Over at the TELOS website I have placed up the following talks I gave at a recent conference Session 1 – Worldviews Get in the Way Session 2 – Apologetics and Worldviews Pt.1 Session 3 – Apologetics and Worldviews Pt.2 Session 4 – Which Books Belong in the Bible? Session 5 – The God of the Bible and the God of Islam …
Category: Theology
This is the belated third installment of a series I started last year on the topic. I do apologize for dropping the ball on this one. The material is taken from a lecture from the course, “The Doctrine of Man & Sin” at Telos Biblical Institute. Part Two The Traducianist Position: Traducianism (from a word meaning ‘to sprout’), holds that both the material-bodily substance of a person, and the soulish part of a person is passed on from parent to child …
Review of Covenantal Apologetics: Principles & Practices in Defense of Our Faith, by K. Scott Oliphint, Wheaton: Crossway, 2013, 277 pages, pbk. K. Scott Oliphint is Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has written several good books of apologetics and philosophical theology; most notably his Reasons for Faith and God with Us. He is, as far as my opinion counts, the main successor to Van Til and Bahnsen and their apologetic approach. This …
PART FOUR This is the penultimate installment of this series on presuppositional apologetics. In this post I shall be dealing a little more with the erstwhile atheist “expert” appealed to by FF and company and demonstrating his ignorance. I shall also engage more comments by FF etc., and show how presuppositionalism overturns them. The Facts of External Existence What shall I call the individual whose video snippet attacking Jason Lisle and presuppositional apologetics was relied upon by FF? As he …
Part Seven “And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” – Matt. 6:13 I am going to comment on these two petitions as one, since they form a sort of couplet. The fact of evil is what makes necessary both of these petitions. Temptation is never to do good! This life is a life filled with various temptations. But why would we have to petition a holy God not to lead us into temptation? …
PART TWO “This is What You Believe Whether You Admit It or Not” The line above is not a quote, but represents an accurate paraphrase of the atheist [FF – who just showed up one day dissing presuppositional apologetics], whom I have been debating on the TELOS Facebook page and here. It is because of this attitude that I have called a halt to the proceedings. It is also the attitude of the individual who FF is relying on to …
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” This petition, especially when coupled with the addendum in v. 14-15 (“if you do not forgive others the Lord will not forgive you”) has caused concern for some of God’s people. Let me say first that this passage is not concerned with forgiveness of sins and justification on the basis of the cross and resurrection. Certainly, that is not how the disciples would have understood Jesus. Rather, what is in …
PART ONE FF has responded to my first post in the combox of that post. Here I shall examine his remarks and add some new thoughts of my own. Unfortunately, he has not yet picked up the argument I made, neither has he relented from adopting his own position as normative. Now, I freely admit that if his outlook was normative I would not be arguing as I am. But neither would I be arguing at all, since, at least …
I have recently been posting a series of basic studies for Christian parents at the TELOS site entitled Apologetics and Your Children. The posts are meant to encourage believers to take the matter of Truth seriously, and to use Apologetics as a framework in which to fit their evangelism and education of their kids. A few weeks ago on the Telos Ministries Facebook page an atheist whom I shall call FF showed up with a challenge to the presuppositional apologetics …
Part Five In this last post I intend to do three things. First, I will be drawing the conclusion that there are two very different ideas and hence definitions of “progressive revelation” (PR), and both operative words mean something very different both separately and together, depending on who is using them. Thus, there is no really agreed upon definition of this term within Evangelicalism (or, indeed, biblical studies generally). Second, I want to quickly address the straw man issue (I’ll …
