The Trinity & Presuppositional Argumentation with (Brant Bosserman)

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala, and today I am super excited to have Pastor Brent Bosterman with us, who is, well, he's a pastor, and he's also, folks who are going to be tuning in in today's show, know him as the author of the book, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox, an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til.

And so folks who are interested in presuppositionalism are going to find this episode, well, I guess you could find, our past like seven episodes have been on some application of presuppositionalism, but if you're interested in the relationship between the Trinity and Transcendental Argumentation and presuppositionalism in general, you guys are going to find this episode very, very helpful in that regard.

So, without further ado, I just want to make a couple of announcements real quick. On Saturday at 2 p .m., I'm going to be having Dr. James Anderson on to discuss the nature of Transcendental Arguments, and those of you who were disappointed in the fact that the interview with Jeff Durbin fell through, we are in the works of rescheduling that, and so we're going to see if we can get him on to discuss the topic of applying presuppositionalism to competing religious perspectives.

So, I want to provide for you guys a wide range of application to show that presuppositionalism is not just this one thing that you use against atheists, it's really a way of thinking that can be applied to all areas of life.

So, without further ado, let me introduce Pastor Brant Bosterman, and how would you like me to address you, Pastor Brant Bosterman?

Any one of those works for me, no problem. You can just call me Brant if you want. Okay,.

I'll call you Brant, and why don't you take a few moments just to tell people a little bit about yourself, what you do, and.

Then we'll jump right into the discussion. Sure. Yeah, well, I mean, I wrote my book Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox in the late 2000s into, you know, 2012. Yeah, I think 2012, I defended my thesis and got it in the process of publication in 2013, and I think it ended up, you know, getting released in like 2014.

But for me, literally, so I defended my thesis, I want to say, you know, April 4th of 2012, and it wasn't four weeks before I was gathering a church plant in the Pacific Northwest without a breath in between, you know, opening up our house for barbecues and things like that, calling on just everybody we knew from a variety of different relations here in the Northwest.

I did pretty much all of my academic work in the Seattle area, you know, worked at several restaurants, had family out here, and so it just jumped straight into pastoral ministry and the planting of Trinitas Presbyterian Church with the PCA, and so that's what I've been doing for the last, you know, really, eight years.

In fact, last Sunday, this Sunday the 5th or the 3rd, was our seven-year anniversary service from our launch date in May of 2013. So I've just had my hands full, you know, people sometimes, you know, get emails and things like that, you know, asking you about, you know, whether or not I, you know, am writing anything, and, you know, I have projects that I'm working on, and I'm pretty guarded about sharing any of it just because I can't make any deadline right now.

I'd hate to get anyone excited about whatever I'm thinking about because, you know, the work of pastoral ministry, having four kids under the age of 11, you just can't make any promises. It's like it says in Proverbs, you just, you can't talk about what's going to happen tomorrow in this season of life, and so, you know, presuppositionalism, it affects my preaching, surely affects, you know, even my Christian counseling, you know, J. Adams, you know, classic presuppositionalist, highly influenced by Van Til, and it still affects my evangelistic encounters.

I try to have those as frequently as possible, off-the-cuff conversations with people whenever I'm out, and so, yeah, it has bearing on everything I do, but unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity or really the time at this point to put together or jump into a debate or something like that, but I look forward to a time when I can do more of that again.

Yeah, and I like the explanation you give, just being honest with the fact that you're doing family life, and you're doing ministry, and even though online apologetics is really popular, and it's important, obviously, but a lot of people just want to get down and dirty in these debates and see this person against that person.

They forget that apologetics, while very important, is just one aspect of a broader world and life view, which involves things like ministry. I mean, you're a pastor, so while you write great material in your dissertation, your book there, you're also living life and, you know, you know, ministering to people, and so I want to encourage people who are listening, try to have a balanced life and a balanced ministry.

