PresupU Course Sign-Up

All right, welcome. My name is Eli Ayala of Revealed Apologetics. And I kinda just wanna cover a couple of things here. If you notice from the thumbnail, I am advertising an online class that I teach that goes through presuppositional apologetic methodology.

And so I wanna talk a little bit about an overview. So for folks who may be interested in signing up for that class, you can kinda get a gist, a taste of the sorts of things that we will be covering. And I want to also, if we do have an audience, I know it's Sunday, so you might not be sitting in front of your computer or on your phone or something like that.

But if we do have time, I would take questions. If we do have any questions with respect to the online course or anything else that anyone might want to talk about. So without further ado, just real quick, my name is Eli Ayala.

I am the founder of Revealed Apologetics and I am a teacher. So I teach at Christian private school. I've been teaching Christian private education for quite some time and really, really love it. So I've had the blessing of teaching middle school students, high school students, and I currently teach high school students today.

And I've spoken at colleges and other venues where you have folks within kind of the 20s and 30s age range. And I used to do a Bible study at my home where we had a wide range of people. So I really love teaching and interacting with people from all ages, all walks of life, who are excited about theology, apologetics, and things like that.

So super excited to be able to be teaching this upcoming course that I'm gonna share a little bit in more detail in just a little bit. Oh, well, just a couple of things. Just for those who may not know who I am and you're kind of just tuning in to this channel, you will find this channel hopefully very helpful.

If you look down the list of the long video log that I have, I have interviewed world-class scholars, theologians, apologists on a wide variety of topics. But for those who are familiar with this channel, they do know that I tend to focus on apologetics from a presuppositional perspective and from a reformed perspective.

So if you're curious about my theological background, I identify as a Calvinist. I am reformed, leaning more towards a kind of a reformed Baptist sort of flavor. So that's where I stand on some of those issues.

And interestingly enough, I did not grow up in a reformed context. I actually grew up with a Pentecostal background. So folks might find that a little bit interesting. I have gone to seminary. I have two master's degrees from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.

I earned my Master of Arts with Theological Studies and I earned my Master of Divinity with a Theological Emphasis. So theology is a really big deal to me. I think it's super important and it is very, very closely linked with our apologetics, as you know.

If you have watched my content in the past, I believe that our apologetic should flow consistently from the soil of our theology, which when I say our theology, I mean it should flow from the soil of biblical theology.

So those are importantly related there. Now, with respect to this course, I wanna go over briefly the details of this course. So if folks are interested in signing up, what's the deal? Well, there are two forms of the course.

One form of the course can be purchased on the Revealed Apologetics website. So here's the thing. If you are familiar with what I do and anyone's familiar with how YouTube goes, it takes a lot of work to put content out there and stuff like that.

So basically this video is not only a summary of the course and I'm gonna go through some of that in just a moment, but it's also a plea to those who have found the content useful to help support the ministry.

If you're looking for a ministry to support and you really believe in what we're doing, financial contribution is super helpful if that's something you're able to do. If not, no worries. And I hope folks just enjoy the content and that you're able to use it as the Lord provides you with opportunities to use it, okay?

But if you really like what we're doing, you know, financial support is definitely helpful. It helps me pay the bills and pay all of the backend stuff that allows me to have my website and to continue to do what I'm doing.

So it definitely helps in that capacity. If you're unable to sign up for a course, there is a way to donate to Revealed Apologetics through the website, revealedapologetics .com. So there's a way to do that.

That's kind of more in line with perhaps a more flexible budget. And taking an online course is actually good if you can't afford seminary. So I've been to seminary and I have a PhD in debt, okay? It's a lot of money.

So if you're looking for a way to take kind of just a short course, this course that I'm offering is five weeks. And if you order the premium version of the course, we meet once a week through a private Zoom link and we go deeper into the content of the lectures that I send out to the students.

It's pretty cool. I've actually done this. I think this is gonna be my fourth time doing it. And I've had the opportunity to meet with people who have signed up for the course from all over the world.

I mean, we had some folks in England, Norway, and just interesting places. And we were able to connect with just other believers who are interested in this topic. So I'm very excited for this time around.

Hopefully if folks sign up, we'll get to connect with people from all over and kind of just dive deep into the issue. So super excited about that. So it's definitely a good opportunity to have more structure in your learning.

