Downhill Apologetics (Pt 3)Don't Be a Fool
Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.
Well, we come again to our discussion of downhill apologetics and this is our third installment in a five-part series, one, two, and three. We're by Jim, Dave and Jim and then myself respectively, Sean will be speaking the fourth one and then we'll follow that up, God willing, with a Q&A for our fifth session. But when we were putting this together, we shared ideas as to what would be appropriate to talk about. And as I was prepping this week, coupling those things with other thoughts that I had, it seems to me as though there are a lot of Christians who are really at least nervous, if not fearful, when it comes to the matter of apologetics.
And I thought that would be helpful to talk about tonight. And our fear is understandable, particularly if we have an improper understanding of what our responsibility is when it comes to apologetics. If I, for instance, believe that it actually was my responsibility to persuade a dead man of the truth of Scripture, you can bet I'd be nervous too. Right? Yeah. I mean, that is kind of funny, but that is precisely what the sort of load that many Christians are shouldering today. And that is a burden that is too heavy for any of us to bear. Many Christians are, in fact, fearful when it comes to defending their faith.
Some are afraid that if they cannot provide convincing enough evidence, then perhaps that unbeliever will never come to saving belief. Others are afraid that they will hear an objection that will shake their own faith. Still others just don't really want to deal with antagonistic unbelievers. But so long as we can be faithful and we can be bold, there is nothing to fear. And I'm going to return to that multiple times tonight. There is nothing ultimately for us to be afraid of because it's not our job to save anyone. But it is our job to speak the truth and perhaps God will use our words to grant life to a spiritually dead heart.
There's a world of difference in between those two. Our responsibility is not to save, our responsibility is to be faithful and let God deal with the outcome. Tonight I wish to put our apologetic fears to bed as best we can. And it's not because I plan to give you this silver bullet, airtight apologetic argument that is guaranteed to persuade any unbeliever of the truths of scripture. I don't suppose that would happen tonight or anytime. Rather, our trust is in God and his word and so are the outcomes of any sorts of apologetic conversations we might have related to the defense of our faith. Remember too what 1 Peter 3.15 says and what it assumes.
But in your heart to revere Christ as Lord, always being prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. And perhaps you'll recall that in 1 Peter, he was not talking to an audience that had it good. He was talking to an audience that was more than likely a group of Christians in Asia Minor in exile. And if they were the Christian dispersion or the Jewish dispersion, they were in exile, no doubt.
And on the throne at the time was Nero. And so he is calling them in that letter to be faithful to bear up under trials. And then the assumption is then that unbelievers would see that and wonder, how on earth can you do it? So the unbeliever, by observing our life, will see how our testimony is different and be caused to ask us for a reason for the hope that we have. So if that's the case, then that does not require the raiding parties that Jim talked about last time, or where we go out on Tuesday nights and try and pull some unbelievers into our little sacred circle. Nor does it require that we initiate evangelistic conversations with everybody we meet.
I know that sounds kind of heretical for me to say that, but that is not by itself what faithfulness requires. Faithfulness does not by itself require that we initiate an evangelistic conversation with everybody we meet. It does require that we be eager to have those conversations, we be willing to do so, we be faithful to have those conversations, to share the gospel, and to do so liberally. Faithfulness means knowing the right thing to do and going ahead and doing it. And for us, that means that we lead lives that are obviously different from the world, anticipating that people will then ask us for a reason, for the hope that we have.
So in this equation, I'll say it again, Christians have nothing to lose. No one is able to snatch us out of the Father's hand, John 10.29, and our responsibility does relate to something that we can control, that is being willing to speak. So we need to be willing to speak, but it's not our responsibility to save anyone. For purposes of our discussion, well, I thought it would be appropriate to briefly review presuppositionalism and evidentialism. These categories, for purposes of our conversation, I am broadly categorizing the different philosophical camps when it comes to apologetics and to do big camps, presuppositionalism and evidentialism, and Dave talked more about the different camps in verse, I mean, maybe five different categories, which still he distilled into the two categories himself.