Don't just be so much engaged in apologetics that you forget that there are other areas of life that need to be attended to, and they are all under the category of bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

So you can't tout on the one hand, presuppositionalism holds up the Word of God, and our thoughts are captive to Christ, yet you are not, you know, doing that in those other areas of life. We're called to be consistent with that in that regard, so.

Yeah. I appreciate that, Ellie. You know, the, you know, you, I think about even the time when I was writing Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox. It's kind of a mouthful to keep saying, but I think when I was writing that, you know, and I had done a debate with a Unitarian, and it wasn't specifically, you know, a presuppositional tag sort of a thing with an atheist.

It was obviously quite different, you know, in that it was more, you know, reasoning with the cults and things like that, but, you know, there were opportunities. I did that in like, I want to say 2006 or 2007.

I don't recall, but there were opportunities to do things like that when I was writing my thesis, you know, and there were plenty of opportunities to jump into online forums and debates and things like that, and I don't mean to devalue those things at all, but part of what I had to do while I was writing was ask, you know, what is the more important contribution that I can be making here?

You know, engaging every opportunity to do a presuppositional debate, you know, here, there, or online, or to really advance, you know, presuppositional thinking and, you know, the Vantillian system, you might say, which of those two things is going to be the better use of my time?

You know, I had to weigh those things out. These are plenty of opportunities for me to potentially, you know, expend a great deal of energy and effort in exactly the sorts of things you're talking about, and again, I don't mean to devalue that, but we all have to ask ourselves, and this is part of being a presuppositionalist, we all have to ask ourselves what the Lord, who is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom and understanding, what he would have us do with our time as the most useful contribution to the ends of his kingdom, and so I would say my book is the fruit of that sort of pumping of the brake saying, you know, you can't pursue every opportunity that sits in front of you, and I often tell, you know, younger men, you really haven't even found your calling in the ministry yet, probably unless you've turned down point blank three other opportunities for the ministry.

That's probably your first clue. I mean, if there's some, you know, ministerial caller, you know, just presents itself too quickly, and you're ready to just rush into it, it's probably the first clue that there's some more discerning and deciphering of things to be done.

Well, thank you for that, and yeah, so just that encouragement, balance is important, and so I hope that does provide a few other opportunities to hopefully write or engage more. I'm just happy I was able to nab you for this little nugget, which I'm sure folks are going to enjoy and find useful.

So let's just jump right into the bulk of our discussion. I have a list of questions here that I want to run by you, and hopefully your answers will produce some side discussion as well that we might veer off into, but these are questions that people have been asking and often bring up within the context of you know, presuppositionalism, the transcendental argument, how the trinity relates to that.

So let's just start from the top here. First question, what is the summary of Van Til's apologetic as you see it? If someone were to say, summarize Van Til's apologetic, how would you understand that?

And then from there, we're going to kind of unfold this and get more into how the trinity relates into all of this.

All right, you know, maybe I'll summarize it this way. Van Til's apologetic has at the heart the question of what is the normal way to think. And reason. This really sets forth the antithesis between the believer and the unbeliever.

The world as we know it carries on as if it's perfectly normal, inappropriate, when asking questions of epistemology, asking questions about reality, even right and wrong, that one must fundamentally start with themselves.

Whether in a rationalist way where they they heed the basic, you know, laws of logic or whether they start with intuition or whether they start with their experience or overwhelming feeling to gauge and to navigate what's true.

We are saying as presuppositionalists and Van Til is saying, that isn't normal if we allow the biblical scheme to tell us what is the norm or the right or the rule for the appropriate way to think and to reason.

And in fact, not only is it not normal in that sense of, you know, conforming to a god-given norm, it's actually completely vacuous to attempt to build a worldview out of oneself and make sense of the world treating themselves as the starting point.

By contrast, the way we were meant to reason, the way that we were meant to view the world and engage the world is by presupposing God, our need for God, his personal communication to us. And once we do that, it puts all of the other tools of learning and understanding in their proper place.

