(Part 1): Against All Opposition (Teaching Series)

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Part 2 Against All Opposition Teaching Series

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Welcome to part one of Against All Opposition, the teaching series, all right?

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Now, if I can just throw this up here, this is Against All Opposition by Greg Bonson.

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And this is what we're gonna be working through. So I'm gonna be going through a multi -part series, going over the study questions of the end of each of the chapters here.

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So this is not a teaching series that goes comprehensively through every aspect of the book, but I'm definitely trying to touch all of the major high points.

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So at the end of each chapter, if I can kind of flip through this bad boy here, there are some study questions.

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Here we go. Boom, boom, boom. You can't really see that, but at the end of the chapter, there's some study questions.

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And so I wanna take the time to kind of go through some of these and kind of expand on them a little bit because the study questions kind of capture the essence of each of the chapters.

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So this is gonna be a great opportunity to, if you don't have time to read the book, this will be a great opportunity to kind of work through some of the major themes, which

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I think are gonna be helpful, not just for equipping people to do apologetics in general, but to actually get your feet wet into presuppositional apologetics.

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So this series is going to be based upon Greg Bonson's book, Against All Opposition.

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Now, just a little bit about this book. This is not a book actually written by Greg Bonson, who

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I'll explain who Greg Bonson is. This is actually a series of lectures that he gave that were compiled.

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So they're kind of like a transcript in book form of various lectures that Dr.

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Bonson gave. And this was put out by American Vision. So if you wanna get a physical copy of this book, it's available there at americanvision .com

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or .org. Also, there are some other books here that I'm thinking, we'll see how this one goes.

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I wanna see if I can do maybe kind of a multi -part series going through the same thing, like I'm going with this book, through this book here,

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The Impossibility of the Contrary. Without God, you can't prove anything. And again, this is in the spirit of this book.

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This book is a transcription of a series of lectures that Dr. Bonson gave. And of course, there are some study questions here that highlight the key portions of the chapter.

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So again, I might wanna do these books here. Now, there's a third, okay? I feel like I'm holding up a deck of cards, called

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Pushing the Antithesis. Now, I wanna say something about all three of these books. The Impossibility of the

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Contrary, Pushing the Antithesis. These are, you know, antithesis. You don't hear that word often, right?

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It sounds technical, but actually this book here, okay, was written, or I'm sorry, was a series of lectures that Dr.

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Bonson gave to high school students who were going off to college. And so this was a series of lectures that he gave to prepare them for that.

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So while the language might sound a little technical there, this is all like introductory stuff, perfect for, you know, high school students or anyone who just wants to begin to start thinking about apologetics and how we should approach the defense of the faith.

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Because I wanna encourage folks that we can be confident in the Christian faith.

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And there's a difference between how the world perceives the Christian faith and how the Christian faith actually is. So the world can often come across as accusing

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Christians of being irrational or uneducated when in fact there is a great intellectual tradition that stands behind the

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Christian faith. And I want folks to become aware of that. I want people to be confident. I want people to be able to articulate the faith, articulately defend the faith, and make an impact in where God has placed them, okay?

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So to that end, this is part one of the teaching series of Against All Opposition, the study questions.

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If you enjoy this lecture, please, or this lesson here, please leave comments and interact, encourage one another.

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Christians are kind of interacting in the comments there. And try to expand on some of the things that I will be discussing in the following lesson, all right?

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So this is part one. Again, I'm going to be going through all of the chapters and there are a total of 11 chapters.

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So this is going to be pretty long. Each individual lesson may not be long, but I'm going to hopefully throughout the upcoming months, complete all 11 chapters and put this in a nice playlist for folks on the

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YouTube channel on Reel Apologetics. And hopefully that will be useful to people. If you do find this content helpful,

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I would greatly support, I would greatly appreciate your support if possible. On RevealedApologetics .com,

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there is a donate section that definitely helps me financially, just upkeep the website and some of the backend costs that I have to do this ministry.

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So if you are grateful for the content and that you find it useful, any help would be greatly appreciated, all right?

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But to that end, let's begin. I'm going to share some of my slides here, okay?

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So against all opposition, defending the Christian worldview, all right? Now let's kind of, let me here, let me introduce you to the author of the book here,

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Against All Opposition. This is Greg Bonson. Now Greg Bonson was a reformed minister within the

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OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And he was a noted apologist of what we call the

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Vantillian tradition, okay? Vantillian tradition, this, it relates to the Christian philosopher,

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Cornelius Vantill, who was one of the founding members of Westminster Theological Seminary.

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And he, that was, the founding of Westminster was kind of spearheaded by another individual that we're going to be talking about later on in this particular lesson, and that is

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J. Gresham Machen. J. Gresham Machen, we'll talk a little bit about, but he hired

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Cornelius Vantill to be the professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. And you're gonna find it very interesting to kind of know the context from which that actually occurred.

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So we'll get there a little bit later. But Greg Bonson was a Christian apologist. He passed away in 1995, but he was a debater, an analytic philosopher, super smart dude, and very down to earth.

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So a lot of his lectures can be found on Sermon Audio. They're all available for free there, and there's just hours and hours worth of content if you want to learn from Dr.

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Bonson himself. So that's Sermon Audio. You type in Bonson Project, and all of his lectures will pop up there.

