Fhir Ch2: A Brief History

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Apologetics in Luke and Acts (6)

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1. The most overtly apologetical in purpose.
2. Political apology for Paul.
3. Speeches present apologetic arguments.
4. (Acts 17:18) misunderstood as teaching new deities. Luke reports accusations in terms identical to those describing the Athenians’ charge against Socrates in Plato’s Apology.
5. Throughout the speech Paul speaks biblical truth but uses Stoic terms and argues in Stoic fashion, even quoting a Stoic poet in support of his argument (24-29)
6. 1 Corinthians 2:2 shouldn't be taken to mean that Paul abandoned philosophical reasoning (as his use of Greek logic and rhetoric in 1 Corinthians 15 makes clear), but that he refused to avoid the central issue even though it was scandalous to the Corinthians.

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Apologetics in Paul's Writings (4)

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1. The true knowledge of God – in which one knows God, not merely knows that there is a God of some kind – which once had by all people, but no longer. All human beings continue to know that there is a God and continue to be confronted with internal and external evidence for his deity, but generally speaking they suppress or subvert this knowledge into idolatrous religion of varying kinds.
2. Christianity promotes a true wisdom that mature Christians find intellectually superior to anything the world can produce, one based on God’s revelation rather than human speculation (1 Cor 1:18-21; 2:6-16)
3. The classical model of apologetics: locking opponents of gospel truths in a logical dilemma.
4. Paul boldly co-opted Greek religious terms such as pleroma, a term used to denote the “fullness” of the divine beings that inhabited the cosmos, to convey Christian ideas – in this case, the idea that all deity dwelled in Christ (2:9)

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Apologetics in John (2)

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Adoption of Greek philosophical and religious terms in his Gospel, in which the preincarnate Christ is called the logos.

To any Gentile or Hellenisitic Jewish reader the term Logos would have immediately conjured up Platonic and Stoic notions of the universal Reason that was believed to govern the cosmos and was thought to be reflected in the rational mind of every human being (John 1:9)

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Apologetic Mandate

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Peter instructs believers to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being read to make a defense (apologia) to everyone who asks you to give an account (logos) for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

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Justin Martyr (100-165)

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Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and Two Apologies

To support his claim that Christianity was the true philosophy, Justin made the first attempt in postbiblical history to correlate John’s doctrine of the Logos with Greek philosophy, arguing that Christianity was superior to Platonism and that any truth in Plato was actually plagiarized from Moses.

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Clement of Alexandria

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important theological discourses and an apologetic work called Protrepticus.

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Origen (185-254)

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Contra Celsum

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Augustine (354-430) (6)

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1. Developed an apologetic that was built on a stronger metaphysical or worldview base.
2. Became the first Christian theologian and apologist to embrace a thoroughly Pauline view of faith and of God’s sovereignty in salvation and in human history.
3. City of God
4. Reason precedes faith in that a rational mind and recognition of the truth of what is to be believed must exist if we are believe anything.
5. But faith precedes reason in that the truths of the Christian faith are in large part unseen-not only is God invisible, but the redemptive acts of God in Jesus Christ occurred in the past and cannot be directly witnessed.
6. Created what would philosophers would later call a cosmological argument.

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Anselm (5)

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1. Middle Ages directed their efforts in three directions – toward unconverted Judaism, the threat of Islam, and the rational ground for belief.
2. Anslem (1033 – 1109) one of the most creative and original philosophers of the Christian church has ever produced.
3. Created the ontological argument.
4. Cur Deus Homo – in which he argued that God became a man because only God in his infinite being could provide an infinite satisfaction or atonement for man’s sin.
5. Later Anselm pointed out that “although they (unbelievers) seek a rational basis because they do not believe whereas we seek it because we do believe, nevertheless it is one and the same thing that both we and they are seeking.”