And so we can develop a coherent view of ourselves in the world and not just a coherent and static one, but one that's growing ever bigger. I mean, the spirit is the one who Jesus promises will lead us into all truth.

Once we are reconciled to God in Christ and we're renewed unto knowledge as Colossians 3 .10 and Ephesians 4 .24, favorite scriptures of Van Til tell us, it's not just that we've got a tight, closed system of thinking, we actually have a way of reasoning that allows for boundless discovery and better understanding of ourselves, God, and the world.

And so you have this antithesis, you know, the abnormal fallen depraved thinking of mankind that begins with man as an autonomous self-guided unit or even a self-guided society. And you know, God-centered thinking that begins with God's necessary part and his guidance is a necessary part of right reasoning.

And the beauty of the Van Tilian apologetic claim is that reasoning by thinking God's thoughts after him and beginning with him can be summarily vindicated not just as the right way to think, but as the only way to in a fashion that is consistent and coherent and you know, life-giving.

Yeah, yeah important comment there where you said that our need for God and I want to point out for folks that the need for God is coming from a pastor. So the pastor is probably, people probably think, oh the pastor's talking about our need for God.

I don't think you just are necessarily referring to the existential need, like we need God. I think we would agree with this that epistemologically speaking, right? Epistemologically speaking, we need God to ground knowledge.

So it's not just merely this pastoral practical we need God. That's true. But just think properly. We need to acknowledge God. Now you said something about starting with ourselves in kind of a rationalistic sense, in an autonomous sense, versus starting with God.

Now, there's a big hullabaloo all the time and it's always part of the criticisms of presuppositionalism that people say you have to start with yourself. How can you not start with yourself? So what does it even mean to start with God?

You're mixing up epistemology and ontology. How would you speak to that?

Yeah, one almost feels like when people raise that criticism, especially if they have any acquaintance with presuppositionalism, that it's almost a willful lack of understanding at some point. I understand some people really don't get what we mean when we say that, as if like somehow I could jump out of my own consciousness and, you know, start somewhere else.

But we're speaking of a different sort of priority. For the Ventilion, and really this is, you know, for Calvin, for John Calvin, you know, man knows himself as immediately in time as he knows God and God as immediately as he knows himself.

That's strictly unavoidable. That, you know, temporally man has an inherent knowledge of the creator in whose image he has made. But when we speak about starting with ourself versus starting with God, we're talking about a primacy of place who the highest authority is in guiding your beliefs and guiding the formation of your beliefs.

And so there's that sort of priority, that logical priority that's given to the highest authority in any given matter. And so that's what we mean as presuppositionalists. We're not trying to suggest again that, you know, we can jump out of our own consciousness and you know, be another person or something like that.

It would virtually imply that we were attempting to, you know, be God if we were to start in that first person existential sense. But it's to say that, yeah, we give God's guidance and we give his reality the highest place as the most illuminating truth to all other truths that put all other truths in their proper place.

Yeah. Would you say then that there's an important distinction between what we would call proximate starting points versus ultimate starting points?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, right. I mean, and that's a distinction that kind of pervades, you know, again, reformed thinking, you know, we can talk about secondary causes and we can talk about, you know, the God is this, you know, first cause and, you know, sovereign providential governor of all things.

And we have to start with ourselves as a proximate beginning place. And what thoughts we articulate about God in the course of time as we, you know, develop acquaintance with human language is going to be in English or German or Dutch or Spanish or whatever it may be.

So yes, in that sense, that proximate starting point is an unavoidable aspect of things. But one of the things, one of the reasons we can trust that our proximate starting point isn't so perhaps damning or blinding or all-encompassing as to be the most important is precisely because we give the weight to God as the most important light of all of the lights that we might encounter in making sense of the world and in making sense of ourselves.

And it's one of the reasons why presuppositionalism is just in, you think about the, we acknowledge on the one hand the importance of presuppositions and the importance of perspectives and things like that, but we don't fall into the trap of the postmodernist who fundamentally says there is no reality outside of the text or outside of the language or language game in which we find ourselves.