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And I highly, highly recommend that people check out Dr. Bonson, okay? So when we speak of someone coming from the apologetic tradition known as Vantillianism, or if we can use the more popular term, presuppositionalism, we're referring to a particular type of apologetic method.

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So I grew up watching martial art movies with my dad, and a lot of these movies were really, within the context of the story, were typically schools of kung fu vying for greatness.

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Which method or which style of martial arts was the best? And you'd have karate, you'd have kung fu, you have jujitsu, and these different schools.

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Presuppositionalism is a school of thought or a methodology within the context of apologetics.

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So you have different ways of doing apologetics. And so there's the classical method, which is probably more well -known.

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You have someone like William Lane Craig, who would represent the classical approach. Again, this is not going to be a talk on the different methods, but just to give context, there's the classical method, there's the evidential method of apologetics, and there are others as well.

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But presuppositionalism is, I think, a very unique method of apologetics, and this is the method that I adhere to for a number of reasons, which we'll talk a little bit about as we move along.

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So this book, Against All Opposition, is a book on presuppositional apologetics.

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If we can kind of give a summary, this is the summary the book itself gives on the back cover. Against All Opposition lays out the definitive apologetic model to help believers understand the biblical method of defending the faith, okay?

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So Greg Bonson and those who are within the Vantillian tradition, and of course,

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Vantill himself, they were, as I am, convinced that the Bible not only commands us to defend the faith, but it gives us a method, okay?

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Now again, the Bible's not a handbook. It's not a textbook by any means where it lays out all the details.

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But I think when we take principles laid out in scripture, and when we consistently apply those principles to this realm of engaging unbelievers, what emerges is,

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I think, a consistently presuppositional approach to defending the faith. And again, we'll define what that means for folks who might not still be unfamiliar.

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They might be unfamiliar with what this methodology is all about, okay? So Against All Opposition lays out the definitive apologetic model to help believers understand the biblical method of defending the faith, okay?

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So presuppositionalism simply defined, and this is my favorite definition, but I'll kind of give a couple of definitions here, and hopefully that'll be helpful in helping folks understand what presuppositional apologetics is.

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Okay, so I would define presuppositional apologetics as a method of defending the

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Christian faith that seeks to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever.

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I'm going to read that again nice and slowly. This is, I think, the heart of what a presuppositional apologetic approach is getting at.

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It is a method of defending the Christian faith that seeks to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever, okay?

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This is very important because when we bring every thought captive, when we have thoughts, when we have beliefs, when we have ways of thinking and reasoning, sometimes we engage in those things in a way that does not reflect the lordship of Jesus Christ over our thinking.

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And so when the Bible speaks of, and this is kind of a reference in scripture, when the scripture speaks of bringing every thought captive, this scripture is encouraging us to think like Christians.

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We want to think like Christians. Jesus Christ is our Lord. He is the Lord over our hearts, as 1

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Peter 3, verse 15 says, to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts, which again, and you've heard folks who have followed this channel know that I often make reference to the heart not so much being the organ in your chest, but being the center of one's being, one's mind, if you will.

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Jesus Christ is to be the Lord over our minds. And so everything we think must be brought into captive and brought into obedience to Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever.

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So when I'm defending the Christian faith, the unbelievers' thoughts and lines of reasoning and arguments are things that are setting themselves up against the

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Lordship of Jesus. And so while I'm defending the faith, I want the unbeliever to recognize that unless he brings every thought captive to the obedience of his maker, he can't make sense out of anything he's doing, right?

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So, and we'll kind of unpack that a little bit as we move along, but in essence, I think this biblical passage here, bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever,

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I think captures well what the presuppositional apologetic method seeks to do, right?

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I want to encourage Christians to think like Christians, and I want to encourage Christians to see the unbeliever as the

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Bible sees the unbeliever and take all of these things into consideration when we're actually engaging in the apologetic task, okay?

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Again, another definition of presuppositional apologetics that I like is this simple definition here.

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The presuppositional apologetics is the application of Christian theology to unbelief, okay?

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The application of Christian theology to unbelief. Now, Christian theology, for those who are super duper beginners, theology just refers to the study of God, okay?

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When we speak of Christian theology, it's the study of the Christian God, right? And of course we have content about God that's given to us in scripture, okay?

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And so when we study theology, you can come at theology in different ways. There's the discipline known as biblical theology.

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Then there's the discipline known as systematic theology, where we seek to take all of what the

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Bible has to say about any given topic and kind of hold them in a coherent system in which we can understand how our beliefs in one area relate to our beliefs about God in other areas, right?

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We kind of hold to these beliefs systematically, okay? Now, the application of Christian theology to unbelief.

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So there is a Christian theology of prayer. What does the Bible tell us about prayer? There is a

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Christian theology about God himself, right? Who God is, what is the nature of God?

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What are the attributes of God? When we speak of God's spirituality, his invisibility, when we speak of God's aseity, this idea that he does not depend on anything else for his own existence, right?

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He is self -sufficient unto himself, okay? When we talk about the Trinity, when we talk about God's omniscience, this idea that God knows everything, that God is omnipresent, that he is present everywhere, that God is omnipotent.

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So you have the three omnis, right? The three attributes, the three omni attributes, omnipotence, God's all -powerful, omniscience,

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God knows all things, and omnipresent, God is everywhere present. The Bible tells us these things.

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Those are elements of Christian theology, right? But there is also a Christian theology of unbelief.

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How are we to view the unbeliever and the nature of unbelief itself?

