Presuppositional Apologetics is the Key to a Postmillennial Future w/ Zach Smith

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Presuppositional Apologetics is the Key to a Postmillennial Future w/ Zach Smith

April 26, 2023

God's word, empowered by his spirit, is the key to the evangelism and conversion of the world. Presuppositional apologetics is the methodology applying the prior sentence.

You can read Zach's article here. I highly recommend reading through his material and following him. For The King!

Key Text:

* 1 Pet. 3:15

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Transcript

[music playing] Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life, because God has given him a name that is above every name, so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you, and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[music playing] Hello, friends. Welcome to the "Fool of the King" podcast. This is your host, Rocky Ramsey.

On this podcast, we proclaim the edicts of the king, namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would like to introduce my guest to you for this week.

He's been on the podcast before. You can go back and listen. It was titled "The Magi Star." And it was a really fun, a funny episode, but also we got some interesting things that was enjoyable.

But he's back again, folks. This is Zach Smith. He is a father, husband, speech pathologist, and lay theologian.

And I am really pleased. Also, the proprietor of SpeakingBasicTruth.WordPress.com. Really thankful for this brother. He's been a good friend to me.

If you go back and listen to that Magi Star episode, I also key you into this man being instrumental in God using him to lead me to the Reformed theology and the doctrines of grace. I'm thankful for this brother. I love him dearly.

I hope you guys can be edified by our conversation today. So Zach, how you doing, man? How's it going? I'm doing great. I'm glad to be back.

I hope everyone is doing well. Yeah, I think if there were a funniest episode award, we would take it by storm. Yeah, the "For the King" Emmys.

That would be the funniest episode, I would say. I was still trying to work out what that star was. Yeah, we're still the text and talking about it.

We have not figured it out yet. No, no, no. So yeah, but we are not talking about kind of fringe topics today.

We're going to actually talk about something that we think is extremely important to the future of Christendom. And that would be pre-suppositional apologetics. So my brother Zach here on his blog, SpeakingBasicTruth.WordPress.com, he just released an episode.

Sorry, I'm sorry, not an episode. He released a blog titled "The Proof of Christianity, An Introduction to Biblically Defending the Faith." So Zach's been kind of letting me into what he's been learning in his free time outside of his vocation. And he's been going through Bonsen's lectures with a was at BonsenU, right? And he's been learning a lot.

And this is the fruit of it. It's really, really solid stuff. So I got to read through it.

And I'm thankful for it. I learned a lot. But I guess I'm not gonna, I didn't write it.

So Zach, what, I guess, can you just kind of give us an introduction to why you wanted to write that, that blog? Why do you, why do you think that, you know, pre-self is so important? And maybe just kind of summarize what your goal was there and what you wrote about. Okay. First, I would like to say, yes, go to BonsenU, make an account.

It's free. Go through Bonsen's lectures on apologetics. It will change your life.

Also, sermon audio has a huge wealth of recordings from Bonsen's lectures and sermons. So that's an, that's for free. So go into it.

So basically, that's the starting point is I took the plunge and decided to listen through the introductory levels of, of Bonsen's apologetics courses, and just kept working my way up the ladder in terms of complexity. He's got all these different levels, like from beginner to seminary level. And I just kept listening through them.

And, and because I think I went in that gradual fashion, I was able to follow along with everything as it, as it got more and more complex and more and more technical in terms of the philosophical ideas that were in there. But yeah, I just have been kind of obsessed, if you will, with figuring out apologetics and, and, and had all of these ideas of, I guess, taking Bonsen and making him even more tangible or even more understandable than he already already is. So the way I see it is like Cornelius Vantill, who is the father of presuppositional apologetics, what a beast, what a monster, an amazing godly man of history.

And I do one day want to, to read his stuff. But he's, he's notoriously difficult to understand. Part of that is that he's probably way beyond us intellectually.

But the other part is, he's not an, he was not a native English speaker. Yeah. He was kind of like translating as he wrote in English from Dutch.

But anyways, I see Bonsen, who was Vantill's protege as like the one who made him accessible in English. He took his ideas, he refined them, he, he presented them in a beautiful way. But I think even then Bonsen was such a genius that what was simple for him or what felt simplified to him was still challenging for, for a lot of people, especially for people who just don't have an interest already in apologetics.

I think Bonsen is perfect for the guy who's willing to like work hard at it and is willing to go through the pain and hardship of figuring out these difficult concepts because you think it's worth it already. But to people who, you know, aren't naturally inclined to this topic, I think he's pretty difficult. And so I guess that, that kind of provides some background to why I think it's worth it for me as a nobody over here to write anything about presuppositional apologetics.

My main goal with writing this article is to make this really difficult information extremely accessible, extremely understandable. That's why I had provided the key for the terms because there's just terminology that you have to use. And if I give you a definition for it, then you can read it and refer to that and understand it.

