna talk to you about Jesus.

And he would visit neighbors in the hospital, unannounced and uninvited.

He would just go in there with his Bible and read scripture and pray with them. And he was just a remarkable, he was an evangelist and that's what motivated this apologetic.

As you say, he wanted people to understand Christ is Lord and our privilege is to serve him.

Yeah. And I think that's so, and before I kind of get into my main questions, I think that's so important because a lot of people who get into the apologetics game, so to speak, we tend to kind of over tech, we over complicate things with technical philosophical concepts and arguments and things like that, that especially presuppositionalist, we too can be overly philosophical to the exclusion of actually bringing

Christ front and center in our discussions with people. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. All right.

Well, you wrote a book some years back, Covenantal Apologetics, and you had a mission to change the terminology from presuppositional apologetics to covenantal apologetics.

I'm not sure if you've successfully accomplished that. Well, I can tell you this, it works in my classroom because I won't allow them to use the word, but I think outside of the classroom and maybe when they graduate, it goes back.

I mean, it's baked in. So I'm not pretending it'll go away, but the reason

I want us together to find some other terminology is because it's ambiguous, hopelessly ambiguous, and it's philosophical.

And Ben Thill was not so much about philosophy. He was about scripture and theology.

So I think it's better for us to label what we're doing as a theological biblical process in the first place, which can have philosophical implications.

We can do that if we need to, but that's not the gist of it. And it makes it sound like we're concerned about presuppositions, they're concerned about evidence.

And as you know, presuppositionalists recognize everything evidence is God. So it's a misnomer, it's ambiguous, it's a big umbrella under which many people want to fit or many people think they fit.

And I think Ben Thill was more unique than that and more consistently reformed than that. So, like I said, people in my class,

I say, don't use this when you're in my class. Whatever you do outside of class is fine, but we're not gonna use that word.

If you wanna use reform, that's fine. My preference is covenantal. Anything but this philosophical ambiguous term works for me.

Right, now you just said something there that's interesting. You said that presuppositionalism,

I suppose, is an ambiguous term and gives the impression that we're against evidence, we're just all about presuppositions.

I think it was a discussion you had on Unbelievable with, I think it was Kurt Jaros, where you said something to the effect that presuppositionalists are eminently evidentialists.

We're more evidential than the evidentialists because we think literally everything is evidence for God. So I think that's a very helpful thing to say because when

I was learning presuppositional apologetics, I had one foot in presuppositionalism and then

I had another foot in classicalism being reared on the milk of William Lane Craig's classical arguments.

And so I'm like, man, I see the value here, but if I'm a presuppositionalist, I can't use any of that. And so I had this kind of dichotomy set where I'm either a presuppositionalist or I can use some, and there is actually helpful ways to marry those and put them within a presuppositional context.

I think your comments on that particular episode of Unbelievable was really helpful to me. Yeah, good.

Well, I hope someday we can band together and agree to something else because it just is not helpful to our overall discussion out there for people to think, oh, you're presuppositionalist, you must be philosophically oriented and talking abstractions and transcendental ideas.

And we can do that. You've had people want to do that. And sometimes that's useful depending on the argument, but fundamentally we're meant to be biblical and theological.

And so that's what our approach is. And it needs to be infused with that content before we move forward to talk about the other.

Well, excellent. So you wrote the book, Covenantal Apologetics, but you also just came out with a book entitled The Faithful Apologist, Rethinking the

Role of Persuasion in Apologetics. Now, I think it's available on Audible.

I don't know, is the paperback or hard, is there a hardcover paperback available just yet? You know, I wish

I knew. It must be available because I had a student bring it to me earlier today to sign one.

And I told him it's the first time I've seen it. So I guess it's out there, but I'm the last to know. He's like, I just write the stuff.

I don't actually work on this product. Yeah, I just don't know how the process works, but it's gotta be out there somewhere, because he had one.

Okay, all right. Well, the Audible version's definitely there. And I was reading the summary on Amazon.

There were a couple of things that caught my eye and I want to see if you can unpack for us here. So in the summary portion on the

Amazon page, it says, quote, but too often this takes, and the this is referring to the act of giving an answer, right?

This takes, you know, the apologetic can often feel like we're doing PR work for God, limiting our apologetic to a series of strategies and tactics.

What does that mean? What is your opinion on the current state of apologetics that it can often feel like that when we're doing it?

Yeah, part of that is, there are two sides to that. One side is, you know,

I was reflecting on Oz Guinness' book, Fool's Talk, where he's interested in persuasion there in that book.

And one of the things he says is, this is not just, this is paraphrasing Oz, but this is not just another ad campaign.

We're not into marketing and sales. So that's part of it. And the other thing that resonated with me in that is that when

I was a new Christian and in my early days as a Christian, the dear people who were discipling me, you know, many of whom are still alive and still dear people, they were

Arminian folks. And they might not have known the name, but that's kind of the way it was.

And so I was kind of initially reared on a gospel that needed to be sold because it's up to you to convert.

You know, the responsibility is sort of yours to do it. And I felt that because I was in an evangelistic ministry before I went to seminary.

So part of what I'm trying to say there is that there are two sides to persuasion for Reformed folk.

One is, as the Westminster Confession says, the spirit persuades. He works by and with the word to draw people to Christ.

The spirit is the primary persuader. And then it's our responsibility, I think as Christians, to conduct ourselves with wisdom toward outsiders.

And part of what that means is we want to try to connect with them. We don't want to push them away. The gospel is going to have its own offense, and we don't want to be adding to the offense of the gospel by being offensive ourselves as much as is humanly possible, of course.

So in a Reformed view, we're meant to be persuaders on the human level, recognizing that the

Holy Spirit blows where he wills and does what he wants, and he will use the truth of God according to his own sovereign purposes, and the word of God never returns void to him.

So it's that kind of idea that I was trying to avoid. Thinking back on my own personal experience, the beauty of the

Reformed faith is in apologetics, in preaching, in evangelism, we're not the primary instrument.

God is, and his spirit is. We're the ones used by God, and it's a blessing to be used by God to draw people to himself, which is done by the

Holy Spirit bowing with the word. So it's a great privilege to be involved in that kind of ministry. Sure.

Now, I definitely want to get back to the issue of the role we play in apologetics.

Obviously, we're the one giving the reason for the hope, but what is the actual role of the believer as we work in tandem with the working, the mysterious workings of God's regenerative power through the spirit?

I want to return to that a little bit later. But as I was continuing reading the summary portion of the book here, it says, it also says something really interesting.

It says that the book offers a cross -centered foundation for Christians to explain their faith in a welcoming and winsome manner that avoids any burden to sell

Christianity to non -Christians. What do you mean by a cross -centered foundation?

And I guess that latter part kind of relates to what you said. We tend to kind of sell Christianity.

We can kind of look like a cheap car salesman that turns people off when we're talking about theology and the

Christian faith with unbelievers. Yeah. You know, I haven't read what you're reading there, and I'm not sure who wrote it.

I like the way he's put it or she, whoever wrote it. And I'm glad they saw the cross -slash -Christ -centered focus of what

I was trying to do in the book. And see, what I'm after in the book is,

I'll try to put it this way. I'm after a sort of basic level audience who probably has not read a whole lot about apologetics, probably doesn't know the various isms out there, but is just interested in what apologetics is and what it means.

And so what I'm trying to do in my focus there is to reach that kind of audience without any technicalities at all, and to show them what

I think is the biblical mode of persuasion, which begins, really begins with the second person of the

Trinity who is the focus of revelation in covenant history. It's the second person of the

Trinity through whom God is revealed as triune. He is the mediator of revelation.

And so what I do in the beginning of the book is just try to show how that takes place in the

Old Testament. I think sometimes we miss the fact that when the Lord appears in the Old Testament, it's the second person of the

Trinity appearing. And then how that marches us into the New Testament, where we see when the time had fully come, second person of the

Trinity now takes on a human nature permanently. So God's condescension, if I can put it this way,

God's condescension is the mode of persuasion. He could have shouted the gospel from the skies.

He could have dropped leaflets all over the world. Tic -tac -toe. Tic -tac -toe.