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Well, the Bible informs us how we should perceive unbelief, okay?

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The Bible says in the book of Psalm, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. The Bible tells us a lot about the nature of unbelieving thought and the wisdom of the world versus the wisdom of God.

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There is a Christian theology of unbelief. And when we are defending the

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Christian faith, we wanna do so in a way that does not conflict with our biblical theology of unbelief or our biblical theology of the unbeliever, okay?

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We wanna see the unbeliever and interpret the unbeliever in a way that is consistent with what the

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Bible teaches about the unbeliever and about unbelief in general, okay? So the application of Christian theology to unbelief, okay?

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So Jude chapter one, verse three, I think is a good passage to use here. Jude says, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation,

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I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

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So this is important here. So he says that I found it necessary, okay? This kind of teaches us the necessity of apologetics, right?

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Cause he's speaking about contending for the faith. And an interesting thing here within the context of Jude chapter one, he not only is finding it necessary to defend the faith, to contend for the faith, but he's also referring specifically to a necessity of defending the faith within the church.

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So he's not just talking about like defending the faith against like atheists and agnostics and Muslims or whoever, you know, there are actually false doctrines seeping into the church itself.

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And so Jude is saying, hey, you know, it's necessary that we contend earnestly for the faith.

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And notice what he says here. We are contending for the faith once for all delivered, okay? So the nature of the faith that we are contending for is a faith that has been delivered to the saints.

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Delivered by who? Well, it was delivered by the apostles who, and of course it has its roots in the teachings of Christ. And of course the

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Old Testament, right? There is a body of Christian truth that we are defending. Okay, and this is very important because when we defend that body of Christian truth, that faith once for all delivered, again, the method of defending that body of Christian truth must not be inconsistent with that body of Christian truth.

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Okay? So presuppositionalist really emphasize the importance of consistency.

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The way we defend the faith must be consistent with our foundation.

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Okay? And that foundation of course is God and his word, right? This is something that's hugely foundational for us.

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It is our ultimate authority, the word of God. The word of God is so authoritative that it holds the very word of God itself.

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I think it was Wayne Grudem in his systematic theology. I think he says something along the lines that when we disobey the word of God, we are disobeying or disbelieving

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God himself because God speaks to us in his word. When God made a promise to Abraham, it says that he swore by himself because there was no one greater than him, right?

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You know, when we make promises and swear, it's like, I swear by my mother, or I swear, you know, someone will say,

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I swear to God, right? We swear by something greater than ourselves, but God does not swear by anything greater than himself because he is the greatest.

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So he swears by himself. The word of God must be central to our apologetic.

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It must be the foundation upon which we stand and the soil out of which our apologetic, our defense flows and grows out of, all right?

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All right, 1 Corinthians 1, verses 20 through 21. Where is the one who is wise?

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Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

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I like that passage. And I think in, in against all opposition, I mean, Bonson rightly uses this passage to really kind of typify what the presuppositional approach is trying to get at, okay?

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I mean, the book's entitled Against All Opposition, Defending the Christian Worldview. Against all opposition.

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So whatever the opposition is, whether it is an agnostic, whether it's an atheist, whether it's a

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Muslim, whether it's a Mormon, whether it's a Hindu, whether it's anybody, right?

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The Christian offers the challenge. Where is the wise according to this world?

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Where is the scribe? Where's the scholar, right? Where is the great debater of this age? And Paul says, has God, has not

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God made foolish the wisdom of the world? And this is really important because when we are doing apologetics and we're studying theology and philosophy, it's very easy that we become enamored with the wisdom of this age, right?

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We become, we stand in awe of the great philosophers of our contemporary world and the scientists and the great thinkers in our modern context.

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But, and again, I'm not disparaging the great accomplishments that, intellectual accomplishments that people have achieved, but ultimately at the foundation, the

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Bible calls foolishness the wisdom of this world. What is the wisdom of this world?

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It's a wisdom that's not grounded in Christ. It's a wisdom that is defined not by the standards of the origin of wisdom, but by some other standard.

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So Paul says, where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not

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God made foolish the wisdom of the world? I hope you're getting the theme here. As Christian defenders, we are not defending the

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Christian faith with a pitiful timidity, but rather a confidence in the surety and truth of God's word, okay?

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And this is the spirit with which we are to engage in apologetics. Now, again, we don't do this pridefully, right?

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We don't want to do this in a way that is dishonoring to God and is inappropriately confident in the sense that we are just trying to refute for the sake of showing how smart we are, things like that.

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That's definitely not what we're trying to do, but there definitely needs to be a confidence because we're standing on the very wisdom of God, right?

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Okay, so very important. I really like 1 Corinthians 1, verse 20 through 21. That'd be a good memory verse for folks to remind themselves of the foolishness of the wisdom of this world as opposed to the wisdom of Christ grounded in scripture.

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All right, 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verses five through six, again, shows kind of the aggressive and offensive.

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I don't mean offensive like I'm offended, like offensive, like defense and offense. It highlights the offensive nature of the task of engaging on believers, right?

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1 Corinthians 10, five through six says, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion, not some lofty opinion, every lofty opinion raised up against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey

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Christ. We destroy arguments, okay? People will say, you know, I don't think we should be arguing as Christians.

