Dissecting Apologetics

Van Til’s Definition of Apologetics

In this video, I want to dissect the concept of apologetics. I often get asked the question, how do you define presuppositional apologetics? And I think a useful way to do it is to just define apologetics, but within the context of how Cornelius Van Til defined it.

In his opening pages of his book, Christian Apologetics, I think it's the opening line, he defines apologetics as the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life over against the non-Christian philosophy of life.

And what I want to do here is just take a few moments to kind of analyze his definition. And I think what we do when we analyze it, we break apart kind of the words and the concepts that he's using and see how we can expand or broaden the categories that he's using so as to get a more crystal clear picture of what at least Van Til means by apologetics.

And so let's take a look here. So Van Til defines apologetics as the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life over against the non-Christian philosophy of life. Notice that within his definition, he defines apologetics as that which deals with a philosophy of life.

And so this is very much wrapped up into the idea that when the believer and the unbeliever kind of going head to head against each other in some dispute, we are dealing with a collision of worldviews.

It is the Christian worldview over against the non-Christian worldview. The Christian has a philosophy of life. The unbeliever has a philosophy of life. And so apologetics has to do with worldview confrontation, so to speak.

OK, so again, apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life. Also notice that apologetics for Van Til is the vindication of the Christian philosophy.

Of life.

It is not simply a defense warding off attacks from the enemy. It is also an establishing or vindicating of the Christian position. And so vindicating the Christian worldview is going to entail also presenting a positive case for the Christian worldview.

And of course, Van Til would do that, or at least he would encourage doing that within the context of a presuppositional approach. There are two sides of the presuppositional coin. We can engage in defending the attacks upon the Christian worldview and asserting positively why the Christian worldview is true.

And of course, one of the ways that Van Til would suggest that we do that, someone like Greg Bonson as well, is that we do that through transcendental reasoning, transcendental argumentation. So let's take a look again.

Worldview Confrontation and the Antithesis

Apologetics is the vindication, OK? We are trying to establish the Christian worldview and defend the Christian worldview. It's the vindication of the Christian philosophy of life, the Christian worldview, over against the non-Christian worldview.

The idea of a philosophy of life is also wrapped up in the idea that Van Til promoted the idea that when we defend the Christian faith, we are not defending the Christian faith in a piecemeal fashion.

That is to say, we're not simply dealing with, in apologetics, the issue of the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact or the existence of a God, some theistic God that's not specifically defined.

We are concerned with a worldview as a whole, a system. The worldview context gives meaning to the specific historical event of the resurrection. So in apologetics, we're not dealing with a piecemeal defense of the faith.

We are dealing with the defense of an entire philosophy of life, indeed, an entire worldview. Notice also in the definition a vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life.

In Van Til's definition, you also have a great emphasis upon the idea of antithesis. There is this conflict between worldview perspectives. You're going head to head. It's a system of thought going against a system of thought, this antithesis, OK?

So again, we're not simply disagreeing over a historical fact. Rather, we are in disagreement at the philosophical worldview level. The reason why the unbeliever and the believer will interpret the facts of history differently and interpret what we think the facts of history mean is because we are coming to history with an entire worldview perspective.

And so part of Van Til's definition emphasizes this idea of antithesis between these two competing philosophies of life. And then notice that he says here, the over against the non-Christian, OK, over the various non-Christian philosophies of life.

A vindication of Christian apologetics is a vindication of the Christian philosophy of life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy of life. Now, that word there is very important in Van Til's definition.

It is intentional, because for Van Til, and I think he's right here, for Van Til, it is really the case that in the apologetic situation, there are only two worldviews. OK, there is the Christian worldview and then there is the non-Christian worldview.

And of course, Van Til was not so naive to deny that there are multiple flavors of unbelief. But he grouped these multiple flavors of unbelief into one basket of the overall broad category, the unbelieving worldview, because he saw and I think this is correct.

He saw that the weakness and the commonality of the unbelieving worldview is common to all aspects of unbelief. And that is the assumption of autonomy, autonomy from the one true and living God. OK, so we're dealing with the Christian philosophy of life over against the non-Christian philosophy of life.

So for Van Til, there's only two worldviews. And I think when we take a look at the definition, we break it down. I think when we take a look at this definition that Cornelius Van Til has provided, we get a very good gist of presuppositional apologetics.

The Christian Worldview, Epistemology, and Scripture’s Authority

So, for example, for the Christian, we take a look, for example, the philosophy of life of the Christian. We believe that there is a triune God who's revealed himself both in natural and special revelation.

We believe that man is sinful. We were created in God's image, but man disobeyed. We are sinful and we're in need of a savior. God, the father sends the son, the son redeems sinful people for himself, so on and so forth.

These are the things that we believe as Christians. And so how do we know that that's true?

Right.

Apologetics is going to deal with the how do we know? And so when we're dealing with the question of how do we know, OK, we're engaging in the defense of our entire worldview system. We know that our worldview system is correct.

And of course, that's going to be the purview of the philosophical category of epistemology. And of course, it gets into other details as well. But when we take a look at this perspective, part of our worldview requires us to take God at his word and to argue while standing upon the authority of God's word.

That's part of our worldview. And so there's a great emphasis placed upon the idea that the manner in which we defend our faith must be consistent with the faith itself. That means apologetics flows from and grows out of our theology.

OK, and so a presuppositional approach takes very seriously the idea that we are to as Christians bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and every thought includes the thoughts and thinking process that is involved in reasoning, thinking and.

Arguing.

And so when we reason, think and argue, we seek to do so in such a way that accurately reflects the teaching of Scripture with respect to God's proper role of authority and our role as creature and how that functions and plays out with respect to how we reason and think and so forth.

OK, so that's just a few points here summarizing apologetics from Van Til's definition from his book Christian Apologetics. And it's, I think, useful in analyzing his definition. It kind of gives us the core essentials of what constitutes a presuppositional approach.

Hope this has been helpful.

Take care.

God bless.