Differing Modes of Defense: the Presuppositional and Classical Apologetics

By Colin Cutler
Final Exam for Principles of Biblical Reasoning (used by permission)
Dr. Martin Erdmann

A Defense of the Faith

“But sanctify the Lord in your hearts; and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”

1 Peter 3:15 is the verse of commission for all apologists: the Greek word translated “answer”—apologia—speaks of a legal defense before a tribunal. Christians are to be able to defend their faith from the attacks of unbelievers. They are told to be able to make a defense to every man who asks what the reason is for their faith.

A few points can be made here. 1) We are to be knowledgeable about what it is we believe; we cannot defend something we do not know. 2) We are to believe it and act upon it (“sanctify the Lord in your hearts…having a good conscience; that whereas they speak evil of you, as of evil doers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.” 1 Peter 3:15-16). 3) We have assurance that our faith is reasonable. Contrary to some of the anti-intellectual fideists who say that one must simply “have faith” without or contrary to reason, we are told that we do indeed have a reason for our hope that we must defend. Faith is not simply a volitional leap, but is a rational—I will argue the sole rational—way of interpreting the empirical and metaphysical data. 4) We are to defend our faith with meekness and fear. We are not to fear man—though we are to be humble, with the knowledge at the forefront of our minds that the only difference between us as Christians and others as unbelievers is the grace of God—but are to fear God. We must not sacrifice or compromise the authority of His Word in our attempts to defend it.

Paul reasoned with the Jews from Scripture (Acts 9:22, 17:17) and the Greeks (Acts 9:29, 17:18-34), and Christ defended Himself with logic (John 10:37, 38).
There are in the modern day two broad schools of thought on Christian apologetics; there is the presuppositional system, which broadly fits under an Augustinian conception of a reason subordinate to faith, and the Thomistic system, which seeks a synthesis of faith and reason as equals operating in different spheres.

Classical Apologetics

Classical (or Thomistic) apologetics is the predominant system in the church currently. It traces its descent from St. Thomas Aquinas, a 12th century theologian and philosopher. He was heavily influenced by Aristotle’s works on logic and philosophy and sought to synthesize Aristotle’s works with the Scriptures and beliefs of orthodox Christianity. His method effectively dichotomizes faith and reason, assigning them different realms of responsibility. Faith is concerned with special revelation (that area of knowledge known and knowable only by immediate divine revelation, specifically in Holy Scripture), and reason with general revelation.

More relevantly, it generally holds that reason, just like the rest of man, has a propensity towards, but not a bondage to, sin and the denial of God. Man is still able to reach some amount of truth by means of his reason, though admittedly not enough for his salvation. Just as Aristotle was able to come to the right conclusion that God is one, is just, and is the source of all things, so, Thomists argue, man can come to the realization of some of God’s truths, and from these can a defense be made for the Christian system of belief, and possibly a foundation laid for faith itself. Thomists thus emphasize general revelation in their apologetic system and tend to reason from what they believe to be common ground held with their opponents.

Presuppositional Apologetics

Presuppositional (or Van Tillian) apologetics is a distinctively Reformed defense of the faith. It was first articulated by Cornelius Van Til, a conservative Reformed professor at Princeton and later Westminster Theological Seminary during the early 1900s. His apologetic system is self-consciously Calvinistic in its view of man and his reason, and God and His creation, and was forged against the backdrop of rationalism, idealism, and the beginnings of a pervasion of postmodern skepticism and nihilism in Western culture. Van Til articulated the idea that on the Christian epistemological foundation of faith, and only on this foundation, could man make sense of his existence and of his world. Thus faith—and not just any faith, but specifically that of Christian theism—was not only reasonable, it was also a prerequisite to all reason. Further, it was a prerequisite not only to good reason, but to any rationality. It is in this that presuppositionalism is revolutionary. Many others had articulated the idea that faith was reasonable, and also that faith was a necessary condition for good reason—Christian reason—but hitherto it had not been clearly articulated that all views except Christian theism were irrational and that Christian theism was a prerequisite for all rationality. In this, Van Til applied the doctrine of Total Depravity in positing that all unbelievers were irrational in part because their professed worldview was inconsistent, but ultimately because they were willfully suppressing their innate knowledge of God.