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We should just share the gospel. Well, yes, we should share the gospel and yes, we shouldn't be argumentative, but the

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Bible says we are to destroy arguments. So there is an appropriate context to engage in argument, giving arguments and refuting arguments or as the

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Bible uses here, destroying arguments and every lofty thing, every lofty opinion that's raised up against the knowledge of God, okay?

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Now, again, notice the knowledge of God, which is actually given to us also in the word of God.

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There's a sense of confidence in these words, not the timidity that we often hear in various contexts where, you know, well, maybe the

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Bible, you know, is most likely true or the Bible's very reasonable. We kind of just, we're overly apologetic about the

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Bible as though it's something to be ashamed of and it isn't. The Bible is the very wisdom of God given to us in written form that we're to stand upon those principles and engage the world of unbelief with, of course, as 1

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Peter 3, 15 tells us with gentleness and respect, okay? There's another important passage. I don't have it on the screen here, but I wanna read it.

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And it kind of gives us the context for the spirit with which we are to engage in defending the faith.

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2 Timothy chapter two, verse 24 through 20, let's go through 26, okay?

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2 Timothy 24 through 26 says, and the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.

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God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.

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Check that out. The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, okay? I have nothing against arguing, but we need to avoid quarrelsome, a quarrelsome spirit, an argumentative spirit, right?

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A contentious spirit. We are to avoid that, trying our best to be kind to everyone, able to teach, we are able to teach those, patiently enduring evil when we receive it, right?

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Correcting his opponents with gentleness, okay? And we do this to the end that hopefully God grants repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.

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And they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will, all right?

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So again, very great passages to kind of create a context for how we properly are to engage in the task of apologetics, all right?

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Let's continue on. All right, so chapter one, we kind of get to the book proper here in Against All Opposition.

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The first chapter is entitled Faith and Reason. Again, a very important topic and a topic with history, right?

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How should we understand the relationship between faith and reason, okay? And if you wanna get the details,

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I would encourage you to read the book as this is going to be looking through some of the chapter study questions, okay?

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But it is important that we kind of grasp how we should properly understand faith and reason.

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We often hear kind of this dichotomy set up, right? They're often set side by side. You have faith on the one hand and then you have this thing called reason on the other.

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And like the religious people are over there and the intellectual agnostic or atheist or the unbeliever, they're over there, right?

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We just wanna use reason. You religious people, you just have faith. Of course, I would reject that dichotomy as well you should as well.

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They are not incompatible with each other. And as we'll see, I would argue that faith is actually the foundation for reason.

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And so, and again, faith properly understood, okay? Faith is not believing something with no evidence or it's not believing something you know ain't true, right?

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Faith is a trust and a reliable source. So the biblical context there, it's a trust in God himself who has exhibited his faithfulness throughout scripture.

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This is why it's so important that we read the word of God because in the word of God, we are reminded of the faithfulness of God as he proves himself faithful in his relationship with his people

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Israel, even in the midst of unfaithfulness to him. So again, we have warrant for trusting

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God, okay? And we have warrant for trusting our reason because our reason is grounded and given a context and given the meaning that it has within the context of the

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God who is faithful and has given us these intellectual tools to think rationally and critically, all right?

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So here are the study questions that we're going to be plowing through. There are seven in total at the end of chapter one.

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Number one, what separates the believer from the unbeliever? Is it faith, okay? Number two, to have faith often means what to unbelievers?

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How does the unbeliever understand this thing that we call faith? Number three, when unbelievers charge that Christianity is irrational, what do they mean?

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Number four, in what way are Christian dogmas logically consistent? Number five, explain what

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Jay Gresham Machen means when he states that the Christian faith is a thoroughly reasonable thing.

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And we'll, again, I'll introduce you to Jay Gresham Machen in just in a moment, well, maybe in a little while, somewhere down the line, we'll eventually get to him, okay?

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Number six, does Neo -Orthodoxy teach that Jesus is God? Again, I'll explain what Neo -Orthodoxy is and we'll answer that question and why it's important.

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And number seven, what did the apostle Paul mean when he wrote that if you don't have faith, there's no place for reason?

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Now, of course, those of you who know your scripture, Paul didn't actually say that in those words, but I would argue that it is an implication of some of the other things that he says, so we'll talk about that as well, all right?

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So these are the questions, I wanna tackle these one by one, and hopefully this will be helpful for folks who are following along, all right?

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And just pardon me as I stop every now and then for my cup of coffee. All right, so number one, what separates the believer and the unbeliever?

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Is it faith, okay? This is a very important question. As I said before, chapter one of the book,

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Against All Opposition by Greg Bonson, is a book about presuppositional apologetics.

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Now, presuppositional apologetics is a worldview apologetic. It focuses on one's worldviews, not so much the details of the facts and the evidence, we definitely talk about that, but the issue is what worldview is one viewing the facts and interpreting the facts through?

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And these are very important question, okay? What separates the believer and the unbeliever is not that the unbeliever is using reason and the

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Christian is using faith, okay? What separates the believer and unbeliever is that the believer and unbeliever have different worldviews.

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We have different intellectual spectacles, if you will, through which we are looking at the world and interpreting the world.

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This is so vitally important to understand. When we are talking with the unbeliever, we must be sensitive to the fact that we and the unbeliever have differing worldviews.

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We have a Christian worldview, they have a non -Christian worldview. When we talk about the facts and the evidence, the way we interpret the facts and the evidence are going to be affected by our worldviews, our intellectual lens, okay?