Could have done that. Now he could do alerts on our phones. He has all the means he needs, but what he did is he became one of us in order to communicate to us.

And he did that in the beginning. To me, this is fascinating, and I'm not sure I really hit it as crisply as I could in the book, but it's fascinating that God speaks to us.

He speaks to create, and then he condescends to speak to Adam and Eve. And then he speaks in redemptive history through the

Old Testament. And in these last days, he's spoken through his son, and now that's finished, and he speaks to us in scripture.

So to me, all of that has to do with God's means of persuasion.

I'm gonna get, at your level, Calvin called it the divine stoop. I'm gonna condescend to you in order to communicate the truth that you need to know about me.

And I just think that's a marvelous truth, and it helps us understand something about what persuasion is.

Now, this person who wrote this summary mentioned that the book offers a cross -centered apologetic or a cross -centered foundation.

And of course, you didn't write that, but I'm sure you would agree that that's what you were going for. So my next question is what does it mean to say that an apologetic is cross -centered?

What does a Christocentric apologetic look like? And why do you think, say, for example, presuppositionalism offers that to believers?

The thing that attracted me to Vint Hill's approach initially was, like I said,

I was involved in an evangelistic ministry, a wonderful ministry, actually, and I'm thankful for my involvement there and for the fruit of that ministry, not just when

I was there, but overall. But what drew me to Vint Hill, as I was reading him and trying as best

I could to understand him and writing him letters to ask, what do you mean by this? What do you mean by that? What drew me to it is that I could see at least this much that what he was doing was inextricably linked to the gospel.

And the way I had learned apologetics, even in a minimal way, I wasn't a student of apologetics, but I'd read some apologetics because of my ministry

I was in, the way I'd learned it was my job would be to prove theism.

And then, if I wanted to, I could move from that to the gospel. That seemed, even as a youngster, that seemed to bifurcate things that ought not be separated.

And then when I'm reading Vint Hill, I'm seeing that he's moving us inextricably toward what he called

Christian theism. So it's not just generic theism, it's Christian theism.

And so I think what makes this approach, this reformed approach cross -centered is that we're defending the

Christian faith and not just some notion that God is immutable, unchangeable, infinite, eternal, which of course he is, all of those things, but that's meant to move us, that truth is meant to move us to the triune

God. So you've got this notion in the Roman Catholic catechism that Muslims and Catholics, as they put it, adore the same

God. Well, that's a serious problem. Number one, it would mean that both are idolaters because it's not the true

God, but the reason it's the same is because you have the attributes listed in the same way.

And part of the reason for that is because of Thomas's dependence on Muslims and on Aristotle. That's not

Christian theism. Christian theism is this kind of God who then condescends to us to speak and to tell us who he is.

And so our apologetic needs to lead as best we're able inexorably to the gospel itself and to the cross of Christ as the only solution to our sin problem.

So I have some friends who are pretty noted classical apologists and I've run some ideas like this by them and they would tell me,

I'm trying to demonstrate Christianity. That doesn't mean I have to provide one argument that concludes the

Christian God. What's wrong with me offering some arguments that demonstrate that the

God I'm trying to demonstrate has certain features as part of a broader case because classical apologists as the cherry on top of their arguments, depending on the proposition of the debate, right?

Does God exist? We'll hear the traditional proofs. The cherry on top of the cake are the historical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus.

So while it's true that demonstrating that God is transcendent, perhaps the transcendent cause of the universe, a

Muslim could affirm that. The classical apologist wouldn't say, well, I'm gonna stop there. I believe it is the

Christian God and not every evangelical apologist agrees with the Catholic that Muslims and Catholics worship the same

God. So how would you speak to a classical apologist who says, hey, I'm trying to demonstrate Christian theism, but I'm doing it step -by -step where you think you can do it as like a whole and like all power to you, but don't say

I'm trying to demonstrate the existence of some generic God. I wanna get to Christian theism. How would you speak to someone like that?

Yeah, so I would say a couple of things here. I don't wanna give the impression that there's something wrong with discussing theism.

What I wanna say is if we Christian apologists are gonna discuss theism, we have to recognize that our epistemological foundation for that is

God's revelation and not some rational construct or not some mutually agreeable rational principle since those don't exist, mutually agreeable ones.

So when I was writing covenant apologetics, one of the things I did in one of the chapters is I took an actual dialogue between a classical apologist and a humanist.

I took that actual dialogue and the apologist was given the cosmological argument. Everything comes to be as a cause.

Universe came to be, therefore God, that kind of thing. And the humanist, five times in that, it was a real discussion, five times in that discussion, the humanist says to the classical apologist, how do you know that God did not come to be?

And you can read his answers in the book, but he can't get to the answer. What he does is repeat the structure of the thing.

How do you know that God did not come to be? Well, everything comes to be as a cause. How do you know that God did not come to be? And on and on he goes, and he never got an answer.

So that shows, I think, that there's an epistemological gap in a sort of classical approach because then what

I do in the book, is I reconstruct that very argument in a way, not the only way, but a way that a reformed covenantal apologist would use it.

And what I begin to do then is, when the how do you know question comes, the way

I set it up in that mock dialogue, when the how do you know question comes, I say, well, the only way I can know is because God has told me who he is and what he's like.

In other words, you've got to be, I think, clear and quick if needed to get to your foundation so that the people that you're speaking to will understand from what authority you do speak.

If you don't go to your foundation, which is God's revelation, then the impression is going to be given, I'm speaking from my own authority or from the authority that we share together by virtue of our rationality or something like that.

That's not what apologetics is meant to be or meant to do. So we need not ever be embarrassed or ashamed or reticent.

To say I'm standing on scripture because unless I do, I've got nothing to say to you.

And what I say to you is not because I'm the authority here, it's because Christ is and he's spoken to me in his word and he's told me what

God is like. And I just think that's a world apart from much, not always, much of what happens in classical apologetics.

You probably know the situation better than I do, but the story of Antony Plough, he eventually became somewhat kind of theistic, but he could never get over the suffering issue.

And that's a hard one, there's no question, problem of evil is difficult. But one of the ways you can talk about that in an apologetic context is to say, here's what

God has done about the suffering. He came and he suffered. So he's not aloof from it.

And in his plan, he planned that he would actually undergo it.

So it's that important to him as well. And now you've got a cross centered apologetic.

Maybe it doesn't answer everything the person wants to ask, but it answers everything they need to know in order to understand what

God thinks about suffering. He took it on himself. You can't do that if you're so boxed in in kind of a theistic context.

It's not, you're not gonna think, I've got the leeway to go there immediately, because you're gonna think this really does mess up my argument.

And in that actual dialogue in covenantal apologetic, you see how that works. I mean, the classical apologetic, he just can't go there.

He's gotta stay with his, what he thinks is his mutual rational principle. Okay, so when we take, for example, the

Kalam cosmological argument, whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. You've got the fine tuning argument.

These kinds of traditional classical proofs. Does the presuppositionalist have any use for those?

What does it look like to a pre, because we often give lip service as reform folks, like, hey, we don't agree with the classical approach, but there are some great insights that we could still benefit from.

And is that just kind of tipping our hat or are there great insights that the presuppositionalist can use from the classical approach?

How does, and this is a question, I don't know if this is something that is spoken about in methodological debates at the scholarly level, but at the popular level, this is a huge question.

How do we marry presuppositionalism and those evidences and classical arguments?

I mean, is it just garbaggio or is there a fruitful way to kind of bring them together and provide a very potent cumulative presuppositional -esque approach to present to the unbeliever?

Yeah, and I think that's just a great question. And I think it's legitimately kind of a burning question out there and we all need to do more work on it.

One of the reasons I did the dialogue format in Covenantal Apologetics and created a mock dialogue,

I did two or three of those throughout the book. I did a dialogue with a Muslim and this one was a dialogue with a humanist.

And one of the reasons I did that, and I tried to make clear in the book because I said it repetitively, this is only one way to do it.

It could be done other ways, but I wanted to show, of course, those arguments can be used.

You know, Ventile uses Boving's language to say that theistic proofs are all objectively valid.