In his first talk, I would commend that to you. But evidentialism and presuppositionalism themselves, those titles give reference to the starting points of each respective camp in an apologetics discussion. So do we start with evidence? Do we start with evidence for the existence of God? Do we start with evidence for the textual veracity, the integrity of the Bible? Or do we start with the evidence for the resurrection, the reality of the resurrection? Or rather, do we start with, by looking at examining our presuppositions, yours and mine in that conversation. Those baseline assumptions that determine how we filter and how we consider everything.
And I realize that different people may define these terms differently, but when it comes to apologetics, I'm a convinced presuppositionalist. I'm convinced that we must consider what, we must first consider what presuppositions, what assumptions each person does bring to the discussion in order to have that discussion, and everyone does, in fact, have assumptions and presuppositions that he brings to that discussion. The faithful Christian must presuppose that what God has said is true. Without this operating assumption, there can be no intelligent conversation at all. I've operated for a while with this sort of working distinction.
Evidentialism calls unbelievers to believe. Presuppositionalism calls the unbeliever to repent of his unbelief. I'll leave that up there and let you think about that for a moment, there is a difference. And it's a significant one that is actually very, very freeing for the Christian apologist, if he is, I would say, presuppositional. For what it's worth, while I believe that the presuppositionalist position does consist more with reformed soteriology, I think it makes more sense in light of the discussion of Calvinism and Arminianism. The distinctions are not so tidy as to say that every presuppositionalist is himself a Calvinist, or every Arminian is an evidentialist.
That is not the case at all. And for more about those distinctions, I would again recommend that you go back and visit Dave's talk, the first installment in this series. And you'll see that there are intelligent, godly men on both sides of the aisle, and also intelligent, godly men who are Arminian and Calvinist, Calvinistic, would call themselves presuppositionalists, and vice versa. So anyway, it's not that neat and tidy delineation that would be so convenient as we really like black and white categories as humans. My aim tonight though is to remove any potential fears that you might have when it comes to the discussion of apologetics.
Also, I would hope to, by God's grace, help to alleviate any sense of inadequacy that you might have. Not because you and I are yourself adequate, but because God's word is, and it's your job to communicate that rather than to try and anticipate every potential objection to the faith. What we ought to do, rather than working hard to anticipate all those objections, is study the Word, study the Scriptures, speak the truth, and then pray for God to change the unbeliever's heart unto understanding. To change the unbeliever's heart unto understanding. Tonight I wish to embolden you by God's grace. I wish to make the case as strongly and as simply, this will not take long, I assure you, because the point is actually fairly straightforward.
But as strongly and as simply as I can, that you don't need to be afraid to engage unbelievers, even if they're smarter than you. So to help address those fears and mental obstacles, I would like to consider three separate apologetic factors. They're the myth of neutrality, natural man's foolishness, and then the wisdom, as we drill down, of examining Proverbs 26 versus four and five. So first we'll begin with the myth of neutrality. Another working definition I like to use regards myth, and that is that they're the stories that help shape culture. Our culture is shaped by the myth that there is some spiritual demilitarized zone where the believer and the secularist can have a conversation about the existence of God or other spiritual matters.
Well, that divorces fact from truth or from any consistent objective standard in an attempt at neutrality, a spiritual demilitarized zone. Elements of this discussion are pretty familiar to us. I think we would probably disagree with those who would say that knowledge and facts are themselves neutral, which is why, of course, it's fine for Christians to send their kids to whatever school they want, because if facts and information are neutral, then it doesn't really matter, right? No wrong, right? It's wrong, right? The reality is that Christ is Lord everywhere. If Christ is Lord everywhere, how can there be neutral ground?
If Christ is Lord everywhere, then that necessarily includes the realm of knowledge. Facts are not neutral. Nothing is neutral. It's all Christ's, and when educators or scientists or parents or anybody else pretend that facts are actually neutral, we can know that if nothing else, those communicating the facts have a worldview. So, if nothing else, and the media banks on this. So these news outlets would argue that they're just communicating the facts, and they might be communicating the facts, but would we all agree that the way that they communicate the facts actually makes a difference? Well then the facts actually are not themselves neutral in how they're communicated. What's more, in order for there to be facts, there must necessarily be truth. And it is not possible for truth to exist apart from some standard or source of authority outside of us. This of course we know to be God. Apologist Greg Greg Bonson suggests the following when it comes to neutrality.