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And so this is kind of step one, right? In order to be an effective apologist, you don't wanna just run headlong into a fact debate.

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Well, I have more facts than you, I have more evidence. That's an important conversation, but it cannot be had in a meaningful way, independent of acknowledging that the reason why we have a disagreement is because we have different worldview perspectives.

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As is pointed out in the book, Greg Bonson says, what separates you are the underlying worldviews.

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It's the philosophy, not the facts. What separates the believer and the unbeliever are not the facts, but the philosophy of facts, okay?

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That's what separates the believer and the unbeliever. And then we need to ask the question, who has the proper philosophy of facts?

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Who has the right glasses through which the facts are being interpreted? That's a very important question, okay?

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So hopefully that makes sense there. That's the answer to the first question there. That's really a key thing that separates the believer and the unbeliever.

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Number two, to have faith often means what to unbelievers. So when we speak to an unbeliever and say,

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I have faith that the Bible is true, I have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, how does the world interpret that?

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This is very important because we don't want the world to take the word faith, interpret it in accordance to how they understand it, and then allow the unbelievers definition of faith to be foisted upon us, okay?

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Faith has been defined in a number of ways. You can make an entire lecture series, you know, a week long going through all the different ways that the idea of faith or what it means to have faith has been misrepresented by critics of Christianity, okay?

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What does this mean? Well, within the context of against all opposition, Bonson points out, unbelievers think, and this is generally speaking, obviously you have more informed unbelievers who may have a more accurate way of understanding what faith is and what it means to have faith.

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But Bonson points out here, unbelievers think that to have faith means to let your emotions run wild and turn off your brains, okay?

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So in essence, according to many unbelievers, faith is anti -intellectual, right?

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To have faith is not an intellectual thing. It's not something based on reason. It's just this irrational conviction that what

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I believe is true, okay? And of course, that's not how we understand faith, okay?

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Now this is very important. When we talk about faith, the Bible rarely speaks about faith in the sense that like,

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I have faith that God exists, right? As I mentioned before, the Bible says in the book of Psalms, the fool says in his heart, there is no

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God. The Bible itself doesn't argue for the existence of God. It just kind of presupposes it, right?

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right, and it says it's foolish to ignore this

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God who exists, right? So faith in the Bible is typically a trust, right?

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Usually within the context of a relational trust. It's not a blind leap. It is a trust in a reliable source, okay?

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God is a reliable object of our faith, okay?

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And that is not, that does not remove, you know, this aspect of the intellect, right?

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We do not stop thinking. We don't turn off our brains when we say, I have faith in God.

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I have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's just to say that what Christians mean by faith is not this sense of like irrational belief.

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We believe that faith is very rational. We believe that faith is very reasonable, contrary to popular opinion, all right?

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Number three, when unbelievers charge that Christianity is irrational, what do they mean, okay?

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Now, again, the answer to this question can vary, right? You know, people can mean all sorts of things when they charge

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Christianity with being irrational, okay? But Bonson points out in his book,

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Christianity is often understood as being illogical. So when we say that Christianity is irrational, what often people mean is that Christianity is illogical.

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And that's to say that something within Christianity is contrary to the canons of logical and rational thinking.

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People who take this line will often try to demonstrate that certain beliefs within the

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Christian faith are logically contradictory, okay? They cannot be consistently held, right?

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So belief A over here that the Christian has, and belief B over here that the Christian have, they're logically in conflict with one another.

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So when someone says Christianity is irrational, they can mean, depending on who you're speaking with, they can mean that Christianity is illogical, all right?

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And so I think it's important to ask, when someone says Christianity is irrational, it's very important to ask, well, what do you mean by that, okay?

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And if they take this line, then of course, allow the person to kind of unpack what they mean by that.

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If Christianity is illogical, that's a good question to ask, what brought you to that conclusion? You know, why do you think

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Christianity is illogical? You know, and allow them to bring up the examples. And of course, as Christians, always ready to give an answer, we want to be able to address those objections when they come, all right?

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So some people, when they say Christianity is irrational, what they mean by that is Christianity is illogical, all right?

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Another way that people who say that Christianity is irrational, they often will mean that Christianity lacks evidence, right?

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So if I say Christianity is irrational, I can mean it's illogical, or in some contexts, people will take that to mean that Christianity lacks any evidence for it, okay?

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Now, of course, we need to define what constitutes evidence, right? When skeptics say, oh, there's no evidence for God, what they typically mean, well, at least in my experience, there is no empirical evidence for God, right?

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So people who are very scientific -minded are sometimes under the impression, well, unless you can prove something scientifically, you really don't have evidence for it, and that's just wrongheaded.

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You'll often hear people say something along the lines, well, you know, give me scientific proof of your

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God, right? You know, and it's really important to point out, how irrational that is, right?

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Scientific proof, science is a method of investigating the physical world, and God, within Christian theism, is a spiritual being.

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So what you're asking is give me empirical, physical proof and evidence for this immaterial being, okay?

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Now, I think there is evidence for God, and I think there's a very powerful way in which the very method of science points to God, but just on a surface level, when someone says, give me scientific proof or empirical proof of your

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God, I don't think the person knows what they're asking. I would actually argue that they're making what's called in logic a category error, okay?

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So for example, that's like me saying, you know, that it's possible to detect rubber buried in the sand using a metal detector.

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Well, of course, it'd be weird to expect that I'm going to detect rubber while using a metal detector.