Presuppositionalism is also distinct in that it defends Christianity as a system: it does not start with the existence of God and then proceed from there to proving the Scriptures as inerrant and the atonement as rational. On the contrary, Van Til was concerned with defending all of Reformed orthodoxy and using the distinctives of Reformed orthodoxy as complements to his system. He realized that this was, in a sense, begging the question of authority, and he responded to this with the valid point that all appeals to authority must by their very nature beg the question of authority. What one must do, then, is to show the ultimate authority of unregenerate man to end in ultimate inconsistency. In the intramural debate between apologetic systems, he applied this in order to point out that if a Christian argued for the authority of the Bible on the basis of prime reason, then it was reason that was authoritative, not the Bible. If the Bible depends on anything other than itself to prove itself, then it does not speak with the authority that it claims for itself.

Presuppositionalism does not say that man cannot know some truth. It does say, and emphatically says, that unregenerate man cannot make sense of truth. For knowing truth divorced from its context and without foundation is hardly knowing truth at all, and is certainly an incoherent way to look at truth. He may grasp some principles that a Christian would agree are true, but the unbeliever has no way of knowing why these principles are true or how they should be applied unless he borrows from the Christian’s own absolutist worldview.


A Comparison of the Two Systems

Thomism has the advantage of antiquity and tradition behind it, and is not to be despised. After all, it was the system of choice for most of the church’s apologists and philosophers for about 800 years, whereas presuppositionalism has been articulated for about a tenth of that time. However, Thomism has many of the same problems that were resolved in the theological reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, and Van Til viewed himself as simply following the return to these Protestant doctrines to their logical conclusion when applied to apologetics. He considered himself to belong firmly in the same theological vein as Augustine and Calvin—indeed, in his Defense of the Faith, he defends himself as often from the Calvinistic creeds as directly from Scripture. In some ways, he thought that the Protestant Reformation, in reforming its theology, had neglected to reform its apologetics to fit its theology. It could be argued, indeed, that if Calvin had been a philosopher instead of a theologian, he may have agreed with Van Til that the existence of reason itself required the existence of God (Institutes of the Christian Religion I.5.4).

The chief and fundamental error of Thomism is in its concession of autonomy to man’s reason. Man tends to consider himself as rationally prime—if he is to trust anything, it must be because he considers it sensible. In essence, man sets himself up as his own god. Thomism concedes this in principle and tries to present man with proofs that are held in some supposed common ground. Some men may acknowledge this common ground, but if they are cross-examined, they will realize that they have no basis for any foundationalism at all, let alone a common ground with Christian philosophers. Presuppositionalism performs this cross-examination and tears the ground from under unbelievers by showing their inconsistencies in reason and even in attempting to reason.

Presuppositionalism has no quarrel with those who would use rational and empirical evidence to convince those willing to be convinced by those means. Their point, however, is precisely that there is no one naturally willing to be convinced. To the unbeliever, the evidence could conceivably point either way, so the choice is left to him, and it is perfectly rational for him to refuse. It is a matter of interpretation. Presuppositionalism recognizes this and attacks the unbeliever’s standards of proof and interpretation, showing them to have no basis in his own atheistic or skeptical philosophy, but that, to make sense of anything, he must submit his own interpretation to the One who has created the world and grants it meaning. Presuppositionalists take seriously and literally the idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom [some translations “knowledge].” (Proverbs 1:7) Without the fear of God, there is no wisdom and knowledge.

As a note, the Reformed doctrine of God’s exhaustive providence and presuppositional apologetics are complementary—for if anything can happen outside of God’s ordination, then there is an element of chance in the world which leaves all facts open to autonomous interpretation. If God has not preinterpreted an event and granted it meaning, then it has only and every meaning that any individual who sees it assigns to it. He could assign it to luck or determinism or free will, but that event does not necessarily point to God. It is, as Van Til put it, simply a “brute fact.” This is in direct contradiction to the Psalm which says “the heavens declare the glory of God” and the Proverb (16:4) which says that “The Lord hath made all things for His purposes, even the wicked for the day of destruction.”