That's a long one. The Christian is called upon to surrender his distinctive religious beliefs to temporarily put them on the shelf to take a neutral attitude in his thinking. Well Satan would love for this to happen. More than anything else, which he says three times, more than anything else, the superlative, this would prevent the conquest of the world to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord. More than anything else, this would make professing Christians impotent in their witness, in their walk and disarmed in their battle with the principalities and powers of this world. More than anything else, such neutrality would prevent sanctification in the Christian's life.
For Christ has said that his followers were sanctified as in set apart by the truth. And immediately he went on to declare thy word is truth. Interesting that Christ says that unbelievers are sanctified as in set apart by his word. When we set that aside, We also, by default, set aside our sanctification. We set aside our own set-apartness. Colossians 1.17 teaches us that Christ holds the creation together, whether we acknowledge it or not. He is before all things, Paul says, and in him all things hold together. And denying this does not make it untrue. Bonsohn says elsewhere, and Bonsohn, You've heard us talk about him before.
He was a guy who wrote this book, Always Ready. He was a disciple and a student of Cornelius Van Til, and he's way more accessible than Van Til, although he does in places in this book quote from Van Til extensively, and we'll see that in just a moment. Bonsen says, there can be no neutral ground between believer and unbeliever, between obedience and rebellion, between respecting and abusing that which belongs to God, that is everything. No, demilitarized zone exists between the camp of unbelief and the forces obedient to Christ. God owns everything or he owns nothing. So, like I said, denying these things does not make them untrue.
And we can suppress that truth, men do suppress that truth. If we entered a discussion about the physical sciences, though, all the while denying the existence of gravity, we nevertheless enjoy the benefits of gravity while having that conversation. So the guy who says, I deny gravity doesn't start In order for cohesive arguments to exist, there must necessarily be order. There must necessarily be reason and cohesion of arguments. And all of existence coheres in Jesus. Remember, this is under the umbrella of there is the myth of neutrality. So when the unbeliever demands that we find neutral ground on which to have our discussion, then that's not possible.
because there's not one thumbs width an entire cosmos over which Jesus Christ who is Lord overall does not cry mine, said Abraham Kuyper famously. There is no neutral ground. There is no starting point for discussion over which Christ is not Lord. So it's silly to suppose that there is. Now with that said, while there is no neutral ground, there is however common ground and there are important distinctions to be made. Common ground is not neutral. Common ground is ground that the unbeliever and the believer share alike in common, which is owned by God. The world in which we live and operate has been created by and is, meanwhile, sustained by God.
But as I said, it is not neutral ground, it is God's ground. The denial of neutrality secures then rather than destroys commonality, says Bonton. What he means, the denial of neutrality, we deny that there is no neutral ground, it's actually all Christ's. Therefore, we are capable of having some common ground on which to converse. And once we've established that it's all God's turf, then and only then can we have the discussion. The second aspect I wanted to look at was the natural man's foolishness, the natural man's foolishness.
I like this one, because as Paul says, so were you all at one point, and I was as well. The unbeliever demands that we engage him on his terms, and that is fallacious for at least two reasons, at least two reasons, broken methods and a broken mind. First, broken methods. The unbeliever wants us to operate as though God does not exist. He wants us to engage in the conversation as though there is a reality and, in many cases, a moral framework apart from God, which is kinda like trying to make bread without flour. God's existence is fundamental to reality and to discussions about spiritual matters. This conversation cannot make sense if God is not.
And the Christian, the new creature in Christ, betrays his spiritual identity when he acts like what he is not. We should not act like unbelievers when we've been given a new identity in Christ, and why would you want to? Why would you want to take unto yourself, once again, your darkened understanding, just for sake of the discussion? Which is not the same thing as showing the unbeliever the error of his reasoning. We'll get to that in a moment. First broken methods. So I mentioned broken methods. Second was a broken mind. Men's natural state is to have a darkened understanding. Natural men cannot discern spiritual things.
First Corinthians 2.14 tells us that the natural person, this is Paul's writing, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to Him and is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. When we try to reason with men who are spiritually dead about spiritual matters, this is folly. So, why have the conversation at all? Well, of course we have the conversation, because you don't know who the spiritually dead are, and you don't know who the spiritually quickened, made alive are. So to be faithful to what God has said, we have the conversation, and perhaps God will use us as instruments in that person's conversion.