And what that means is they have their own validity, but what's not considered oftentimes, or if it is considered, it's considered in a theologically different way than we would consider it, is the state of the person to whom you speak.

And as you know, in a typical Arminian context, there's a ration, there's meant to be, they think, a rational mutuality so that when you're speaking to someone about cause and effect, your supposition is we mean the same thing by that.

There's no difference. Okay. In the way I think about it and the way the unbeliever thinks about it. So, yes,

I would say Reform apologists, covenantal apologists, your kind, what you're talking about, the word which must not be said, that kind of apologist can use any of those arguments to good effect, but always within the context of a revelational foundation.

That is, we have to know what our principium is, what our basic source is for the information we're giving so that, this was

Bertrand Russell's quagmire, as he put it, the reason he couldn't be a Christian is because you get cosmological argument and the universe came to be there for God.

Okay, who made God? Well, that sounds like a stupid question to us. It's a natural question to ask, given the premises and structure of that kind of cause effect argument.

On what basis do you stop then with God? And you could say, well,

I stop on the basis of my definition of God. Okay, good. Where'd you get that definition?

Is that something here? You get it because that's what you think about God, or do you get that definition or understanding of God from somewhere else?

And for us, we would say, look, we have to get our understanding of God from what God has said, because the distance is so great.

We wouldn't know him unless he condescended to reveal himself to us. And he's done that. He's done that in natural revelation.

He's done that particularly in special revelation. So all of those arguments I think can be very useful.

But when the epistemological question comes, and it doesn't have to be called that, but when the question comes, how do you know?

Then we need to say how we know. Well, I know because God has said so. That's how I know. And by the way, that's the only way you're gonna be able to know as well, because that's who we are and that's who

God is. All right, excellent. Again, that's a topic that I wasn't even planning to ask those questions, but that could open up another discussion that I think is an important one, but I'm gonna try to stay focused.

So, all right. So your book, Apologetics and Persuasion, you're obviously coming from a reformed perspective, right?

Now, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but on the interwebs, there are all sorts of theological traditions that are employing presuppositional approaches.

So for example, I have seen some Roman Catholics floating around using presuppositionalism in interesting ways.

And Eastern Orthodoxy, there's a very strong emphasis on presuppositional forms of argumentation.

There's a very well -known Eastern Orthodox fellow on YouTube, his name is Jay Dyer, and he uses transcendental arguments along the lines of the way

Bonson would use it. So my question then, because you present a reformed apologetic, what is the relationship between reformed theology and presuppositional apologetics?

Is that relationship a necessary one or an accidental one? It's just Van Til developed a system out of certain reformed assumptions that he had, but they're not necessarily connected.

Why don't you unpack that for us? Yeah, well, this goes back to kind of my passion.

Again, when I was a fairly young Christian living in Texas, a well -known apologist came to town to speak and I had the opportunity to chat with him afterwards and his name's not important, everyone would know it, but it wasn't

Sproul, but it was somebody that people would know. And so I had a chance to meet with him and just started talking to him about apologetics.

And I was pretty sure where I was at that point, but I hadn't been at it very long. So he asked me in the middle of it, he said, are you presuppositional?

And I said, yeah, I am. And he said, so tell me, are you Carnelian or Clarkian or Schaefferian or Vantillian or Henryian?

So he gives me this list and light bulbs went off in my head and I thought,

I don't like the word if it's a big umbrella under which people fit who would have pretty significant disagreements among themselves.

So it was one of the clues to me that we've got to do better than that. So that's all to say, yeah, a lot of folks can be presuppositional, a lot of folks can do transcendental.

My concern, my interest is in a deeply reformed apologetic. And I think that was the genius of Vantill.

I think that's what he helped us do. He would have said to us today, if he were here, he would have said, you guys need to remember,

I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants. The way he put it to me, I'm a pygmy standing on shoulders of giants.

I'm not a giant at all. I've just got these people underneath me. That's what he said. And I think he believed that with all his heart.

He would not have done what he did without Calvin, without Kuyper, without Bobby, to some extent

Hodge and Warfield. So that's why I think that the term itself is not helping what we want to promote.

And we need to be as clear as we can that if you're going to think about apologetics as we see it in a biblically consistent way, you need to think about it as infused with reform theology.

The reform theology has got to be at the base of our apologetic method, or we're going to go wrong in various ways.

And that was Vantill's debate discussion with Gordon Clark, with Cornell and others.

So I would say, again, yes, you can fit people into various presuppositionalisms or transcendental methods or approaches.

But my question would be, what's the theology driving that apologetic if you're going to call it presuppositional?

So perhaps I could ask even a more refined question. So yes, I agree with you that we need to have kind of, reform theology is the soil out of which our apologetic flows.

I get that. But is it possible for you to pinpoint certain specifics of reform theology that is just essential?

Like, hey, this is a unique feature that we see in reform theology that's not seen in these other theologies.

And this important piece is very important in consistently using a presuppositional approach.

Yeah, I think so. First is what we've already discussed, that God is the one who saves sinners and he does it monergistically.

The spirit works fine with the word. You've got to have that view of things if you're going to do apologetics, otherwise you think you're really the instrument, the instrumental cause in that.

And then downstream from that, we have to recognize that depravity is total, that it's not partial, that we're not just sick people who need medicine, we're dead people at the bottom of the ocean who need resurrection.

And then I think, when you get to the fine points of this,

I think focally Calvin's insistence picked up by Kuyper, Bovink, and emphasized by Van Til, and a lot of the reformed, actually, in the 16th, 17th century,

Calvin's emphasis on the sensus divinitatis is key for our understanding of what we're doing in apologetics, because we have to go into these discussions recognizing that the people to whom we speak know the

God of whom we speak. They don't just have this ambiguous notion of happiness or blessedness, as Thomas would have us understand

Romans 1, but it's actually, notus tonfaeon, it's actually

Romans 121, it's knowing God. And that's what

Paul wants to set out, and I was just in my class this morning, in my second year apologetics class, we're also going through the prologue of the

Gospel of John, taking off from Gerhardus Voss's good study on that, where he makes it clear,

I think correctly, that the second person of the Trinity has been the revealer from the beginning, and that the light that enlightens every man is actually the knowledge of God.

So you combine the prologue with Romans 1, and what you have, I think, is a biblical certainty that you never go to anyone who is a tabula rasa.

Every person who is self -conscious by virtue of their self -consciousness is, at the same time,

God -conscious, and that's a dynamic, active thing working external to them and within them,

Romans 2, the works of the law written on the heart, so that what you're wanting to do in your apologetic, this is the persuasion part of it, is you're wanting to reach in to that sensus divinitatis and connect with it so that the spirit might use it for its own sovereign purposes, but our prayer would be use it for conversion.

That seems to me, you've got to have those things in place if you're going to be presuppositional.

It's gotta be informed by that brand, if I can put it that way, of Reformed theology that has that strong emphasis on the sensus divinitatis, which was

Calvin's genius, really, and was picked up by the other Reform. I think that's massively important.

Would you equate Calvin's sensus divinitatis with kind of the notion of innate knowledge of God, just innate knowledge?

Yeah, I mean, there were debates about that and discussions because the notion of innate looked

Cartesian back in the day. And so if you use the word, you've got to define it. What our forefathers would call it is a cognitio insita, meaning an implanted knowledge.

Now, I like implanted better because in one sense, it means it's from the outside in. It's put in there by God.

And that's really Paul's emphasis. We know God because God has made himself known. We don't know

God because we construct some sort of theological structure, including that God exists.

We know God because God inserts his knowledge into us. And that's something that, you know, so many even

Reform Christians don't get. They don't get the clarity of what Paul's giving us here.

There've been discussions, Eli, you may know about these on, you know, what do we think about natural revelation, natural theology, all that kind of thing.

And those are helpful discussions. But before we get into that discussion, we need to define our terms. The way

I define natural revelation is that's what God does. God does in and through all that he has made.

Natural theology is what we do with what God does. So some of our

Reform forebears wanted to call natural theology, the census of Benetautis, they called that natural theology because any knowledge of God for them is natural theology.

I think that confuses the issue. I don't like that distinction. So I wanna say, that doesn't mean it's wrong.