You know, that's so magnifying the proximate starting point that I as a man can't transcend my condition as a man, or if not that, a white man. You just take all of the subcategories down the line. That's why we don't fall into that same trap of, again, postmodern thinking and really in many ways, neo-Marxist thinking, but go on.

I know some of us who disagree with you.

I am amazed. I was just listening to a lecture by Greg Vonson. He addressed this issue as to why we're not stuck in a postmodern predicament, which we don't have to give you here, but I mean, it's amazing how people can read Vonson and Van Til and come away with the fact that postmodernism is the inevitable conclusion of such an understanding.

I think it's quite baffling to me, but let's, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, well, it is baffling and it's one of those things, sometimes the accusation I think you're pointing out, it can be leveled against us by say other apologists of other camps or other schools and the accusation can also get made against us, that we haven't sufficiently felt the problem from those who are entrenched in postmodern thinking.

Our point is really that there is this story that is bigger than my story. There's this story that's bigger than all of our stories and it's frankly more illuminative than all of our stories. I would just have to level the criticism back to the postmodernist who says that we're stuck in some sort of a subjectivist rut where we can't transcend our again, our cultures and subcultures and you name it.

I would just point out, you also tell a meta-narrative and a story about every story. It just happens to be a very, very short story. There's just a universe of colliding galaxies of thinking and thought.

There's nothing to mediate between them. They collide and somehow you smuggle in these ideas of a utopian synthesis at the end of all of these potentially bloody revolutions or suppressive governments and proletariats rise.

I don't know where you get that from, but you're still telling a story, a very short story about everything. It's just that there's these disparate belief systems and language games that somewhat overlap and inevitably, they collide and whoever has strength or power at a given time, somehow you smuggle in this notion of justice.

They deserve to be overtaken by some other subversive game, but that's still a meta-narrative. It's still a story. It's not a particularly interesting one. It's not a particularly hopeful one if we're trying to ever have anything like meeting the mind.

It's a self-refuting story as it attempts to say there are no meta-narratives by providing a meta-narrative.

It's painful. I mean, it's the sort of thing. I mean, it comes out everywhere. It comes out in Peter Enns' Hermeneutic where it's like we're supposed to treat every pericope, every text, every story as its own thing and let the conflict be there and not allow the meta-narrative of scripture to inform the individual part.

Again, I just feel like Peter, you're allowing a meta-narrative to affect everything. Again, it's just a very short story. It's the short story of colliding stories in the universe that don't perfectly overlap and have different perspectives that don't harmonize and things like, I just, you're selling a meta-narrative.

You're selling a whole story. Where did you get that from, Peter? Did you get that big story about colliding, unsynthesizable stories in the universe from the Bible? I don't think you did. So where did you get it from?

And that's where it's hard not to see, again, autonomous reasoning at the heart of what he's proposing and really, one would think, capitulating to.

The Trinity and the One and the Many

Well, let's jump to our next question. Our next question here is, what role does the Trinity play in preceptual apologetics?

Yeah, well, I mean, if we sufficiently digest the first point that our thinking gives a certain primacy to God Himself as the most illuminative individual person and speaker in our reality, then it has to play a really big role, who God is.

Obviously, God being tri-personal and one being is one of the unique aspects of our doctrine of God. And for us as presuppositionalists, it answers to and illuminates what is arguably the problem of philosophy, which is the problem of the one and the many.

It confronts us everywhere. I mean, in the most practical spheres.

Well, let me stop you there because that, I think you're, and I hope you don't mind, kind of conversation we're having right now. Why don't you explain for people, summarize the problem of the one and the many.

Why is it a problem? And how does the Trinity kind of engage with that? And maybe that'll help answer the primary question as to how does the Trinity relate to all this?

Yeah, yeah, you know, I'll give, you know, kind of two angles on it. One more abstract, one more practical. Okay. So the problem of the one and the many, I mean, it comes down to the basic problem of predication.

