Always Ready: Greg Bahnsen

The Value of Greg Bahnsen’s *Always Ready* for Apologetics

Hey everyone, it's Sean again from RoarNoMore .blogspot .com, and I want to plug a book today, which is probably the best book I've ever read on apologetics thus far, and I recommend it to everyone. And if you're going to college, or planning on going, haven't gone yet, or are in college, you need to buy this, or get it from the library, or read it immediately if you have not yet.

It is called Always Ready. Directions for Defending the Faith, by Dr. Greg Bonson. And I just have to say, I was introduced to Greg Bonson last summer, or I should say this summer, on YouTube actually, there was a lecture series he had, and I think one of my friends had posted a link to it on Facebook, either that or I had Googled it, somehow I found out about it, and I watched what I thought would be a ten minute video, and then I'd be done, ended up being about three hours, three and a half hours of time I spent watching his lectures online, and I was blown away.

And the book is just even better. His style is so clear, it is so practical, you can use this in any apologetic situation. The beautiful thing about presuppositional apologetics, which Greg Bonson is a master at, is you don't have to know the specific situation you're in.

You don't have to know what the science is about the distant starlight problem, or you don't have to know everything about biological evolution. You name it, you don't have to know it if you know the preconditions of intelligibility.

Presuppositional Apologetics and the Preconditions of Intelligibility

And what that means is knowing what the laws of science rest on, what the laws of morality, universal laws rest on, what the laws of logic rest on. Every single thing that we do, we make an assumption that is unprovable.

That's what presuppositional means. It's axiomatic. You can't prove it by science or any other means. You just assume it at the outset. Laws of logic are like this. They're not conventional. They're something we just assume, and we assume everyone else is going to function on those terms.

You can't see, touch, taste, smell, or hear the laws of logic, but you know they exist. So Greg Bonson talks about the preconditions of intelligibility and how the only way that they make sense is within a Christian view of the world.

Otherwise they make no sense, especially for an atheist, but for any other worldview. Now the way to go about critiquing other worldviews is through doing an internal critique. That means going into the worldview, finding the contradictions, finding the self-reputing statements that they make.

Here's a couple. These are the most common ones. Science proves everything. Without science you can't prove anything. That's modernism, and that's wrong. That's empiricism. Because the statement, science proves everything, is not proven by science.

The most common one today is, you can't know truth. They know that they can't know truth, the people making that statement. Be aware of these things. There's actually tons of those kind of statements we could go over.

Every worldview that's not Christian really breaks down into one of those statements, those self-reputing statements. That's how you contradict other worldviews. Now I'd answer them to be false. Now Greg Bonson is very scriptural as well.

Scripture, Worldviews, and the Christian Starting Point

He goes to Colossians. All knowledge is apposited in Christ. He goes to Proverbs, the fool is set in his heart, there is no God. He talks about Paul in 2 Corinthians, where Paul says, we're casting down all the idle speculations, not being taken away by the wisdom of men.

And he shows that, basically what the Bible is saying is that, you have to start with God, that's your starting point, and then everything else makes sense. And so the atheist, when he doesn't do that, or the agnostic, or when you get the wrong God, Islam, whatever, your whole rest of your philosophy is going to be wrong.

So you need to go to the starting point, the preconditions of intelligibility, get it right there, you'll get the rest right. And Christianity is the only place, the only worldview that actually gets that right.

And it's actually fairly easy to demonstrate this with a non-believer. There's some examples. If you go to the link just below on the info status bar, then you're going to be taken to my website, and I'm going to have YouTube clips and interviews and things that show how you can use this in a witnessing encounter or something.

I'm not going to go into that right now, just because it takes a little bit, but it's actually fairly simple once you master it, and it'll help you no matter where you go, guarantee it. It's bulletproof.

I've used it so many times, and I'm just so thankful for it. So Greg Bonson writes a great book. It's the Don't Answer Answer Method. It is, I answer a fool not according to his folly, but instead as his folly deserves.

The Don’t Answer Answer Method and a Final Recommendation

That's the method we use in apologetics. Don't answer according to his assumptions, his preconditions, his presuppositions. Answer him instead according to the right presuppositions. The other thing about it, it's just very simple to read.

I would say it's on a college level, but it's very understandable, whereas other presuppositional books just aren't. So I would recommend ordering this today. Go to the link below. There's a good price.

There's some good prices on my website, and also just a more lengthy review of it. Encourage you to check it out. Happy witnessing and happy apologetics.