Fred Butler over at Hip andThigh has been blogging about presuppositional apologetics as of late and
I, for one, have really enjoyed what Fred has had to say. Recently, Fred has
been interacting with “Adam” who apparently works for Ratio Christi, and who is a classical apologist and has a different
perspective than those of us who hold to the presuppositional method. In the
interest of fair disclosure Adam has assured us that he is not writing on
behalf of Ratio Christi and so my
remarks are directed at Adam and the classical approach in general and not at Ratio Christi. I first want to say that
I appreciate my classical apologists brothers as they stand in union with us as
we attempt to publish and proclaim the gospel. I realize that Christ is preached
and the good news announced throughout the world by those who hold to a
classical method. So this post should in no way be understood as a cause for division. It is a subject worthy of serious discussion and I suppose it will
continue to be so until our Lord returns. Nevertheless, apologetic method is a
very important component in our theology and evangelism efforts and we should
do our best to ensure that our thoughts, words, and method are an accurate and
honest reflection of God’s divine self-communication in Scripture.
I want to begin with one
of the most basic issues that Adam raises when he writes:
For example, of course the Christian faith is
founded in revelation found in the Bible. But there is no inconsistency in
first determining whether or not the Bible is in fact trustworthy.
The first statement
confesses that “Christian faith is founded in revelation found in the Bible” strikes me as odd. The Bible is itself, top to
bottom, the revelation of God. The Bible does not simply contain revelation,
but it is itself God’s divine revelation. Perhaps this is the root of Adam’s
problem, or perhaps it was a mere faux
pas. Are we in a position to judge which parts of the Bible are revelation
and worthy of acceptance and which parts should be rejected as folklore,
legend, and erroneous or mistaken? I cannot see how such a conclusion could be
avoided using this logic.
The next statement, “But
there is no inconsistency in first determining whether or not the Bible is in
fact trustworthy” is simply not true. Why is it not true? It is not true
because it is, in fact, inconsistent to claim that the Bible is our final authority
for epistemic justification, that it is self-attesting, that it is the final
arbiter of truth only then to take it back and place some other standard over
the Bible before we accept it as our final authority. Not only do we have to
deal with the claim the Bible makes about itself, but we also have to come up
with a different standard separate from the Bible, by which we can judge it’s
fidelity. And it is that standard,
the standard to which we will subject the Bible in our test of its fidelity
that is our final authority, and not the Bible itself. And that practice is
inconsistent with the Christian system. Hence, the reason we cannot subject the
Bible to an external standard in order to deem it “trustworthy” is because
doing so removes the Bible as our ultimate reference point and final authority
for truth. The standard we use to judge the Bible is unavoidably our final
authority for what is true and worthy of belief.
Classical apologists so
often consider this issue to be the product of reason, science, argumentation,
and evidence. It is not. Rushdooney reminds us well, “Man does not establish
authority; he acknowledges it. This is the proper procedure, though seldom
observed. Man wants to acknowledge only that authority which he himself
establishes or at least gives consent to. All other authority is offensive to
his sense of autonomy and ultimacy.”[1]
Rather than begin with God and God’s word as our ultimate reference point for
human predication, classical apologetics begins with finite human reason. This
fact alone proves to be inconsistent with the idea that Christian faith is
grounded, not in human reason, but in the transcendent divine revelation of God
Himself who is immanent with, and covenantally related to humanity. The
Christian God has condescended and communicated with man, revealing to man all
things about Himself and His creation that He wanted us to know. Apart from
this covenantal work of God, knowledge would be impossible. To be clear, we are
not arguing about whether or not intelligibility is, but rather why it is and
how we can account for it. Classical apologetics begins with man while the
reformed method takes us to the source.
Adam then moves to the classical trail-walk from brute facts
to God by saying,
Using
the classical approach, one would show that truth is knowable
From the start, this
statement introduces a number of problems. What is truth? Which theory of truth
is the right theory of truth and how do we know? And if we have to use that
theory of truth in order to prove the theory to be true, isn’t that the epitome
of vicious circular reasoning? And isn’t that something the classical method
seeks to avoid at all costs? The classical method is left with the one and the
many problem, if it attempts to maintain that man can reason abstractly about
reality apart from God. Additionally, once we determine which theory is the
right theory, shouldn’t we subject the teachings of Scripture to that theory in
order to make sure the Bible is teaching truth? Of course we should if we care about
being consistent. So what then is the Christian theory of truth? Christians
believe that all truth is revelational truth. All truth comes through divine
revelation. The Scripture is the final reference point for what must be
accepted and what must be rejected as true, rather than finite human reason,
and instead of the sin-impacted rules of creaturely logic. Scripture could not be
clearer that Jesus is the truth, that grace and truth come through Jesus
Christ, that God’s truth is liberating truth, that all wisdom and knowledge are
deposited in Christ, not the philosophy of God’s enemies. Van Til would say
that true human knowledge corresponds to the knowledge that God has of Himself
and the world. Any knowledge that differs from that knowledge is simply not
knowledge at all.
Additionally, there is no
such thing as brute facts. Facts do not just exist. Facts are known in terms of
their relationship with other facts. If we begin with brute facts, we shall
never move beyond them. There can be no such thing as an uninterpreted fact.
But if the classical enterprise is actually reflective of the state of affairs as it has obtained, then brute facts can and do exist, and if that is the
case, Christian theism is false. This is because Christian theism contends that
the facts of reality are precisely what God made them to be and prior to
creating them, God himself interpreted them. It is the duty of man to
re-interpret the facts according to God’s understanding of the facts. A soon as
man interprets a fact as a thing uncreated by God he has interpreted that fact
wrongly. I will come back to this in part two or perhaps a summary post.
I want to deal with one final statement before closing up
part one of this two-part response. Adam wrote,
I certainly agree that evidence must be interpreted, which
is one reason why William Lane Craig would argue that we must start with
philosophy because this informs our interpretation.
As one who studies
philosophy on an academic level, and who is trained in theology and the
languages, I must confess that this statement is particularly concerning to me.
The idea that theology has nothing to say until philosophy has done its
work in hermeneutics is simply outrageous. The inference is that human reason
sets the tone and the standard for everything to include how we begin with our
most basic rules for even interpreting the Scripture. Mind you, that cannot
only apply to our interpretation of the content of Scripture, but the nature of
Scripture as well. The human person is elevated to a status above Scripture
from top to bottom in this system. I will return to this point at the beginning of my next post.
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