I just think it gets confusing. I wanna say natural revelation, God's activity, natural theology, what

I do with that. So God puts his knowledge into us by and through the things that he's made.

And that's, you know, that's comprehensive. That's internal, that's external, that's always, it's dynamic, it's 24 seven, it never ends.

Okay, so I have two questions then, because this idea of implanted knowledge, I think is very fascinating.

And I think this comes up a lot when presuppositionalists are defending presuppositional claims against other competing apologetic methodologies.

A lot of people really zero in, well, you know, what do you mean by implanted knowledge? How do you defend that scripturally?

What is a go -to scripture that we could use, or scriptures that we can use that you think most strongly defends the idea of implanted knowledge?

Is it just Romans one? Nontes tantean, they know God. Are there any other passages that we can kind of go to to show, yeah, we know the

God that created us, the very fact that we're conscious of ourselves, we must simultaneously be conscious of God, as Calvin would suggest.

Yeah, I think Romans one is the best one for us. Again, I think the prologue, gospel

John, the light that enlightens every man, that's the true light that enlightens every person, that's,

Vos thinks, and I think correctly, that's the knowledge of God given to us through the medium of the second person of the

Trinity, from the beginning of creation all the way forward. He's the one working, but when

Paul says in 120, that we know God's invisible attributes, and his deity, his theotase, his divinity, however you wanna translate that word, what

Paul's wanting us to recognize is that there is, this is not just ethereal, kind of opaque, ambiguous, this is real knowledge, personal knowledge of the personal

God. And then I think if we, so let's take that as Paul's basic dictum when it comes to what

I call the anatomy of unbelief, you know, the psychology, if we can etymologize that, the soul knowledge that people have by virtue of being the image of God.

And if we had time, we could go into, Paul's referencing Genesis one to three in Romans one, he's got that in mind while he's thinking about the wrath of God being revealed.

But if we take that and move to Paul, to that famous occasion in Athens, Paul at Athens, what's he doing at Athens?

Well, he begins his declaration, this proclamation as he puts it, this

God that you don't know I proclaim to you, he begins with some, what we would think are some of the most difficult aspects of God's character.

He begins with his aseity, he begins with his sovereignty, he begins with the creation of Adam, and from one man, every other person comes by virtue of Adam's covenant head, difficult things.

In this culture, you know, Schaeffer called this people without the

Bible. This is a culture of people without the Bible, more or less. So Paul begins there and then he quotes the two poets.

Again, Aquinas says he quotes the poets because he's, you know, they've got it about half right. That's not what

Paul's thinking. Why does he quote the poets? In him, you live and move and exist. We are his offspring.

That's the persuasion point. See, Paul knows, I guarantee you, Paul knows the people that he's speaking to, they know

God. So he's appealing to their knowledge of God at Athens in this proclamation.

They say he's unknown. Paul said, no, he isn't. I'm gonna tell you why. Here's what he's like. You know, the God who made heaven and earth doesn't need anything, doesn't dwell in temples made by human hands, et cetera.

This is who the true God is. And he says, even some of your own poets have said this.

Now, then the question is when, let's say Epimenides says in him, you live and move and exist.

Is that proposition true? In him, you live and move and exist. I ask my classes every year and I get blank stares because they think it might be a trick question and it kind of might be a trick question.

So is it true? Is it true in him, you live and move and exist?

When Epimenides wrote it, it's false because the hymn is Zeus. It's a false proposition.

Paul's made it true by pouring the biblical Christian theistic content into the statement so that when he uses it, he also translates it into a

Christian context. So, and the people listening to him would have known that he's already set up the one he's speaking about.

And then when he used their statements, it's a point of persuasion. It's something they already know, something many of them would have affirmed, but now it's got completely different Christian theistic content.

Sort of like what the apostle John is doing in John one in the beginning was the word. Logos, yeah, exactly right.

Yeah, that word was around and in the air and had been around for a few hundred years before John even wrote it.

And the Lord inspires the apostle John to take it and use it and give a completely different content.

He was in the beginning and he was with God and he was God, and by the way, he became flesh.

I mean, it's just a remarkable passage, rich passage for us and for apologetics. So I think that's the point, that's where we see persuasion in it's sort of in its panoramic view in the

New Testament. You know, I had a guy say to me one time, I was speaking to a Presbytery group and I did a little bit on Romans one and he raised his hand and he says, you know, all you guys have is

Romans one. Is that all you've got? You know, you just keep using this and using this.

And I said to him, because I was in Florida, I said to him, let me quote

R .C. Sproul to you in another context, but the same quote, how many times does

God have to say it for it to be true? So, you know, Sproul had used that before and I used that when it came to Romans one.

And the fact is, you know, scripture says it elsewhere and you can piece together other passages of scripture.

I think Psalm 19, you know, Paul's thinking about that as he's writing in Romans one, the heavens declare the glory of God, day to day pour forth speech, night to night reveal knowledge.

All of that is God revealing and giving in and through everything that's made. And Paul ensures us that when

God does this, it gets through, it doesn't bounce off. He implants it.

It's plain to us because God made it plain to us, Romans one, 19.

So we know that it's there because God makes sure that it's there and God doesn't fail in his task.

So it's, I think unless you've got that as kind of your central focus with the gospel, you know, context and the knowledge of God as your central focus, you're gonna miss what a true reformed covenant on apologetic is.

I'm speaking with Dr. Scott Oliphant of Westminster Theological Seminary, Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology.

Again, folks who are listening in, there are some questions already coming in, but if you have a question for Dr. Oliphant, please preface your question with the word question and he'll tackle those at the back end of this episode.

Now, a question on innate knowledge. So a lot of people ask this, so yes, or implanted knowledge.

Yes, all men have a knowledge of God, non testam theon, yes, they know the God, but what is the content of that implanted knowledge?

How much of the knowledge of God does man have? And can we go further than just simply saying enough to condemn him?

That's true, but people say, you know, do people know that God is triune? If not, and we have kind of just a limited knowledge of God enough to condemn us, then what's wrong with the natural theological arguments which kind of show that, you know, we can deduce the sort of God that everyone kind of has an internal conception of within their own rational thought categories.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does. So just to your latter point, let me just say again, and I think you agree with me here, there's nothing wrong with the natural theological arguments.

Okay, they're objectively valid. The question is how are we gonna use them and where do we stand when we use them? So if we stand on God's revelation when we use those arguments, and we are sure in our discussion that the import of what we say and the content of what we're saying is informed by God's revelation in scripture, then go ahead and use them and work with them.

Just remember the epistemological foundation on which you stand in order to do that, because if you move away from that, as Ben Till would put it, you're on quicksand.

And the only way you can stand on something firm is by standing on God's revelation. So could a presuppositionalist use a cosmological argument with the background knowledge that this argument wouldn't work at all without the

Christian concept, but for the purposes of the nature of the discussion, they kind of throw that argument and kind of have a conversation with the unbelievers.

Is there a place for that? Because a lot of people think if you're doing presuppositional apologetics, even when you're using evidence, it has to look starkly different than what these classical guys are doing over here.

What does that look like? Yeah, again, I don't think it has to look starkly different. I just think even

Cajetan, the commentator of Aquinas, he said, you know, Thomas's proofs bump up against the ceiling of creation.

They can't, you can't jump in a cause effect argument in the way that it's laid out classically.

And let's just say domestically, you don't have within the argument. So I'm trying to be careful here.

You don't have within the argument anything that allows you to jump to eternity and infinity and immutability.

Thomas just says this, we call God. And so if people say yes and amen, okay, fine.

But just recognize you've imported massive content into the argument that's not there in the argument itself.

So if we're gonna use a cause and effect argument, we're gonna have to get to the point where we say

God caused the universe. Yes, right. And that does not mean that he's subject to time or space in his causing it, all right?

So we don't, we can't just, so now we're talking about a different kind of cause, and we have to acknowledge that or at least know that going in so that if we're questioned who caused

God, oh, by the way, God is the only one uncaused. He is who he is, period, the end.

So we just have to be, I think we have to be, you know, Van Til's phrase, we just always have to be epistemologically self -conscious when we engage in these kinds of things so that we recognize from what foundation we speak.