How can we use any words to accurately describe the external world? It's the problem of predication and the problem of truth itself. You know, let's just put it this way. There was a time when people thought that, you know, all swans were swans and that was that, and there was some sort of essence or concept of swans that you could refine down from every every particular feature of every swan that you see, and this one essence is born by all the swans.

And therefore there's something legitimate about this universal concept, this, you could call it an ideal, you name it, being ascribed to a multiplicity of swans. Well, of course, you know, in a Darwinian worldview, there is no static creature called swans.

What you're calling a swan now is in the process of becoming potentially something quite different from what it currently is. And that raises the question of, you know, whether it's ever legitimate to ascribe that one unitary category to the mass of swans out there.

What are you leaving out when you ascribe the one to the many? Can the many things in our experience really be categorized and rightly defined and rightly described with the use of universal terms? That's kind of the more abstract way to put it.

I mean, the more practical way to put it is let's just consider it, you know, in a season of coronavirus, how you can make laws that capture all of the circumstances and all of the nuances in the different circumstances.

How do you get one law in any instance which rightly does justice to everyone in all circumstances? You know, we look at these different codes about what can be open and what can't be open over here in Washington state.

Wait, you're in California? Where are you, Eli?

Oh, by the way, I wanted to correct you. It's Eli, but no worries. Sorry. I've messed it up since I was little. No worries. And I'm in New York.

Okay. Well, there you have it. So how do you have a law that says what sorts of businesses are essential, of all words, and inessential, that doesn't do an injustice to certain people? When you start to put criteria together, you can always find exceptions to that.

So the question is, how do we have, whether it be laws, whether it be ideas and words, how do we have these things overlap appropriately and perfectly with the things we're attempting to describe? And if they don't overlap perfectly, you know, how can we speak truth about anything?

How can we legislate justly about anything? And this is where, you know, the problem of the one in the many, you know, and we encounter it everywhere, in the most practical of realms, in the most, in the most abstract of realms.

And, you know, to really emphasize the problem, you know, once you've divided the world, we might say, into ideas or an ideal realm and a material realm, the problem really gets tough. What force or power can ensure that things that are ideal accurately make contact with things that are tangible and real?

You've kind of exhausted all the terms you can talk about, ideal things and real things. It'd be kind of strange to think that there's like a material giant standing above all of reality, forcing the immaterial ideals to mesh with matter.

That doesn't really work. At the same time, it's equally challenging to think of an ideal giant who lacks materiality at all, who's somehow lassoing logic and ideas and numerical properties and tying them down to material reality.

So the problem of the one in the many is pretty damning once you're working with just the world as we know it. And when we speak of the Trinity as being the solution to the one in the many, we speak of a personal God who is in himself a perfectly and absolutely overlapping and interpenetrating communion of three persons in one being.

And he resides above ideal reality as we know it and material existence as we know it. He made them both. Neither one of them is ultimate. They don't simply collide and accidentally overlap by chance.

He made the both of them and he's the only one who can as an absolutely self-knowing and self-sufficient being speak with authority to the effect that the two really make any genuine contact at all.

Yes, so the problem of philosophical thought on this issue is that they emphasize the one over the many, not realizing that one and the many are equally ultimate in creation. There's not one that's more predominant the other and they are grounded and reflected by the one who is the ultimate one in the many.

That's right. Oneness and manyness are equally ultimate. There's not one above the other. That's right.

And you know an unbelieving thought, you know, really what it is it's a pendulum swing between the one and the many. Those who emphasize that, for example, reason has, you know, ultimate bearing power.

They're emphasizing the one to the point of excluding the many. And so, you know, I just went through Spinoza's ethic with two of my philosophy students at Northwest who have since become my congregants.

And, you know, kind of the joke of rationalist philosophy is that whenever you really encounter a serious problem, you just declare that whatever that thing is or whatever it pertains to just doesn't exist and you move on.