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Metal detectors don't detect rubber, they detect metal. And like fashion, to demand scientific proof, and specifically empirical evidence for an immaterial being is to make a category mistake, okay?

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Now, that's not to say that there's no evidence for God. That's not to say that science cannot be used within our apologetic to point to God.

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All I'm saying is when someone says Christianity lacks evidence, we wanna make sure, we wanna see what do they mean by that?

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And are they using appropriate definitions and standards of evidence? And I think that will go a long way in helping us kind of move to the next step of the discussion.

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Once those categories are properly defined, then we can kind of lay out some of the evidence when appropriately, you know, defined and understood, okay?

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Also, evidence is, again, it's gonna be interpreted, right? So if we are saying,

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I need this kind of evidence for your God, but the way that evidence is understood, okay, is within the context of a worldview lens that we reject, obviously, we're gonna disagree as to what constitutes evidence for the truth of something.

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So again, this worldview issue is going to be very important, okay? But those are the two ways that people, when they say

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Christianity is irrational, they typically mean it's illogical, there's a violation of some, you know, logical law, and it lacks evidence, but of course, we believe everything's evidence for God.

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We don't think it lacks evidence, but we wanna define what evidence is and make sure we proceed accordingly, all right?

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So defining terms, very, very important. All right, number four, in what way are

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Christian dogmas logically consistent, okay? So we would affirm as Christians who hold to a

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Christian worldview that the dogmas of the Christian faith, the teachings of the Christian faith, they are consistent with each other.

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The doctrine of the Trinity is logically consistent with the doctrine of, or the teaching that Jesus is

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God in human flesh, right? They might be difficult to wrap our heads around completely, but we don't think they're illogical, right?

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What we believe here within the Christian faith is consistent with what we believe over here. And most importantly, our various dogmas, okay, are logically consistent with our operating assumptions.

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So our presuppositions, our elementary assumptions, our trust in our ultimate authority, our beliefs are going to be consistent with that foundation, okay?

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As everything that we believe should be consistent with our operating assumptions.

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Now, that doesn't mean we can know everything, right? We don't have knowledge of every single fact, but the things that we assert with respect to Christian teaching, it should be consistent with our operating assumptions, okay?

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And of course, to turn it around, what we wanna point out in the unbeliever is that their dogmas, right, are not inconsistent with their operating assumptions, or if they are consistent with the unbelievers operating assumptions, then their own position is undermined.

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We'll kind of go into that a little bit later, maybe in a different lesson, but that's an important thing to keep in mind. So yes, we wanna affirm as Christians that our theology is consistent with our operating assumptions.

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What we believe is consistent with our presuppositions, okay? And that's just to be consistent. That's not an essential feature of this particular method of Christian apologetics.

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It's something we all, we wanna hold everyone accountable to, right? What you say up here should be consistent with what you believe down here.

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And if there's an inconsistency, then there's a problem. And within the apologetic encounter, that problem should be brought out, okay?

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All right, number five, explain what J. Gresham Machen means when he states that the

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Christian faith is a thoroughly reasonable thing, okay? So real quick, so J.

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Gresham Machen is a super cool guy. Now, if you like to read books and you wanna read something really good,

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J. Gresham Machen, one of the founders of Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a classic book that is entitled

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Christianity and Liberalism, okay? Now, liberalism was a movement that really was challenging

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Orthodox Christianity, and it was moving away from these core essential features of the

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Christian faith. People who were within this liberal movement in theology denied things like the inerrancy of scripture or the virgin birth of Christ or things like this.

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And these were seeping into the seminaries, and J. Gresham Machen wrote this masterful book responding to this liberal movement, not to be confused with like liberalism, like in the political sphere, right?

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This is like liberal theology. So this is his classic book. J. Gresham Machen was kind of the leading defenders of Christian Orthodoxy against this rising false theology, okay?

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And so you definitely wanna check out who J. Gresham Machen is, Christianity and Liberalism, while he's addressing something that was more prevalent in the earlier 1900s, it definitely has application today, right?

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Because there are all sorts of things seeping into the church, and we wanna be able to distinguish between biblical

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Christianity and counterfeit Christianities, right? As the great late

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Walter Martin, the father of cult apologetics once said, that we must be familiar with the truth, so much so that we are able to identify counterfeits, okay?

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He often speaks of studying the counterfeit money, when people are trained to identify false money, they don't go around studying all of the different varieties of false money, what they do is they become so familiar with the original article, the real deal, the real bill, that when they see the counterfeit, they're able to recognize it.

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So we familiarize ourself with truth so much so, that when error creeps in, we recognize it. I think that's the context here, it's appropriate here, given what

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J. Gresham Machen was doing back then, and given what is required of us today in recognizing error when it comes, all right?

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So J. Gresham Machen, awesome dude, founder of Westminster Theological Seminary and author of Christianity and Liberalism, highly, highly recommend.

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So at any rate, to answer our question, J. Gresham Machen rejected the false dichotomy between faith and reason, okay?

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So some people would speak of faith as kind of this irrationality over here, and the realm of the intellect over here,

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J. Gresham Machen said, no, that's a false dichotomy, right? He believed that Christianity was true and in accord with the facts when rightly interpreted, okay?