If we lose that, we're going to lose the biblical import of what we're doing. God may honor it anyway.

There've been successful natural theological arguments from other theological persuasions. We thank the

Lord for that. I used to preach an Arminian gospel and the Lord used it anyway. So that's not the point.

The point is we need to be as biblically faithful as we're able to be given what God has said to us.

So I think that's the direction we need to go. I forget the first part of your question. I had an answer for it.

I said, with respect to the content of that implanted knowledge, how much of God, of the true

God do we know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I would say Charles Hodge is really good here in his commentary on Romans.

He says in effect, you know, when Paul wants to give us a list of things, he'll give us a list and he'll make a long list.

He does that at the end of Romans. I mean, you've got a long list there, but people are full of, you know, Paul says you're full of this because God's given you over.

But in Romans 1 20, we don't have a list. We have two categories, eternal power and theotics, divine nature, divinity, the godness of God.

So it's his eternal power and his godness. And Hodge says, he's of the opinion,

I think he's correct here, that Paul, if he wanted to give us a list, he would have said, we don't have a list. We ought to include,

Hodge says, all the divine perfections. Now that doesn't mean all of them are always in us in the same way, at the same time.

It's not like God just sort of dumps all the divine perfections into our soul and there it is and there it stays.

Because the point that Paul's making there is that the wrath of God is being revealed.

There's this dynamic of revelation. Again, back to Psalm 19, day to day pour forth speech, night to night reveal.

There's a dynamic going on so that we're knowing God truly and perhaps in different ways at different times in the world.

So when there's a tragedy in a life of an unbeliever, they wanna know God as a forgiving father, even if they're not

Christians. Sure. And when things are happening now in Ukraine with Russia, you've got all kinds of people that surprise you by saying, we need to be in prayer.

So they know God in that way. So that you've seen the census of Anatolius.

I've used the example, I'm not the only one, but I've used the example of a beach ball trying to hold it underwater and sometimes that ball's gonna pop up.

And a lot of times in times of tragedy, that ball pops up and people say, we need to be in prayer about this or something like that.

And I think the beach ball's popping up when Epimenides says in him, we live and move and exist. He's got the wrong reference, it's not

Zeus. But why even say something? Why have this overarching in him kind of idea? That's the census of Anatolius.

So I think it's eternal power, it's divine nature. Do people know that they are creatures of God?

And Paul's point is you ought to honor him and you ought to give thanks. You ought to be doing those things.

You know enough that you ought to honor God, you ought to worship him, you ought to bow the knee to him, you ought to be thankful.

But instead you become foolish in your speculations, you're foolish, hard, you're dark and professing to be wise, you become fools.

That's what suppression looks like. But you can't suppress what you don't have. So it's suppression of the truth.

That's always there. And because we're covenantally qualified, either in Adam or in Christ, that knowledge will always be there in this life and the next.

So that hell is the reality of me shaking my fist at the one who gave me life and breath and all things while I existed here.

It's the knowledge of the wrath and justice of God, new heavens, new earth, knowledge of the grace and mercy of God.

All right, excellent. Now I have two questions. One is my last question on implanted knowledge.

And then my other question is related to reform theology and the role of persuasion in doing apologetics.

So my last question on implanted knowledge is what is the nature of...

We say that all men know that God exists. That means everyone is included. Everyone has a sufficient knowledge of God for their damnation, right?

We would agree with that, right? Yeah. Okay. So what is the nature of a newborn baby's knowledge?

When you have someone who hasn't even fully developed mentally, does a newly born baby have a knowledge of God enough to damn them?

And like, how does that work? Is it the fact that they have a knowledge of God, but they lack the rational capacities to formalize it into like language?

What is the nature of a baby's knowledge of God? Yeah, and I think those are fun questions.

The Bible doesn't give us much information about that. I think that's why

I like to say, I think Ben Till says this somewhere, I just read recently along with Calvin, to the extent you're self -conscious, you're

God conscious. And in my own view, I had a discussion about this a while back, a good while back now with a particular philosopher who was kind of upset that I was saying this knowledge doesn't have to be propositional.

I don't think it does at all. There's much more going on in knowledge than simply propositions.

An example I've used is when one of my granddaughters was three months old, she and her siblings and mom were living with us for a while because my son -in -law was deployed, he was in the

Navy. So this granddaughter was born in our home and in a few months was just kind of being reared here.

When she was three months old, I would walk in the door and she would smile and get excited. That's knowledge.

And I don't know what kind it is. I don't know what's going on in her brain, but she knew me and she was actually, you're gonna be surprised.

She was excited to see me. So that's baby knowledge. If you came through my door,

I'd be excited to see you. Well, yeah, so I think scripture's not wanting to, deal with that question except to say,

God knows what people know and how much they know. And Paul's writing to a group of people with an ideal, sort of an ideal adult in view, a typical

Roman, as he writes to the Roman church in view here, Roman pagan. And yeah, it'll filter down in various ways to children.

But again, to the extent they're self -conscious, they're God conscious. And if you have children, I had children, you know that when they're very young, the big questions start to come, even if they're not provoked.

The questions about heaven, questions about God, questions about life. So kids are getting that already.

And that I think is an example of the census divinitatis at work. All right, thank you for that.

Now I have one last question on my end and then we'll move to some live questions. I hope you're enjoying this conversation.

I am. I love how you explain some of the things that are floating around in my mind and questions that I hear.

So I appreciate that. But here's my personal last question before we kind of shift to some of the audience questions.

So some folks from other apologetic schools of thought who are perhaps more critical of reform theology might say something along the lines of if Calvinism slash determinism, so a deterministic form of Calvinism is true, what's the point of being persuasive in apologetics?

It's ultimately up to God anyway, whether you're persuasive or not, it is God who's going to have to produce regeneration in the heart of the unbeliever anyway.

So God can use unpersuasive means to accomplish his task in evangelism and apologetics because it's really up to God to turn the spiritual regeneration switch on.

So in essence, are we to be persuasive as reform folks simply because God commands us to or does persuasiveness actually play an important role in how we communicate with unbelievers?

That's my question. Yeah, really good question. I don't have a lot of patience with caricatures of reformed theology because they've all been addressed somewhere.

And so when I hear a caricature, it tells me right away, somebody doesn't know much about the view that I believe.

And kind of the standard view, if you're a Calvinist, God is the author of sin, as if the

Calvinists had never thought about that. Oh, really? That's an interesting objection. No, it's right there in the middle of the

Westminster Confession when they're talking about the decree and no Calvinist has ever thought that. And there's a certain sense in which no

Calvinist has ever been a determinist. We certainly do affirm that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass.

Nothing comes to pass except that he has first ordained it. But we also have affirmed in reformed thinking, really goes farther back, doesn't it?

But we're just talking in here about reform thought. We've also affirmed that we are responsible creatures.

In Adam, we're responsible, in Christ, we're responsible. And so we're responsible to be involved in what

God has called us to do. And God can use any means he wants to to convert people.

I heard someone one time say that they were converted by way of a study of Buddhism. And what they recognized was there's something wrong here and that moved them over to think about Christianity.

So God used Buddhism, but we don't wanna use that in our apology. We don't wanna hype Buddhism so that people can go to Christianity and learn something else.

So what the Lord has ordained is that we would be involved in our preaching, in our evangelism, in our apologetics.

We would be instruments that he would use to bring his own people to himself.

None of that happens accidentally. None of it happens randomly. Nothing is contingent to God, as the confession says.

All of it's according to his plan. But he's planned that he would use the likes of us in preaching evangelism and apologetics in order to bring people to himself.

So I've had people say to me, you probably have too, they sort of come and say, oh, by the way, no one was ever argued into the kingdom.

And I say to them, exactly right. And let me just help you here. No one was ever preached into the kingdom.

No one was ever evangelized into the kingdom until and unless the truth of God is used by the spirit of God to change hearts of people.

And that's what the spirit does. He's chosen to use us in that process. And we're meant to be biblical in the way that we present the gospel.