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Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) (5)

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1. Aquinas sought to combat the challenge of the Greco-Arabic worldview by creating a Christian philosophy utilizing Aristotelian categories and logic.
2. Summa Contra Gentiles, primarily against Averroism but also offering a sweeping, comprehensive Christian philosophy in Aristotelian terms.
3. Faith is absolutely reliable because it is founded on God’s revelation.
4. The five ways
5. Arguments show that Christianity is plausible and can be used to refute objections, but cannot be used to prove Christianity to nonbelievers.

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The Reformation (2)

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Originally humanism was essentially an intellectual approach to literature and learning emphasizing the study of the classics (and of the Bible) directly instead of through medieval commentaries.

If Luther was the father and chief polemicist of the Reformation, John Calvin (1509 – 1564) was arguably its chief theologian.

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Apologetics Faces Skepticism (4)

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1. Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) rejected the traditional rational arguments for God’s existence and emphasized the personal, relational aspects involved in a non-Christian coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
2. Sought to strike a balance between two extremes. He did not want to abandon reason altogether, but he also did not want its importance or value in knowing Christ to be exaggerated.
3. God has not shown himself in a way that would compel faith in those who don’t care or don’t want to believe.
4. For the next three centuries, the apologists understood the apologetic task as primarily one of showing the scientific credibility of the Christian faith.

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Joseph Butler (1736) (3)

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1. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736).
2. Sought to defuse objections to the orthodox Christian faith posed by deists, who favored a purely natural religion that was in principle available to all people in all times and places and that could be proved by reason.
3. His use of analogies was not intended to prove either that God exists or that Christianity is true, but merely that it is not unreasonable to believe in the Christian revelation.

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Hume

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Christian apologetics was forced to reinvent itself with the advent of the Enlightenment.

Hume convinced many that the teleological or design argument, the argument from miracles, and other standard Christian apologetic arguments were unsound.

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William Paley (1743-1805)

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systematized the evidential arguments of this time in two works, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology.

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Charles Darwin (1859)

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Origins of Species (1859) seemed to offer a naturalistic explanation for the order and diversity in life, encouraging many in the West to abandon belief in God as the Creator.

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Thomas Reid (1710 – 1796) (3)

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held that our knowledge of all these things was simply a matter of common sense.

1. Philosophers who question these things have let theory obscure the obvious.
2. Our knowledge of cause and effect and right and wrong is self-evident and an incorrigible aspect of our constitution as created by God, whether we acknowledge God’s existence or not.

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Charles Hodge (1797-1878)

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reason must first discern whether Scripture is indeed a revelation from God.

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B.B. Warfield (1851-1921)

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continued Hodge’s apologetic approach. Argued against liberalism that a Christianity devoid of supernaturalism is, first a Christianity that denies God, and second, really no Christianity at all.

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Soren Kierkegaard (1818-1855)

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denounced both the cold confessional Lutheran orthodoxy and the abstract philosophical system of Hegel. He also rejected the traditional theistic proofs and arguments for the deity of Christ.

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James Orr (1844-1913)

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responded to the Enlightenment challenge. He was one of the first apologists to present Christianity as a worldview

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Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) (6)

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1. Developed the notion of antithesis.
2. Absolute antithesis between the two sets of principles to which Christians and non-Christians are fundamentally committed.
3. Christians and non-Christians cannot see eye to eye on matters of fundamental principle.
4. The non-Christian is incapable of verifying or testing the revelation of God in Scripture because, since Scripture is the Word of God, tis teachings must be accepted as first principles or not at all.
5. Therefore Christianity cannot be proved to the non-Christians on the basis of philosophical arguments or historical evidences, because these presuppose Christian principles.
6. There can be no common or neutral ground between Christian and non-Christian. Thus, traditional apologetics must be abandoned.

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Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) (3)

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1. Developed Kuyper’s ideas into full-fledged philosophy.
2. Traditional apologetics was based on an unbiblical dualism between nature and grace – between what can be known by the non-Christian by nature through reason alone and what can be known only by God’s gracious revelation through faith.
3. The task of Christian philosophy is to commend the Christian worldview while exposing the inadequacy of all other worldviews to provide a secure footing for knowledge and ethics.