So we do, we must have the conversation to be sure, but we must not have that conversation on the unbeliever's terms. So are you following so far? He is making demands that don't work, and he is demanding that you appeal to a mind that is darkened in its understanding. We are doing the unbeliever then no favors by allowing him to entertain the notion that God does not exist. We're doing the unbeliever no favors by allowing him to entertain the notion that God does not exist. But still, we do need to have the conversation. Like I said, as we do not know whom God may be bringing to spiritual life through our conversation.
Somebody have the conversation with us? I mean, it's good, we should. The unbeliever has a darkened understanding because hard-heartedness begets ignorance. Ephesians 4, 17 to 18 reads as follows. Now this I say, and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are, says Paul, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. These are the people that we are trying to persuade to embrace the gospel, to embrace a need for repentance. A darkened understanding is the symptom, but hardness of heart is the cause of the symptom.
When we just lay out evidence, at best for treating the symptom. The solution is not to treat the symptom but to treat the cause. If their problem is first hard-heartedness, hardness of heart that results in ignorance, the solution must be for them to repent of their hard-heartedness. Then and only then can they repent unto understanding. It's foolish for us to attempt to engage the unbeliever on his terms or to appeal to his broken reason in an effort to win him. Telling natural men what they want to hear will not bring them to repentance. But unbelievers believe unto understanding.
The ability to understand spiritual things is the self a fruit of new life. Many of you testified to this. You read the Bible, then you got saved, then the Bible made sense. I know that was the case with me. After getting saved, some of the passages that I had read before came alive. It was like a light shone on them. The same thing happens when the unbeliever repents of his unbelief, embraces Christ, he is given understanding. Only when they repent are they able to have the understanding that the spirit does himself give. And then third, I wanted to examine together the wisdom of Proverbs 26 verses four and five.
So by this point, you may still be wondering if there's even a place to have a conversation with an unbeliever at all. And in fact, that is actually one of the stones that is lobbed against the presuppositionalist tent is that we suppose that an unbeliever can't have any understanding at all. Actually, that's just not the way God operates. God gives grace commonly to men, and there's all kinds, because of common ground and whatnot, there are all sorts of things that unbelievers can know, but he cannot know Christ, and he does deny the God of Scripture. So, of course there's a place for us to have a conversation, Well, what do we say?
What do we say? If we're talking to somebody who is spiritually dead and we are not to engage him on his terms, what does that look like? Well, Proverbs helps us. And don't forget the biblical term for a man who denies the existence of God. What does God call that man? Right. The fool says in his heart, there is no God. And the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, says Solomon in Proverbs 1.7. So the one who does not fear God or even believe in him is what the Bible calls a fool, but fools have souls. And of course you wanna see them saved as well. And Proverbs tells us what we should do. Chapter 26, verses four and five read as follows.
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. That's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is, answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. So when it comes to the fool, and he's speaking foolish things, do you answer him or do you not answer him? The answer is yes. There's good reason to do both, and we must necessarily do both. Solomon's wisdom applied here means that although we do not engage the unbeliever on his terms or accept his definitions, it's actually good to show him the error of his reasoning. This is the passage, this quotation is from Cornelius Van Til. This is one of his more accessible ones.
The Christian apologist must place himself upon the position of his opponent, assuming the correctness of his ethic merely for argument's sake, in order to show him that such a position, Sorry, in such a position the facts are not facts and laws are not laws. He must also ask the non-Christian to place himself upon the Christian position for argument's sake in order that he may be shown that only upon such a basis do facts and laws appear intelligible. And then Bonsen goes on to say it necessarily follows that the only reasonable system is the Christian system. It's the only one that does not crucify the Savior.
Trying to apply this himself then, the next passage, Bonsen says on the same page.