I mean how we ever got mistaken to think that it existed, they'll offer certain explanations and Spinoza will do that. But, you know, you name it anything from the concept that man is in any sense free or an original source of decisions and actions and not simply himself the product of an infinite, you know, causal chain of cause and effect.

That's just not real for Spinoza. We're just going to get rid of that. It's just not going to work. That's the one swallowing up, not just the many, but some of the things that we love most about life and existence and reality that makes it the freshest for us.

The opposite end of that is the many just taking over and essentially it's the idea that reason itself is just kind of a byproduct of wandering existence. And that's where you are in, you know, a postmodern world in many respects that the different language games and the different ways of thinking and, you know, whatever it may be, you're kind of the ethnic cage that I'm in that I can't transcend as a white male, things like that.

The way I think is itself tainted by again, a passage of history that's either going nowhere or, you know, strangely going to some sort of utopian synthesis depending on what you emphasize, but yeah. All right.

My next question, what role does the trinity play in the transcendental argument? Okay, now I can couple it with this question here. Do you think that the transcendental argument is a silver bullet argument that successfully demonstrates the Christian world view as true by the impossibility of the contrary?

And if so, how does the argument demonstrate the triunity of God without further argumentation? Okay. Sorry, I thought it was a heavy-handed question. Let me transition real quick.

Yeah, yeah. I'm going to just say one thing about the silver bullet, and it's very practical, but then I'll talk more about, you know, the relevance of the trinity. I do think one of the dangers, practically speaking, about how sometimes presuppositionalism is presented is like as the shortest distance between two points of encountering an unbeliever and in 30 seconds or less tearing his worldview to shreds and, you know, bringing him to this point of, you know, consternation about the brokenness of his belief system.

And don't get me wrong, I do think there's something about presuppositionalism that it allows one to go to the jugular, you might say, and just immediately go to the presuppositions that someone holds.

Unfortunately, I feel like practically presuppositionalism is sometimes popularly presented as a mode of apologetics, which renders someone completely unconversational. You know, an exception to that rule would surely be, well, there are many exceptions, but a very good exception to that would be Doug Wilson.

Very capable. Really, the presuppositionalist should be able to start with and engage almost any thought and make their way back to the absolute bearing power and relevance of her God. There's a way to just keep saying, whenever they say, you know, I don't know what you're saying.

Well, you just said that, you know, that, you know, and then just, and just never get out of this loop that you might ever address or touch on anything else under the sun that is interesting. Really, the opposite ought to be the case.

And I feel like sometimes when people talk, you know, describe it as a silver bullet in those terms. It's just, again, it's almost I sometimes feel like I'm talking to someone who just has the most impatient desire to wrap up the apologetic task, which I mean, really isn't even just a fruit of the spirit of which, you know, patience is a big part of it, because fact is even when you've articulated very well, you know, one's epistemological reliance on the trinity you can imagine why it would still take a lot of labor for someone who's not acquainted with this sort of thing to understand what you're talking about.

Okay. So, but let's, let's speak specifically to the question. If I recall correctly, the question asked, do I believe that the trinity is absolutely necessary to the transcendental argument?

Do you want me to repeat the question? The question. Yeah, it was a little mouthful, but I'll do it slowly here because I kind of fused two questions into one. What role does trinity play in the transcendental argument?

And do you think transcendental argument is a silver bullet argument that successfully demonstrates the Christian worldview is true by the impossibility of the contrary? And if so, how does the argument demonstrate the triunity of God without further argumentation?

Okay, so.

I suspect the question kind of wants one to to refine down the transcendental argument to the absolutely necessary components and just to distill out of it the unnecessary components, right? I mean, it's, it's a remarkably classical, apologetical sort of way of asking the question.

And what role does it play? Well, if I'm talking to a Muslim, it plays a profoundly important role. If I'm talking to Joe Unbeliever, whether I, you know, delve into the point that the presupposition and the God who we must presuppose is the beginning of fear, of the fear and the knowledge and wisdom and understanding, whether I need to delve into trinity right then and there with that guy, I don't know that I do.