And I'm not saying there's only one way to do it. There are various ways to do it, but we're meant to be

Christ -like in the way that we do it. And one of the things that I do in the book is I use a couple of the examples of Jesus talking to the

Pharisees and the Jews and show how persuasive he is in using their own words against them in some cases, but also drawing them in by saying, oh, this is what you believe.

Well, guess what? You've got to believe this as well. So the point here is if someone thinks

Calvinism means that our involvement is meaningless and useless, they just don't know what

Calvinism is. It's a caricature. It's nothing that Calvinists have ever believed. Right. All right. Well, thank you for that.

You are doing an excellent job and we're making good time. And we're gonna move to the audience questions.

There's a couple here. We'll go kind of a shotgun speed. You don't feel like you have to rush through them, but don't feel like you have to give kind of a long explanation too.

So some of them are pretty short. Some of them will require a little bit of unpacking, but let's try to get through as many as possible.

I really appreciate when folks ask questions and it's very helpful. It's the opportunity for folks to kind of interact.

So first question here is from Scott Terry. Thank you so much for your question. Did Dr. Olyphant ever meet

Greg Bonson and did they ever have any interaction? You know,

I did meet Greg. He came to Westminster one time and wanted to interact with our faculty on the

Theonomy book that was written. I don't know if you know that book, Theonomy, A Critique. It was edited by Barker and Godfrey.

And Greg called and wanted to join the faculty, interact with it back and forth.

And he did that. And in those days, as today, there weren't any

Theonomists on faculty. So it was a lively exchange. It was lively.

But, you know, I don't think either side was convinced of the other. But Greg and I just didn't have a lot of opportunity to interact much.

He was in California, I was here. And then he, you know, died rather suddenly.

I will say, this is kind of interesting anecdotal. The book,

Van Til's Apologetic that Greg wrote, where he compiled, you know, so much of what

Van Til wrote in a systematic way. Yeah. This guy here.

Yeah, there it is, me too. I've got it right here. And I require that in my class, in my second year

Apologetics class. The interesting thing about that is Greg, it took Greg quite a while to get that eventually done because it's a pretty significant piece.

And, you know, it just takes a lot of effort. And I was one of the ones who was an editor, meant to be an editor of it before it went to PNR to be published.

Okay. So the manuscript, the finished manuscript arrived on my desk the week that Greg died in the hospital.

So providentially it came out just in time. And I think it's been a very, very useful resource for us in Apologetics.

My students, I haven't read it every year and they are always enthusiastic about what Greg does there.

Excellent. I always love those kinds of side stories. Oh, that's very fascinating. All right. Thank you, Scott, for that question.

Random Theology asks, does Dr. Oliphant think presuppositionalism requires a coherentism epistemology?

No, I think it's better than that. I think a Reformed Apologetic requires a

Reformed Epistemology and a Reformed Epistemology requires our understanding of our

Principium Cognoscendi and our Principium Cognoscendi has to be God's revelation. First of all, his special revelation given to us in scripture, and then seeing all of the world,

God's natural revelation by way of scripture. And so if you have that understanding of epistemology, as Van Til says in Survey of Christian Epistemology, then you're gonna be fine with coherence, you're gonna be fine with other kinds of epistemological structures as long as they're framed within correspondence, as long as they're framed within a

Christian epistemological structure. So I will say this, and here's something I've been thinking about,

I haven't done any writing on it yet because I'm not sure where I would go, but there's a strong mood in analytic epistemology that knowledge is justified in true belief.

And so they're trying to figure out what is justification, maybe it's warrant, maybe planning, maybe it's warrant, and then is it true?

And then if it is, then it sort of transforms into knowledge. I think they start in the wrong place.

I think you've gotta start with the knowledge of God that every person has and that belief, whatever you believe is an extension, either antithetical or inconsistency, an extension of the knowledge that God gives you.

So you start as a knower, you don't start as a believer, you start as a knower. So I think they've got it turned backwards.

I think knowledge is the starting place and then from that, beliefs are formulated. And there's a lot of work that I think needs to be done there in terms of a

Christian epistemology because the justified true belief structure sort of looks like a tabula rasa or something like that.

And then you've gotta get somehow the knowledge and philosophers aren't quite sure how to do that. And probably because they're not starting in the right place.

That's an interesting question there. That's an interesting answer. Thank you for that. We wanna go read something now that's related to that.

Arthur Bear asks, how can we transcendentally argue against a Mormon? How does their world do not have the preconditions for intelligibility?

So that's basically, yeah, presuppositionalism works great when you're talking to the atheist, but what happens when you have the

Mormon knocking on your door? Yeah, we'll see. I think this is where you've gotta think about a reformed apologetics a little bit more carefully because reformed apologetics is really just another form of reformed evangelism.

It's a form that's going to deal with objections. It's a form that's going to deal with real questions that come.

But the problem with Mormonism is not intelligibility. The problem with Mormonism is it's a cult and it's a perversion of Christianity.

And so let me just transfer this a little bit. One of the things I did in covenant apologetics, I did this dialogue with a

Muslim. Well, he's got a book and he says, this is the word of God and it's self -attesting. We've got a book and we say, this is the word of God and it's self -attesting.

How do you deal with that? Well, let's talk about what you actually believe. And when you begin to talk about what they actually believe, then you're gonna wanna try to poke holes in what they're saying.

I think Jeff Durbin's probably one of the masters at this because he deals with this a good bit. And you try to poke holes in what they're saying in terms of what their own religion holds.

So what I was doing with the Muslim, the dialogue is I took an actual Muslim book on Islamic theology.

They're all different like Christians, there's their differences, but I took one particular view and it was meant to be a rational view.

There was a big emphasis on the rational. And once you do that, you're gonna have to justify the

Quran itself. Is the Quran or the Quran, is it actually the word of Allah given to you?

If so, how did Allah get it to you? Well, he did it through Mahan, but how does that word come into time?

And there's debate about that. Is this eternal? Is it temporal? If it's temporal, they don't have a

God who can calm the sin. So if it's temporal, they're having trouble figuring out how to make that work.

So I think in Mormonism, I'm not an expert on Mormonism, but you wanna do the same thing with any cult, where you wanna get to is

Christ is Lord. In the beginning was the word was with God is God. Without that, you're not gonna have intelligibility.

So you don't have it just because you have a religion. You only have it if you have Christ. And that's where we need to try to help people to go, need to help them go, if we're gonna do apologetics in a reformed way.

I'm not satisfied with let's address the issue of intelligibility, because the issue of intelligibility is just a segment of the whole sin problem.

The noetic effects of sin are present in every cult. All right, thank you for that. Random Theology says,

Eli, can you have Dr. Oliphant on to discuss theology proper in opposition to the rise of Thomism?

I don't know. If he wants to come back on, we can talk about that. I don't know if that's a topic that's interesting and of interest to you.

Yeah, it is of interest to me. So I'll give you a brief answer. I think my pods are about to die, so I might come into the computer here.

I might just default to the computer instead of these. So I would say this.

Obviously, Thomas was a genius. No question about that. I've never read anything in Thomas that was not said better by some of our best reformed theologians.

So I don't, I would never see it as a place to park. I would see it as an interesting research project.

I took a course on Aquinas at Villanova years ago, just so that I could get it straight from the horse's mouth.

And it was quite clear to me that Thomas, Thomas' overall position is not conducive to reformed thinking.

There are bits and pieces you can extract and pull together. So I guess my bottom line is, when people ask me about classical theism, my answer is,

I'm a confessional theist because that's, for the church, written down specific. Classical is not specific.

If it means Thomas, say Thomas. If it means Thomast and Scotist and Occamist, say that.

And then let's see where the merger takes place. It's just an ambiguous term that people kind of get in their schools together and everybody wanting to fly the flag.

Flag I wanna fly is confessional theism. What the Westminster Confession says, I affirm wholeheartedly every bit of it. And I know what it is, and I know what it says, and I know where it is.

So I don't have to say classical. So I think my own view is this Thomism thing is going to be detrimental to reformed thinking.

And it'll take a while for that to flesh out, but it'll come, I'm pretty sure. Interesting, thank you for that. Scott Terry, thank you for your $20 super chat.

I very much appreciate it. Thank you so much for your support. Is that good? I ain't you liars. That, hey, you come on and you make me money.