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That's a key point there, okay? So let's say, for example, the science. If science, if mainstream science came to various conclusions that seem to be in conflict with Christian theism, we would say that Christian theism is true, and even though things might seem to be in conflict, when all the information is in and the data is rightly interpreted, there will be no inconsistency with Christian faith, with the

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Christian faith, right? So he believed that Christianity is true and in accord with the facts, all right?

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So this is not putting Christianity in this irrational category over here and everything else in this intellectual and rationally respectable category over here.

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No, for J. Gresham Machen, these were closely linked together, faith and reason are not at odds with one another, they are together, all right?

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In a very important sense, all right? Okay, number six, does Neo -Orthodoxy teach that Jesus is

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God? Now, when I was reading the chapter one in Against All Opposition, this question kind of came out of left field.

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I really wasn't sure how to answer it because it's been so long since I've studied Neo -Orthodoxy, okay?

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And again, while Neo -Orthodoxy is not something that mainstream Christians are going to have to be familiar with,

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I mean, if a teenager's watching this and you're trying to equip yourself and you wanna walk through this series and say, hey,

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I wanna know how to defend the faith, you might not ever confront Neo -Orthodoxy. It's an old theology,

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I'm not even aware of people still, I mean, I suppose there are people who still hold to Neo -Orthodoxy, but be that as it may, although this is kind of an outdated theology,

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I think the application is still very relevant to us today, okay?

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So just real quick, so Neo -Orthodoxy was a movement within Protestant Christianity that acted as a response to the liberalism that was seeping into the church during the early part of the 20th century.

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It was seen as a return to a more conservative form of orthodoxy in light of the liberal rejection of key

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Christian doctrines. So it made mention of liberalism, this theology that came in, took over various schools,

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I mean, Princeton, prestigious Princeton was overcome by liberal theology, and that's why you had

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J. Gresham Machen start Westminster Theological Seminary out in Philadelphia, all right, it was to move away from this theology that denied the virgin birth, that denied the inerrancy of scripture, that denied key features of Christian belief.

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And so a response to that liberalism, you had folks like J. Gresham Machen who wanted to fight for orthodoxy, and then you had kind of a more extreme swing in the other direction, and that's

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Neo -Orthodoxy. So on the surface, Neo -Orthodoxy seemed to be a strong, how can

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I explain this? Neo -Orthodoxy seemed to be in strong opposition to the liberalism, so people who were like, man, liberalism is really dropping the ball on some key issues, look at these

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Neo -Orthodox guys, they seem to be getting on the right track, okay? So I would say that liberalism over here is on the one extreme, and Neo -Orthodoxy is on the other extreme.

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There were some good things, but there were some things that I think we need to be very cautious of. The tricky thing about liberalism and Neo -Orthodoxy is that the way they laid out their theology, it would sound very similar to traditional

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Orthodox conservative Christianity that we would say is right within the realm of appropriate Orthodoxy, okay?

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But the language sounded, you know, we use words, but we don't always mean what we think they mean by those words.

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It kind of reminds me when you're talking to a Mormon, for example, and they'll affirm that they believe in the

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Trinity, okay? So they're speaking the same language as us, but in reality, what they believe about the

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Trinity is that's three separate gods. The Father is one God, the Son is another God, and the Spirit is another

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God. Clearly, we don't want to affirm that, that's polytheism or tritheism in that sense.

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But liberal theology and Neo -Orthodoxy use very Christian language.

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They were on the opposite side of the spectrum, but I think both of them were kind of veering off to the extreme ends that I think we need to be very cautious of.

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And to that end, I think it's very appropriate to bring this up, even though the average believer is not going to confront

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Neo -Orthodox theology very much, okay? We always want to ask for the definition of terms.

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And of course, with having a firm grounding in biblical Orthodox theology, we will be able to engage in misrepresentations when they appear, okay?

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So these are two key proponents of the Neo -Orthodox tradition.

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On the right, we have Karl Barth, and on the left, we have Emil Brunner, okay? These are two kind of the quintessential

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Neo -Orthodox theologian. And again, their literature, written, a lot of information out there on them, but of course,

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I don't want to get off topic here into the details of that. I just want you to know that in a general sense,

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Neo -Orthodoxy moved in the correct direction away from liberal theology, but fell into some,

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I think, egregious errors in other areas that we want to be cautious of, okay?

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So with respect to the deity of Jesus, the fact that Jesus is God, to my knowledge, okay,

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I would imagine that within Neo -Orthodoxy, there's a wide spectrum of beliefs, but to my knowledge, the belief that Jesus is

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God was affirmed. But again, we want to ask, well, what is meant by that? Okay, it's very important. The Neo -Orthodox also believed, you know, some of the key proponents believe this about the

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Bible. The Bible is a collection of merely man -made documents which

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God uses to create an encounter with the people reading it. Therefore, the

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Bible becomes the word of God as we read it and encounter God through it.

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And again, I don't think we want to affirm the idea that the Bible becomes the word of God as we read it.

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We would argue that the Bible is objectively independent of our reading it or not, is the word of God, as 2

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Timothy 3 .16 tells us, it is theanostos, it is God -breathed, okay? And that's true independent of whether we read it or not, okay?

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It is true that we encounter God in the scriptures, but our encountering God in the scriptures does not make the scriptures the scriptures inspire, right?

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So there are a couple of things within Neo -Orthodoxy that we want to be cautious of. But of course, since you're probably not gonna meet a proponent of Neo -Orthodoxy, the general principle is still the same.