So, I mean, obviously there's content out there. I mean, this is not the only way to learn presuppositional apologetics. You can get books, you can watch videos, debates and things like that. But what I find, and this is one of the valuable things that I've learned when I went to seminary was the difference between structured learning versus kind of just reading randomly and trying to get what you can get.

So taking a structured course, I think would be a super helpful to that end. All right, so what's the details here? So let me kind of let folks know here. So the premium version of the course involves those private Zoom sessions.

So that's going to be scheduled and I'm actually gonna be meeting with the students once a week for an hour or more. Sometimes we even go longer to discuss some deeper issues. That's going to start on January 24th at 9 p .m. Eastern.

Okay, so if anyone wants to sign up for that, that's kind of the time we'll be meeting on Mondays. All right, and pardon, we will be covering a wide variety of topics. And so let me kind of just briefly survey the sorts of things that we go.

Biblical Foundations for Presuppositional Apologetics

So in session one, we cover, and obviously this is gonna be kind of the bread and butter of presuppositional apologetics. And that really is just the biblical basis for doing apologetics. So we survey some important scriptures that kind of give us a foundation for doing what we do with respect to defending the faith.

And of course I cover and unpack some scriptures that give us a kind of a presuppositional framework. So if you read any books on apologetics, almost all books you're gonna read are going to have scripture.

Obviously everyone who's doing Christian apologetics believes they're doing something that the Bible commands them to do. And so there is obviously that important aspect to the course. And so I do unpack a couple of scriptures, but I try to kind of unpack them in a way that gives us a more presuppositional framework for doing what we're doing, okay?

Defining and Constructing Worldviews

Also the second session, once that session is over, we go over the vitally important topic of defining and constructing worldviews. So we go over a simple definition of a worldview, and then I unpack a more complex definition of a worldview with the purpose of hopefully being able to join these both understandings together and have a better perspective of what a worldview is, why it's important.

We talk about constructing a worldview, what is a worldview made up of? So we talk a little bit in detail about the issues of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics and how those things work together. So that's gonna be a super important foundational issue when you're learning apologetics.

I mean, when you do presuppositional apologetics, I mean, this is a worldview apologetic. I mean, that's just the nature, that's the flavor of presuppositionalism. It really tries to defend the Christian worldview as an intellectual system.

So I think this is going to be really fundamental for people who want to learn this perspective. You need to learn how to think along worldview lines, okay? And so I have a lecture where we unpack that, we go into detail, and if you do the premium course and we're meeting, we're gonna go even deeper into that and do some role-playing.

And hopefully I'll be able to teach you how to identify worldview assumptions when you're engaging with other people. So that's a super, super important aspect of learning presuppositional apologetics.

Scott Terry, thank you so much. Wow, that is awesome. Scott Terry says, your tact, humbleness, and respect in dealing with unbelievers is just as important, if not more so, than the intellectual content of the precept method.

Much needed, you're a blessing. Thank you so much, Scott, that... Wow, I feel humble. Thank you so much for the support. I very much appreciate that. Thank you. Wow, super awesome. Well, God is good, and look at that.

Well, that's super helpful. You caught me off guard. I had no idea. Thank you so much for your generosity. Appreciate that. Okay, so look what you did, Scott. You threw me off my game, right, with your kindness.

So, okay, so there we go. So I remember where we were. So we talk about defining and constructing worldviews, and that's going to be our second session. Okay, in the third session, I cover a topic. I call it, I entitled it, The Twin Poisons of Unbelieving Thought.

The Twin Poisons of Neutrality and Autonomy

And we go through the important concepts of neutrality and autonomy. Now, these are very common terms for folks who are already familiar with the presuppositional method, but we really kind of go deeper into these concepts, and we go into how we can identify when notions of autonomy and neutrality are kind of snuck into the discussion.

And so I teach the students how to identify those key presuppositions, right? And of course, how to engage that from a presuppositional framework, okay? This is super fascinating to me, is developing the skill of recognizing presuppositions.

One of the helpful ways of doing this is watching movies. Now, I'm a big movie guy. You know, don't be caught off guard with my jacket, my collar, my glasses. He looks, you know, he seems like a very studious individual.

Listen, I love to just watch movies. Sometimes I'll watch too much, and I realize I probably should be doing something more important, but I do like watching movies, and one of the things I love about watching movies is that it creates a context for me to train my ability to identify presuppositions, worldview commitments, right?