Further, presuppositional apologetics, by its strict adherence to Sola Scriptura and its commitment to defending Christian doctrine as a system rather than piecemeal, can preserve the doctrine of providence over and against those who consider it to be unreasonable, both within and without the church. To those outside of the church, the presuppositional apologist will point out that by denying the incoherence of juxtaposing God’s providence with human responsibility, they are simply begging the question of authority. To those inside the church, the same could be said, but if a person accepts the truth of God as presented by a presuppositionalist, he could completely avoid the erroneous doctrine of autonomous will. With Scripture as his sole and sufficient source of authoritative truth, and reason subordinate to and founded upon Scripture, he would avoid the error of those who try to subject Scripture to reason. Thomism, on the other hand, opens the door to such aberrant doctrines by conceding to man’s reason the ability to know truth independently of context and authority. It is this basis (or lack thereof) that allows man to invent doctrines that make sense to him as a man and hold them as true. If reason is prime, then it is allowed to independently draw conclusions; and in more extreme cases, it will even subordinate Scripture to itself.

A Word of Caution

Presuppositionalism must be seen in its full context as a distinctively Reformed apologetic. As a corollary of Reformed doctrine, it can only be fairly criticized by those who keep these doctrines in mind as well. Specifically, some have decried Van Til’s system as presenting a “magic bullet” cure to the problem of unbelief when such is not the case at all, nor has it ever been represented as such by Van Til or any responsible student of his. Van Til, along with all historic Calvinists, believed firmly in God’s sovereignty over salvation and belief and unbelief. As such, he believed that no amount of rational proof, even the epistemological proof of his transcendental system, could finally change the unbeliever’s heart to the point that he would submit to the claims of Christ. Only the Holy Spirit could do this, and He is sovereign in His dispensation of the saving grace of regeneration and faith.

Also, Van Til’s system must be viewed against the backdrop not only of the prevalent rationalism and idealism of his time, but also against the rising postmodernist and nihilistic systems. In America and especially in the church and school where he taught (both of which when they finally liberalized, he left and helped form a conservative nucleus elsewhere with J. Gresham Machen), a wave of pluralism was rising. Classical apologetics could simply not compete with this, not because the evidence was faulty, but because completely different standards of interpretation were being used. Indeed, one may wonder if the shift of the Western mind from modern to postmodern did not spell the obsolescence of Classical apologetics. One thing is certain, that shift did spell the end of common methods of rational interpretation and common standards of authority that had, till then, been prevalent in Western intellectual culture.

Van Til’s system is, then, not only an application of Reformed theology to apologetics, but also an attempt to deal with the shifting intellectual atmosphere and to preserve an absolutely biblical way of engaging each of the exploding fragments of the Western intellectual culture. Further, in its ability to do this, it also remains helpful for Christians who are dealing with these questions and preserves confidence in the old institutions of Reformed orthodoxy. Most of all, though, it seeks to glorify God by holding His truth unsullied and absolute, just as it proclaims itself to be.



Conclusion

Despite the antiquity of the venerable Thomistic system, it preserves in its root the poison of Romanism manifest in the syncretism of paganism and Christianity. A fully Reformed apologetic requires the acknowledgement of God’s primacy in all. God has revealed Himself primarily through His apostles and prophets in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and it is to these, not abstract concepts of reason, that the Christian apologist must demand allegiance. The Christian apologist must realize himself and show to his debater that these “abstract concepts of reason” would have no existence at all were Christianity not true. This is the heart of presuppositionalism—that the fear of the Lord ought not be a conclusion to reasoned proofs, nor something dichotomized from reasoned proofs, but rather is and by right ought to be “the beginning of wisdom.” With Augustine, the presuppositionalist says “Credo ut intelligam”—I believe in order to understand.