As he's applying what Vantile was saying to Proverbs 26 verses 4 and 5, the unbelievers should not be answered in terms of his own misguided presuppositions. The apologist should defend his faith by working within his own presuppositions. If he surrenders to the assumptions of the unbeliever, the believer will never effectively set forth a reason for the hope that is in him. He will have lost the battle from the outset, constantly being trapped behind enemy lines. Hence, Christianity's intellectual strength and challenge will not be set forth. So it's tricky how that works a little bit, but we have an obligation to speak the truth to the unbeliever and it is fine to to follow his system of reasoning to its logical outcome in order to show him where it leads. There was one flavor of presuppositionalism that Francis Schaeffer was particularly fond of and he and Van Til I think probably friendly ways butted heads from time to time because they went about presuppositionalism differently but Shaper, what he was fond of doing was engaging unbelievers and it
wouldn't be on their terms but he would start by hearing their presuppositions or at least identifying those presuppositions and then following those presuppositions to their logical outcomes and he was a master at this showing why all of them broke down or they they were intellectually unsatisfying, or there was no final atonement, or any number of things, and how ultimately, only the Christian worldview actually is satisfying and consistent. And of course, that's not too surprising to us because God wrote it. But that was a sort of presupposition, a presuppositionalism that was still not conceding the ground of God's word is true.
It wouldn't be a forsake of the discussion. Let's imagine that the Bible is not. That did not happen. Our job is to, in faithfulness, speak the truth to the fool. We help him to understand the folly of his own reasoning, but we must do it on the terms of scripture. And we can call that our terms. We must do it on our terms, presupposing the word of God. That is our presupposition, that what God has said is true. We return to that, we retreat to that, we champion that, we make no apologies for that.
This is how, in the context of apologetics, we answer a fool according to his folly, and we don't answer a fool according to his folly. So hopefully a consideration of those three criteria, those three aspects will help to embolden you to speak the truth and to defend the faith. But briefly to review if I could distill it, I just want you to remember this, our starting point needs to be scripture. Our starting point does not need to be rock layers or carbon dating or any number of other, an infinite number of potential grounds for objection or for debate with the secularist. Our starting point needs to be scripture.
It's not our job to convince people of God's existence. They know that already, no matter what they say. It is our job to be faithful to speak the truth. And as we've said, perhaps by God's grace, he'll use our words to bring someone to faith in him. So very plainly, we start by taking scripture on its face, exactly what it says. We take God's word as inerrant, speaking without flinch or without apology, precisely what scripture says, and we speak the truth according to scripture calling unbelievers to repent according to scripture and leave the outcome to God. And then for your encouragement, remember, Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.
He also said, earlier in the same book, all that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. I don't know about you, but that's actually really freeing to me to know that I don't need to, it's not up to Jonathan to turn a goat into a sheep. Someone's a sheep or he's not, and Christ's voice is going out and calling his sheep to himself. And sometimes Christ's voice is you, and sometimes it's somebody else. But there is an outward call that accompanies the inward call of the spirit. While my heart can ache for unbelievers, I don't approach them with the burden of convincing them of what they cannot believe apart from repentance.
Our job is to be used by God to give that external call I mentioned, being used by Christ as he calls his sheep and gathers them into his fold. It's mystical how that works out, and it's awesome that we get to be a part of it. Our confidence is not in ourselves. Our confidence is not in our apologetic technique. Our confidence is not even in our understanding of the Bible that we're responsible to preach very boldly. Rather, our confidence is in what Scripture says, and that confidence comes about by faith. So when we talk about removing fears, it's not because we replace those fears with confidence in ourselves, but rather in a confidence that it's God's job to change hearts and it's our job to be faithful and bold, being used by Him.
It's more than just unfortunate then when we are fearful about giving others a reason for the hope that's in us. It's actually wicked as we are acting like unbelievers. It's understandable, but we ought not to do that. We act as though we have not learned Christ and we act like the fool who says in his heart that there is no God. So may God help each of us to not be a fool, but rather to be bold, to be gracious, to be confident in Him. Let's pray together. Father, we ask that you would grant us that confidence that comes from submission. And we pray that we would be submissive to what you have said enough that we will do what you have said to do.
We ask that you would give us, as we prayed earlier, an increased appetite for your word so that we can filter all of our decision making, so that we can filter all of the oppositions of our opponents through what you have already given us in special revelation. I pray that you would grant us just the boldness that it requires to be faithful and to do what we know is right when our flesh fights against that. And give us opportunity to apply this even tonight as we prefer one another ahead of ourselves. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.