And as I'm enjoying the movie, I'll kind of toy around with some things that I am identifying throughout the course of watching. Okay, a good example of this, I see there Braxton Hunter. Let's see here.

Braxton Hunter of Trinity Radio seems to be listening in. Hello, Braxton. Braxton's a great friend of mine. Braxton says, will this be helpful for those who have no prior knowledge of presuppositionalism?

Yes, it would. It assumes a little bit of a background, but we do kind of go through the basics, and I unpack all of the details of the method, and I go through explaining the inner workings of the method, not just the stereotypical presuppositional talking points, but I try to go through what is the reasoning behind why we are saying what we are saying, and I go into some of the philosophical backdrop of that, as well as kind of the theological foundations for those things.

So absolutely. Asking for a friend. Well, good. Well, Braxton is, he is a classical apologist, and he's an excellent apologist. So if folks really want to see a excellent YouTube channel where Christian apologetics is applied to like YouTube atheism and things like that, you definitely wanna try Trinity Radio.

If you haven't subscribed to Trinity Radio, most definitely do so. While they are classical over there, as they say, God can strike a blow with a broken stick. So it's still useful. I'm just messing around.

That's an excellent channel. Braxton is an awesome apologist, and while we have methodological disagreements, I'm glad that we're on the same team. So thank you so much. All right. So we talk about the twin poisons of neutrality and autonomy and how to avoid those two things within our own thinking.

So that's another important element that we cover in the course. Session four is entitled more specifically, the precept method and argument. So while we lay the foundations of the biblical foundation for apologetics, defining and constructing worldviews, avoiding neutrality and autonomy, we go into the presuppositional methods specifically and the nature of the argument itself, okay?

Now this is important because the nature of the presuppositional argument is more than just saying that Christianity is true by the impossibility of the contrary, and that's it. All right, a lot of people, a lot of criticisms of presuppositionalism, especially at the popular level, like on the internet and in social media, is that presuppositionalists are really good at making assertions, right?

We could assert that Christianity is true by the impossibility of the contrary, but that's it. You don't really back up that assertion, right? You don't win an argument by making an assertion and leaving it there.

So I talk a little bit about the presuppositional method and the nature of the argument itself. What is it we are trying to demonstrate, okay? So we talk a little bit about those aspects of presuppositionalism.

If you wanna know the more technical terminology, we talk a little bit about the nature of transcendental argumentation, okay? Now, transcendental argumentation has a long tradition in the school of, well, in the history of philosophy.

And so we go into what a transcendental argument is, and that is kind of the bread and butter of a presuppositional perspective. And so that's definitely an important thing to know if you wanna learn presuppositional apologetics, okay?

Presuppositional Apologetics Applied

And then the final week, session five, I have the lesson entitled Presuppositional Apologetics Applied, okay? So basically we go through the basics. So defining worldviews, I'm sorry, the biblical foundation, defining worldviews, avoiding the twin poisons of autonomy and neutrality, the presupp method and the argument itself, and then the presuppositional apologetics method actually applied.

We kind of take everything that we've discussed in the first four weeks, and then we kind of apply it to specific situations, okay? And of course, everything that we do needs to kind of drive us towards that idea of applying.

What is the point of learning apologetics if you're not applying it, all right? And so what I do is I take a couple of way, I kind of present the presuppositional argument in different ways. So I have a more intellectually kind of sophisticated way to formulate the argument.

So if you're engaging people who are kind of at that higher level of sophistication and philosophical astuteness, you can use kind of the phraseology I offer there. And then I kind of walk through more simplistic ways to present the argument so that you could apply it to say, someone who might not have a philosophy background.

So I kind of go through different ways to present the argument. And I do this with the goal in mind that you as the student, as you're watching it, whether we're meeting through the Zoom sessions, or you're doing the self-paced course, that can be purchased anytime you can.

Even when the premium course is over, you can continue to sign up and work at your own pace. We send you the lectures and the PowerPoints and the outlines. When you're doing it through there, the goal is simply to take the content and contextualize it, right?

So I might say something in a lecture that you're gonna say to yourself, well, I don't know if that would work in the context that I'm in. Cool. Master the content, understand what the nature of the argument is, and then contextualize it.

Use it in the context that God has called you to, okay? And so that's really kind of the goal of kind of walking through this course with the hopes of equipping people to think along presuppositional lines, to think along what I take to be a biblical approach, and being able to apply it in a variety of ways that's going to be helpful to them.