Look how it works. That's how YouTube works. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Scott. I really appreciate it. But Scott says, Dr. Oliphant, can you explain the

Principium Ascendi and Cognoscendi? Did the reformed scholastics get this from Aquinas? What's the pedigree of it?

And should we Vantillians be principalists instead of preceptors? Oh, real quick,

I'm gonna interrupt you. I can't hear you. I don't know if when you took out your AirPods, you switched to your laptop,

Mike. Still can't hear you. And when you're live on YouTube, you can't go to commercial, right?

We're having technical difficulties. No worries. I'll give you a few moments there. Okay, there is a way to change your microphone to your laptop.

Are you using a laptop, Dr. Oliphant? Yeah, maybe you should sign out and then click the link back in.

And there's that little screen that tells you to type in your name. There might be an option to click on your settings and turn on the laptop microphone.

Why don't you try that? And I'll tell a couple of reform jokes while you're gone. Yeah, no worries.

It's happened before. It's okay. All right, well, Dr. Oliphant is going to join us.

I'm just joking. I have no reform jokes whatsoever. But I hope you guys are enjoying this conversation.

I'm super excited that Dr. Oliphant was able to come on and he's willing to show his face this time around.

If you watch the older episode, it was just kind of like me talking to Dr.

Oliphant, but there's kind of this awkward gray icon on the other side of the screen.

So I'm happy he was able to pop in here. So let's see if he's back on here with me now. Let's see if - Can you hear me,

Eli? Yes, sir, you're back. Good for you, thanks. I'm sorry about that. Like I said, this happens.

Technology is new to me. It happened. I didn't know where to go. If I was still Pentecostal, we could just blame it on the devil, but that's okay.

No, let's do that anyway. Yeah, so I would... Really good question. I'm not an expert on the pedigree of the

Ascending Cognoscenti. I know the Reformed used it. Likely it's from medieval theology.

The Reformed would have put new content, particularly into the Cognoscenti, I believe. And whenever we think about the two principia of Reformed theology, it's got to be

God and the Triune God, not just generic, but the Triune God of Christianity.

And Cognoscenti has its focus in scripture, special revelation, but must also include natural revelation because as Van Til teaches us, they have to go together.

They're limiting concepts. You don't understand one without the other. And it's been that way since the beginning of creation. So sure,

I like what he says. Principialists, that's much better than presuppositionalists, but anything almost is better than presuppositionalists.

I do. Okay, thank you for that. Viet Mai says, how does one get better at recognizing their unbelieving friend's presuppositions, central concerns or fears, so that one can use that to effectively point their friend to Christ?

That's an excellent question. How would you address that? It is excellent. And let me say, first of all,

I'm not an expert at this, but in thinking about this, I think one of the best ways, and as much as I'm able,

I've tried to do this, again, not an expert, but one of the best ways to do that is to go into almost every conversation with the resolve that you're going to be asking a lot of questions.

Not in an offensive way, but in a genuine concerned way, ask questions about what people are saying and what they mean by what they say.

So I've got an example I've given before, a good friend of mine who's not a believer. He was raised

Jewish and is not so much anymore, but he came back from a trip overseas and he was in a country where there was a good bit of suffering.

And he sort of came up to me right away and I said, how was your trip? And he said, finger in the face, he said, your

God does not exist because of the suffering I saw. And so what are his presuppositions there?

So what I said to him was, how do you know that my God is responsible for that suffering?

You see what I did there? I went to the epistemological question and I challenged his assumption in his statement that he knows the

God that I believe in, which he doesn't. Now, obviously there are some things in there that you understand why he would say it that way.

So you could say, well, don't you, you can't do that. But instead what I did is I challenged his assumption that he knew the

God, he knew I was a Christian, he knew the God that I believed in. And I asked him that question, how do you know the

God I believe in is responsible for that? And he just sort of looked at me and we let it go. A few weeks later, he called me and he said, look,

I wanna talk. So it got to him. It was one of those questions and he wanted to know who

Christ was and he wanted to know about his work and we had good discussions about that. So I think the best way to do this is to go into any discussion, not in the first place, wanting to hammer home your points, but in the first place, wanting to know what these people believe, why they believe it and what questions they're really dealing with.

One more example I think might be useful here, Eli. You know, the testimony of Rosaria Butterfield in her book,

Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. She was an activist lesbian teaching at Syracuse University and she was in charge of the gay and lesbian group there.

This was before Obergefell. So this is, you know, back 2000s, early 2000s and I think late 90s, early 2000s.

And she wrote an editorial in a paper against promise keepers.

And she got a letter from a local pastor after she wrote that. She got a lot of letters and she said,

I had a box on one side of my desk, hate mail box on the other side, love mail.

And she got this letter from a pastor and she says in her book, I didn't know what box to put it in.

And that opened up a conversation and eventually she was, the Lord converted her through the ministry of the pastor, but all the, not all, what the pastor did was, and this is the way

Rosaria reports it. He asked her three basic questions. How did you come to your conclusions?

How do you know you're right? And do you believe in God? What's, see, he's challenging her as a scholar.

Give me the thought process here of how you got to this editorial. And by the way, does

God fit into this at all? And it just devastated her. I mean, the spirit took that and just drove it into her heart and it got her.

So I think that's the kind of thing we need to be adept at as much as we're able.

And this is not my strong suit, but I want it to be my strong suit. How to ask the best questions so I can get at what people are really needing to hear.

Yeah, I think it's important to just recognize that everyone has presuppositions and then just ask yourself, what is this person presupposing when they say this?

One of the ways that I found helpful is watching movies. When I watch movies, I love watching movies.

I enjoy them for entertainment, but I also try to, in my own thinking, identify worldview assumptions in some of the comments they're saying.

And it's helpful. You kind of pick up kind of a sense of like, there's something behind what that person's saying.

So I try to do it with people I'm talking with, although I don't bring it up when I'm talking with people. I don't wanna always be pointing out their presuppositions, but I do try to pay attention to it.

It's kind of like a little mental exercise I'd like to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, probing questions is a good way to do it.

And like you said, training yourself to think that way when you're reading a piece in a newspaper or watching a movie or something like that, what's going on behind the scenes here that makes that statement what it is.

That's a good practice. That's right. Scott, thank you again for another $20 Super Chat. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate that. Scott asks, Dr. Oliphant, Van Til said Hendrick Stoker was the greatest living philosopher, yet I can't find any of his writings except for his essay in Jerusalem and Athens.

Can you comment on Stoker and his influence, if any, on Van Til? Yeah, I agree with Van Til on that.

I think Stoker's undervalued and underappreciated. Part of the reason for that is that he's not translated very much.

He wrote almost everything in Afrikaans. And when I meet somebody from South Africa, I try to say, could you not set aside a little time and translate

Stoker for us? I think somebody was working on it at one point because I got a manuscript in my box and I don't even know whose it was.

And it was translation of some of Stoker's material. But the essay in Jerusalem and Athens is the best thing on Van Til's epistemology, written from a theological, philosophical perspective.

It's a bit dated. He interacts with Duyvierd and others, and Duyvierd is not as relevant today, but Stoker, I think, has a better view on transcendental relative to transcendent, which was the big debate between Van Til and Duyvierd.

Stoker has a better view on that, much better than Duyvierd does. He's got another essay, might be useful to you, in the

Duyvierd Festschrift, which I think is called something like The Idea of a Christian Philosophy. And the title of his essay is

On the Contingent and Present -Day Western Man. And he goes a little bit into the unity, diversity, equal ultimacy issue from his own perspective.

He was kind of a philosopher of science. Some people thought he was too influenced by Husserl and phenomenology.

I don't see that necessarily in what he's written, but I hope that some of his material will be translated, more of it will be translated, and he'll be used more, because I think he was just a tremendous thinker and very, very useful assessment overall.

I don't have complete agreement with Stoker's Drewsman -Athens essay, but overall, very useful assessment of what

Van Til was up to. And Van Til responded basically saying, hey, Dr. Stoker, that's your field, go after it.

Keep at it, keep doing what you're doing. Thank you for that. One more by Scott Terry. Thank you so much for that last $5 super chat.