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Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) (3)

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1. The mistake of traditional apologetics was in using rationalistic arguments that concluded that the truths of Christianity are probably true.
2. In place of such arguments, he urged Christian apologists to argue by presuppositions.
3. Two steps
a. Show that non-Christian systems of thought are incapable of accounting for rationality and morality – to show that ultimately all non-Christian systems of thought fall into irrationalism.
b. Commend the Christian view as giving the only possible presuppositional foundation for thought and life.

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C.S. Lewis

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Insisted that Christianity was based on reasonable evidence, and that once a person had embraced the faith, the true attitude of faith was to believe despite such seeming evidence against Christianity as one’s personal suffering and losses.

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Karl Barth (1886-1968)

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His central and constant claim was that god is known only in Jesus Christ. On the basis of this premise, Barth rejected both liberalism, which thought it could find God in man’s own moral and spiritual sense, and fundamentalism, which, Barth argued (erroneously), treated the Bible as an end rather than as a means to knowing God in Christ.

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Gordon H. Clark (1902-1985)

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Maintained that the laws of logic and the propositions of Scripture provide the only reliable basis for knowledge. He was followed by Carl F. H. Henry (1913 – 2003)

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Edward John Carnell (1919-1967)

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Like the presuppositionalists, he rejected the traditional proofs for the existence of God. However, against the presuppositionalists he insisted that in the nature of the case apologetic arguments for the historical truth claims of Christianity, most notably the resurrection of Jesus, could only be based on probabilities.

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Stuart Hackett

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called for “the resurrection of theism” as a rational philosophical system, defended the traditional theistic proofs, and offered one of the first detailed critiques of Van Til.

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William Lane Craig

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divided between sophisticated defense of the existence of God and equally sophisticated historical and theological defenses of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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Robert Knudsen (1924-2000)

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Van Til’s apologetic is best understood as transcendental, that is, as one that presents Christianity as the only position that can give an adequate account of the possibility of truth, reason, value, and our existence.

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John Frame

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developed an epistemological theory he called perspectivalism that sought to integrate rational, empirical, and existential (or personal) aspects of human knowledge.

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Vern Poythress

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applied perspectivalism to systematic theology and hermeneutics.

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John Warwick Montgomery

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a Lutheran apologist who contributed a satirical essay characterized Van Til’s position as abandoning all reasoned argument for the Christian faith.

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J.P. Moreland

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made significant contributions to developing a Christian philosophy of science as well as defending the historical reliability of the Gospels.

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Norman Geisler

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1. First step: he examines various limited theories of knowledge that attempt to base all knowledge solely in reason, or in empirical fact, or in experience and shows them to be inadequate.
a. Unaffirmability – anything that cannot consistently be affirmed is false.
b. Undeniability – anything that cannot be consistently denied is true.
2. Second step: examines all the major worldviews (including atheism, pantheism, etc) and attempts to show that only theism passes the test for truth. A key aspect is a reconstructed version of the Thomistic cosmological argument.
3. Third step: argues on probabilistic grounds that Christianity is the true form of theism. Here his argument focuses on the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the historical reliability of the biblical writings.

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Francis Schaeffer

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Criticized apologetic arguments that were based on probabilities rather than certainties. Invited non-Christians to test the claims of Christianity to see if it is consistent and livable, making his apologetic in some respects more akin to Carnell’s than to Van Til’s.

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Alvin Plantinga

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New Reformed epistemology – belief in God is rationally justified even if the believer cannot offer any evidence for that belief, just as we are rational to believe other things (notably in the existence of other minds) even if we cannot prove they exist.

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C. Stephen Evans

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attempted to integrate the subjective, existential perspective propounded by Kierkegaard into an essentially traditional apologetic.

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David K. Clark

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defended a “person-centered approach” to apologetics as distinguished from what he views as competing “content-oriented” approaches.