Presuppositional Apologetics & Persuasion

The Purpose of the Episode and Introduction to Dr. Scott Oliphant

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, you know, 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.

Van Til, Westminster, and the Shape of Oliphint’s Scholarship

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 on a comparison of Cornelius Ben Till and Herman Doiweard. There were things in the air at that point about who's really transcendental, who's got the transcendental method, and 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 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 80s.

But I mean, he would pick them up and put them down. He was in his 80s, 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 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, well, 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 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, gave 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 I'd given him a while back. And I remember going out to dinner with Pastor Shishko and asking him, 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, 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, as brilliant as he was, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

Why Apologetics Must Remain Christ-Centered and Pastoral

Yeah, and I think that's so, 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, you know, 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 mission.

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 wanna 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.

Persuasion, the Spirit’s Work, and the Danger of “Selling” Christianity

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. I guess it's out there, but I'm the last one 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 wanna try.

To connect with them.

We don't wanna push them away. The gospel is going to have its own offense and we don't wanna 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 and preaching and 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 buying with the word. So it's a great privilege to be involved in that kind of ministry.

Now, I definitely wanna 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 wanna return to that a little bit later. But as I was continuing reading the summary portion of the book here, 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, 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, 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 that 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 in Trinity now takes on a human nature permanently.

So God's condescension, 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-Tacs, 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.

Cross-Centered Apologetics and the Divine Stoop of God

Now, this person who wrote the 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 Till's approach initially was, like I said, I was involved in an evangelistic ministry, 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 Till, 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 Till, 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 what, 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?

You'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.

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, not 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?

The Limits of Classical Theism and the Need for Revelation

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 in covenant apologetics 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 just, 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. 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 what he thinks is his mutual rational principle.

Using Classical Arguments Within a Reformed Framework

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 kind 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 it.

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 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 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.

Reformed Theology as the Soil of Presuppositional Apologetics

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 a 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 about apologetics.

And I was pretty sure where I was at that point, but I wasn't, 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 Henryan?

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.