You're really generous this live stream. I appreciate it, thank you. He asks, or Atheist asks, if everyone knows

God, why are there passages like 1 Corinthians 8, 7, which say some people do not know

God? Now I have 1 Corinthians 8, 7 here in front of me. It says, however, not all possess this knowledge, but some through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol and their conscious being weak is defiled.

So what about those passages of scripture that seem to suggest that not all men have a knowledge of God? Yeah, good.

And there's 1 Thessalonians 4, 3 maybe where Paul says Gentiles who do not know

God. So even Paul, who says in Romans 1, everyone knows God, says in 1

Thessalonians, Gentiles do not know God. So how do you understand that? Well, if you're a skeptic and cynical, you say,

I see the Bible contradicts itself, but we don't understand that at all. And people don't treat literature that way typically.

So we have to contextualize what's being said. And what Gentiles like to say is that there's knowledge of God, and then there's knowledge of God and loving

God, a loving knowledge of God, or what we would call simply conversion.

So there's knowledge of God by virtue of God's own activity. There's a rejection of that knowledge by virtue of unbelief.

And so you can say those who are outside of Christ do not know God because they do not love and honor

God. So the knowledge of God that they have, they don't have because they've done anything. Once they do something, they become agnostic, not knowing, and they won't know truly until they're renewed unto knowledge,

Colossians 3 .10, by virtue of Christ's work. So you have to take those passages in their context and recognize theologically what's going on there.

There's a knowing and not knowing. All right, just a few more questions. I do wanna respect your time.

You're doing great. I hope you're not fatigued from all these questions. I'm sure you're doing fine. I'm just glad he didn't make me do this at nine at night because I'd be snoring.

All right, well, excellent. Here's a good question by Simon. Thank you so much for your question, Simon. Most people say

God and politics must be separated. I always reply by saying that it isn't true because God is the precondition for politics.

How would you respond to this question? Yeah, well, it's a big question. It isn't a complicated question.

And my response would be that Christ is Lord over everything. And that if politics was to be what it ought to be, it would be

Christian politics. If everyone in Washington was to be what they ought to be, they would all be

Christians ruling in the political sphere. So I'm sort of with Kuyper here.

Christ rules over all, and everyone has the obligation to submit to that rule.

And there will be a time when every knee will bow. Some will do it unwillingly, but every knee ought to bow now.

And those knees that do bow, those people should do their work in conformity with what scripture requires of them.

All right, and two more questions, then we'll wrap things up here. Felix asks, hello,

Eli, I love Jesus. God, because in his love, he is also weird, crazy and dangerous.

We must all be more like Jesus. Is this a theologically sound or true thing to say? That's an interesting question.

Yeah, oh boy. I don't like the way it's put, but I could finesse it if I needed to.

Of course, God is love and he loves us and he loves his people. I wouldn't wanna say

God is weird. I think that sounds a little bit irreverent. I would wanna say that God is wholly other and different from us.

He's infinite, eternal, unchangeable. We're finite, temporal, unchangeable. His love is perfect.

Our love never is. I wouldn't wanna say he's crazy or crazy.

Why would you, what's your standard there? That sounds to me to be ridiculous. Dangerous, well, you could use

C .S. Lewis there, you know, is Aslan safe?

No, he's not safe, but he's very good. God is very good and he's not safe in the typical way that we think about it because he will come to judge the quick and the dead.

And so that's why it's our responsibility as people made in his image to bow the knee and repent and submit to him and experience the love that he gives in Christ.

So I guess I'd have to quibble with some of the language or I think we have to be a little more careful in the way we describe

God, the way we think about it. All right, thank you for that. And one last question, just out of respect for Dr.

Oliphant's time, I do apologize if I missed your question. I gotta scroll through these individually and there's a lot of comments here.

So we'll leave this as the last question and sorry if I skipped you. Matt Paisley asks, can you speak to the concern some raise as to how crimes against God in the temporal time can fairly translate to an eternal punishment?

Any recommendations to further study this argument? I suppose temporal crimes warrant eternal punishment.

How's that fair? Where's the justice in that? Yeah, well, the reality is crimes against God or sins against God and violations against God by those to whom

God has given life and who he's made in his image for eternity require an eternal punishment.

If we weren't in his image and if we weren't going to exist in eternity, then things might be different in that hypothetical possible world.

But the way that God has made us, once we exist, we will never not exist. We will exist in this world and we will exist in another.

And there won't be a time from that point forward when we don't exist. And because God has made us fundamentally as his image and his covenant creatures, our sins against him, our sins against an infinite eternal

God, and so they require an eternal punishment. And that's God's justice meted out on his creatures.

It's always meted out on all of his creatures. For those who are in Christ, it's meted out on his son.

It's not passed over, it's still meted. For those who are outside of Christ, it must be meted out on themselves.

Excellent. Now I do apologize. I want to squeeze this one last question in because I think it's really practical. And so here's a question by Samuel Haupt.

How would you approach those who are apathetic and indifferent? It's very common in college campuses here in Europe and elsewhere.

I think that's a really good question and we'll end with that one. I do too. And again, I'm not the expert on this.

I have dealt with people like this. And what you will find given time is the apathy is just more suppression of the truth.

It's a cover. There are things that they're going to be extremely passionate about.

If you take the time to get to know them, to ask questions, to probe a little bit, no one can be truly apathetic.

Apathy is just a cover for the things you really care about that you don't want to show. And the reason we know this is because Paul tells us, other reasons, but Paul tells us in Romans 1 .25

that people worship and serve some God or gods that are created if they don't serve the true

God. And that worshiping and serving is passionate. So there's passion internally that's being suppressed, covered up, hidden.

And the best way to do this, if you're able, if the Lord allows in his providence, get to know these people, talk to them, find out what they're passionate about.

And then you can begin to probe why they might be passionate about that and not something else. The great example that I've used before,

Francis Schaeffer had this conversation. I think he was on a ship at some point and he was talking to a man who was a materialist.

And they were talking about materialistic philosophy. And Schaeffer, and he said,

I must go now. It's late and my wife waits in the cabin. And Schaeffer asked him, he said, before you go,

I want you to think about this question. On what basis can you know that you love your wife?

So here's a man wanting to be consistently materialistic, and yet he has this love for his wife.

That doesn't fit in a materialistic universe. Apathy won't either. And so you can try to get behind that by seeing what people are not apathetic about.

Maybe their spouse, maybe their children, maybe their, you know, all these sorts of things, maybe their job. And then you can begin to probe why those things are so important.

It's a great question. There's no silver bullet here, but I think again, questions are the best way to go. Sure, excellent.

I'm speaking with Dr. Scott Oliphant of Westminster Theological Seminary, professor of apologetics and systematic theology.

Judging from a lot of the comments here that weren't questions and didn't get shared on the screen, a lot of people are enjoying this conversation.

So thank you so much for listening in folks. And thank you so much, Dr. Oliphant, for giving me one hour and 33 minutes of your time.

It's very generous of you. Happy to do it. I'm sorry about the glitch, but I'm glad we got back on track there.

Glad you've been here. No worries, no worries. Well, folks, if you really enjoy this content, please do me a solid and share these videos.

Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, and I'm trying my best to keep the podcast updated.

So what I do is I take the audio from these interviews and I transfer them over to iTunes. What really helps is if you go over to iTunes and write a very brief review as to what you think about the content and just share it.

This is how we get all of this great apologetic content out there. I think people can benefit greatly from the sorts of conversations that we have here with various scholars and apologists.

So thank you so much - Are you on Twitter, Eli? I'm sorry? Are you on Twitter? I am on Twitter, yes.

All right, well, again, I'm no expert, but I have an account that was set up for me years ago, so I'll have to go and find you and follow you.

All right, well, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter, and I just, I don't know, perhaps it's a total depravity,

I just created a TikTok account. Oh, you're way beyond me.

I'm gonna give it a shot with some apologetic content. We'll see what happens, but -

Yeah, well, keep me posted. That's interesting. All right, well, thank you so much, Dr. Oliven. I guess

I'm FaceTime in China, huh? There we go. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Oliven, and thank you so much, everyone, for listening.