But let me explain the sense in which the trinity is relevant every time I'm talking about the transcendental argument. See, the transcendental argument isn't just that without the God of scripture, your worldview is vacuous and all of your beliefs are not only without justification, but they can't even bear the status of being true.

That's not the end of the transcendental argument. To get to that point and then say, and now you need to presuppose our God. The end of the transcendental argument is that once we brought someone to the point that the worldview that they outwardly espouse is empty and vacuous, is to bring them to the next step of realizing they've never really lived in that world that they've created for themselves as kind of a house of cards.

They've always actually known the God of scripture who speaks with authority both in natural revelation and in his word, and they have trampled on him. They breathed his air without ever praising him.

And therefore the end of the transcendental argument is that the person with whom we are speaking is profoundly guilty. They're guilty in a way that merits, you know, eternal death, eternal suffering.

That's the position they're in. Therefore the God they need isn't just a profoundly useful presupposition. They need the God who has an eternal son whom he sent into the world to assume human flesh and to live the life that we have deprived our creator of and deprived him of the obedience that he so deserves.

And he died the death in our stead that we so deserve. And furthermore, not only did he do that, but he sent his Holy Spirit to open the hearts of people who are his mortal enemies otherwise, so that they can receive him and believe on him.

And so without that God at the end of your transcendental argument, the one I just talked about, your transcendental argument is useless. It's no good to anyone without the trinity in the economic trinity who is the savior of mankind.

Now, if I'm talking to someone who I, you know, I sense can, you know, take in something of the depths of the one of many problems, and I have, you know, found people like this impromptu many times, I might have brought to bear the importance of the trinity to our epistemology at the front end.

But at the back end of your transcendental argument, after we've reduced an unbeliever's worldview to Nessians, we always have to talk about the trinity. Sure. What good would it be? We're not people, we're not salesmen peddling, you know, presuppositions that make your puzzle work.

We're apologists bringing people to Christ. And we've really gone off the rails and missed what this whole thing is about if we don't understand, you know, the absolute relevance of the trinity to our transcendental argument.

And honestly, I do fear that unfortunately, that's kind of what transcendental, you know, argumentation has been treated as, is, you know, some premise that, you know, lets me have all my beliefs. Plus a few more.

It's not that. It's something that drives you to the cross. And if presuppositionalism has not been that for you traditionally in how you're using it and reasoning with people, you're not doing what Van Til prescribed.

You're doing something else. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very good. I think it brings.

Unity to the whole Christian life view because you just brought argument together with the purpose of our being Christians and our goal that Christ has sent us out to accomplish. Not just crushing someone in a discussion.

And I think I like how you emphasize that. And I also like how you emphasize, which if there are non-Christians listening to this, they might want to explore this a little more because like, wait, I think I caught him saying that and that's just remarkable.

You said that once you destroy the world view, you point out the fact that they never really lived in that world. In other words, when they confessed with their mouth, they didn't actually live in those categories.

You can deny the Trinity, for example, but you can't help but function in one in many categories. You can deny God, but you can't help but function in a world that you can't help but function in a way that only makes sense if God exists.

That brings to the issue of the knowledge of God that the unbeliever has, which is a very, very important aspect of presuppositionalism in Christian theology that I think needs to be hashed out a little more clearly.

Not in this show, because we have some more questions pertaining to what we were originally going to talk about, but the nature of the unbeliever's knowledge of God, I think, is a profoundly important question.

Because I think a lot of people, you know, unbelievers will say, well, how dare you tell me that I believe in God? I don't believe in God. So, you know, that's one of the things against presuppositionalists.

You know, you're just an arrogant guy telling me what I believe. And there is some nuance there and some unfolding of that. Perhaps, you know, we can cover that in a later episode. You know, I'll definitely try to cover that material.