And of course, that coupled with the working of the Holy Spirit, as you go out and share your faith, we trust God for the results, right? Now, just one word about people who come at apologetics from a different perspective.

These differences between apologetic methodologies are important differences. They reflect different philosophical, theological commitments and different competing understandings of kind of biblical conceptions of how we are to go about this.

This is super, it's super important to understand that they're important. However, ultimately speaking, if you're not a presuppositional sort of person, and I wish you were, and I think this method is a powerful method and it is effective and it's biblical.

If you're convinced that, hey, I think I'm gonna go the classical route. I mean, that's, I have my criticisms of classical apologetics, but I would also make the argument that it is better to go out and do apologetics as opposed to going out and not doing anything, okay?

So I see my brothers and sisters who come from the wide range of apologetic traditions as my brothers in Christ. We have important differences, but I know that God is using all of us in some way. I mean, we're just imperfect vessels.

We're trying to do the best that we can in terms of sharing our faith. And so I know that when we do that with gentleness and respect, as 1 Peter 3, verse 15 tells us, God is going, we're going to see fruit from that, okay?

And so I do encourage people, if you don't sign up for this course and you wanna sign up for another course, like go for it, do apologetics, learn it, and pray that God just allows you to speak the right words and be able to share it in effective and meaningful ways, not just through internet interaction also, but through face-to-face interaction, face-to-face, right?

So go out there and do apologetics, okay? So just to wrap things up real quick, and I'll see if there are any questions. If there are no questions, that's okay. I didn't expect this to be too long. I just wanna kind of by way of review.

So if you wanna support Revealed Apologetics, you can go to revealedapologetics .com and press the donate link, and you could donate. If you want to support Revealed Apologetics by signing up for this course that I'm offering, which is probably the best way to help out.

I mean, it's a larger cost. It definitely helps me out when folks sign up. You can do that at revealedapologetics .com. And there is a section on the website, on the menu entitled Precept U, and that's short for Precept University.

And then you can fill out the information there. And if you're doing the basic course, the lectures, PowerPoint, outlines will be sent to you within a short period of time. And if you sign up for the premium course, which starts next Monday, January 24th at 9 p .m. Eastern, that information will be given to you as we move closer to that date, so that you can actually watch the lectures and be prepared for our class session on Monday night.

Okay? And suppose you're flat broke, busted, and disgusted, and I know how that goes. And you're unable to support Revealed Apologetics financially. I would greatly appreciate your prayers. I would appreciate you liking and sharing the videos that you think are helpful, that you think are gonna be useful for people.

And if you listen to the Revealed Apologetics podcast, what's super helpful is if you go to iTunes and write a nice review. I've got a couple of nice reviews already, and I appreciate that. But those are some of the ways that you can help out Revealed Apologetics.

All right? So I'm just gonna go very briefly through the comments here. And if there are no questions, we'll wrap things up. All right? All right, let's see here. Do, do, do, do, do. Let's see here. Will there be a PreceptU basketball team?

No. Yeah, we can play against the classical guys. That would be awesome. We can, how about this, okay? For those who sign up, we can create a PreceptU basketball team, and then we can play Frank Turek's team.

Frank Turek offers a couple of online courses. And so maybe we can, I can reach out to Frank and we can set up a game. That would be pretty, pretty awesome. Thank you for that. Wow, gave me a good chuckle there.

I don't know how to pronounce that name. I'm sorry, is that Rydie Dog? I apologize. Thanks for all your content, Eli. It's been very helpful for me to add in to our homeschool curriculum. Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate that. And I'm glad that it's been useful to you. All right. Well, if you think there's someone who might be interested in signing up for the course, and maybe this is not for you and you're not in a position to do so financially, if you know someone who might be interested, share this video.

Those are some of the ways you can help me out. And I really love doing this stuff. And the more help I get, the easier it is for me to continue to do this. And with much more rapidity, I can get some more content out there.

And it definitely helps my own situation personally as well. So thank you so much for your support. There are no questions. That's fine. And until next time, I will be setting up a couple of interesting interviews coming up in the future, some debates that I'm going to be moderating for.

And so I will definitely let folks know as those things solidify and come closer in terms of the date. Okay. Thank you so much. That's it for this episode or kind of this commercial, a short episode here.

Take care. God bless. Bye-bye.