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We want to be very cautious of any view that uses Christian language, but the definitions that stand behind that language are not matching up with what the

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Bible actually teaches. And so that's very important. We wanna be familiar with what the Bible teaches so that we're in a better position to identify error.

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All right, let's continue. Number seven, and this is our last question here.

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What did the Apostle Paul mean when he wrote that if you don't have faith, there's no place for reason, okay?

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I would say that Paul teaches that reason and wisdom are rooted in faith, okay?

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As the proverb says, the beginning of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the

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Lord, okay? A proper place of reason is as a tool that is rooted in faith and trust in the source of reason, which is

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God himself, okay? So a couple of things here. Bonson points out in his book,

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Against All Opposition, page 16, he says this, and this is important because when you read about presuppositional apologetics and presuppositional methodology, you'll often hear, ah, presuppositionalists, they don't talk about the evidence.

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They're not really giving any arguments. They're just asserting that Christianity is true and you have to presuppose that. And if you don't, you're a fool.

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That's not at all the case, right? Bonson points out, rightfully, he says, it was to vindicate the truth of his religious claims that Moses challenged the magicians of Pharaoh's court in Exodus chapter seven, verses eight through 13, okay?

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So, and this is Bonson speaking, the quintessential presuppositionalist. What we're trying to do with the unbeliever is to vindicate the truth of the

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Christian faith. We wanna argue for the truth of the Christian faith. We can do that in a number of ways, okay?

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Bonson continues, it was to vindicate the truth of his religious convictions that Elijah competed with and taunted the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel as recorded in 1

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Kings chapter 18, verses 16 through 45, okay? As Van Til himself defines apologetics.

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Cornelius Van Til defined apologetics as the vindication of the Christian worldview over against the non -Christian worldview.

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So what we're doing when we're doing apologetics is we're seeking to vindicate the

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Christian worldview, okay? Bonson goes on to say that the resurrection, which is the key feature of the

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New Testament, right? The Bible says, if Christ has not been raised, you know, we're wasting our time, right? The resurrection was a mighty sign and wonder that provided evidence for the veracity of his claims and for the apostolic message based upon his claims, okay?

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So when we're talking about Christian apologetics, Christian defense and presuppositionalism,

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I want to overemphasize, we must argue for the truth of our position.

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We must employ evidence to support our claims, right? We're not against that, presuppositionalists are not allergic to using evidence.

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We just would argue that evidence must be presented in the proper context and in a way that does not, that is not inconsistent with our operating assumptions, right, okay?

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So the resurrection was a mighty sign and wonder that provided evidence for the veracity of his claims and for the apostolic message based upon his claims, okay?

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And so Paul sets up this dichotomy in his letters between godly wisdom and human wisdom, okay?

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Reason, humanly understood, does not stand as Lord over the wisdom of God.

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Now, the wisdom of God is given to us in his word and the authority of God's word is what grounds, should ground, proper wisdom.

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It's godly wisdom that we stand upon. Jesus says that we must build our house upon the rock as opposed to building our house upon the sand, human wisdom.

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What is human wisdom? According to Paul, where he speaks of being cautious of philosophy, he says we must be cautious of a philosophy that is not rooted in Christ because that kind of philosophy is not true wisdom, right?

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A philosophy that is based upon the elementary principles of the world, that is not true wisdom.

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The world might see that as wisdom. The world might see these great philosophers today and the scientists as standing upon wisdom, but the

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Bible says it is the wisdom of the world that is based upon elementary principles that are not grounded in Christ.

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Where is our wisdom? It is grounded in Christ and upon the word of God, okay?

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So if we go back to our question here, what did the apostle Paul mean when he wrote along the lines that if you don't have faith, there's no place for reason?

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He's basically arguing that unless we start with a trust and firm reliance upon God and his word, you don't have reason.

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Reason is foolishness, if not rooted upon the wisdom of God.

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You see, reason doesn't exist as this kind of thing independent of everything else. Reason must be understood within a context.

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It must be understood standing upon a foundation. What foundation is our reasoning standing upon?

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Is it based, pardon, is it based upon elementary principles of this world, which the

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Bible calls foolishness? Or is it based upon or built upon the rock, which is

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Christ himself, the word of God, okay? So again, hopefully these questions will create the context.

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Okay, let me just remove this here. For the rest of what we're gonna be moving through. When we do apologetics, we need to really ask ourselves, what are we standing on?

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Are we standing on the shaky ground of unbelieving principles and throwing Christian language on top of that so that we can communicate better with the skeptics and things like this?

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Or are we standing upon the wisdom of God's word, regardless of what the word says, holding fast to the conviction that the word of God is true and that we are in a position to argue for its truth with force, with gentleness and respect, being in a position to destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised up against the knowledge of God.

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That is the important issue that I think helps us create the context for the rest of the apologetic task, okay?

57:54

Well, we are just under an hour and hopefully the rest of our classes, so to speak, will be around there.

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So you get a decent amount of time. I don't wanna go too over. But again, against all opposition, defending the

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Christian worldview. Until next time, stay tuned for part two in our,

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I think it's gonna be 11 part series. So hope you've enjoyed. I hope you found this helpful and beneficial.

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And if you like the content here, share it. Use what's being spoken of here, taking notes.

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You can teach it within your own context in your own church. Hopefully it's beneficial to you to that end.

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All right, well, that concludes this class session. Until next time, take care and God bless, bye -bye.