So yeah, that was what I worked really hard on was editing it down in a way that I feel like everybody could understand. Yeah, that's good. And you were in that writing process, you're regurgitating and working through yourself what you had already learned.

So it's establishing it for you and really kind of test testing your understanding. Can I can I pin this down in an art in an articulate way, but also make it accessible? Just for me reading it, I'm not a, you know, a trained apologist, but I have been, you know, looking into presuppositionalism. I've read one Bonsen book and one book by Bantill.

So like still very new to it, but I thought it was very accessible, easy to understand. I didn't have to obviously use the legend because I've been introduced to those terms, but anybody that had with the legend what you what you use to work with your terms and your definitions. I think I do think anyone could read through it and take something away from it.

So I guess maybe just from going through Bonsen stuff, kind of define what is apologetics, what was he, why do we call pre-suppositional apologetics? You know, why is that important? What are the proofs? How do we apply it kind of thing? Maybe do a short summary of how you kind of interacted with those things. Yes, I will attempt a short summary of my article, which I'll admit it was lengthy a bit, but at the same time, I think it was as short as I could have possibly made it. Yeah.

Is how I would put it because if I had cut anything else out, I would have left out essential components of introducing the topic. So it was necessary and I think it's worth it to go through it. But yeah, it was kind of lengthier than I think I would want my normal article to be.

Yeah. But anyways, I'll try to go through things fairly quickly. So I start off with 1 Peter 3 15, which says, "But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and fear." So that's our key text of the article, but also just apologetics in general.

So I start off defining apologetics and we get that word in the English word apologetics from the ancient Greek word apologia, which I think kind of literally means from words, apa, logia. So we've all heard of logos, hopefully from John 1, which is the word. But essentially, I joke, apologetics does not mean apologizing for your position.

It means the opposite. So I don't know if anyone thought that was funny or will think that's funny, but I did. So I think I thought it was funny because I used to think that apologetics meant you were apologizing.

So I hope I'm not alone in that. But no, what it means is it's a reasoned defense. An apology is a reasoned defense, a rational defense.

It's an argument for your position. And that can be in a number of different contexts. And we know in ancient Greek, it was used in a law context, like a courtroom context.

People would give an apologia if they were put on trial. So that's basically to say, when Peter says to always be ready to make an apologia, a reasoned defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, it means to provide a rational argument. We are providing argumentation to objections and people asking questions or making accusations or objections against the hope that is in us.

And that's Christ in us. So we're making a defense of the Christian faith when we do apologetics. Yeah, I think that kind of covers that definition.

So real quickly, then I talk about who should be doing apologetics? Who should be defending the faith? Who does this apply to? And I go straight into First Peter 3, that chapter, where we have our verse, so we want to go to the immediate context of our proof text, not rip it out of its context, right? And so if you guys look that up and you go into First Peter chapter three, you'll see that the first seven verses are Paul dealing with, or sorry, not Paul, it's First Peter. First Peter, I'm always just like reading the New Testament, like, sometimes you miss, but First Peter, so Peter is dealing with marital relations in the first seven verses of chapter three. And then in verse eight, you have this transition phrase, and I have the NASB 95 up, and it says to sum up.

So he's making a conclusion. He's switching that section from marital relations to, so let me make a conclusion about all of this. Yeah.

And then the next thing says to sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, on and on. Then he goes on to say, but even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you being all of you, as in verse eight, you are blessed and do not fear their intimidation and do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. And that's where we get our command to defend the faith is in the face of suffering for righteousness, which is the perfect context in which to do that.

We see Paul do that in Acts multiple times. He's put on trial, if you will, for his claim that Christ has been resurrected. Yeah.

And we see him, we see him implementing the presuppositional apologetic method. Perfectly. Exactly.

Yeah, I agree. Exactly. Great example of that would be go to act 17.

And you can see the apostolic tradition of using presuppositionalism and not classical apologetic. So I just, I want to say that because if we want to be apostolic, I mean, how's Paul argue? Well, he definitely doesn't use, you know, platonic ideals or Aristotelian ideals to argue for the faith. He uses God's word.

No, nor does he start with, uh, like, like data about the world. Yeah. And then shows them like one, two, three, boom.

There you, Christ, I proved it from these three facts that we can all accept. It's just not how he's going about the situation. He's, he's starting with, like you said, God's word.

He's telling the story that's in the Bible from beginning to end. Yes. And, um, you know, he's, he's doing evangelism.

Exactly. Well, and I think you hit it on the head in the article here, you had already mentioned this, but I just wanted to apply what you had said in the article even more. The beginning of first Peter three 15 from all that leading up, especially during the persecution at the end of that, uh, a part of that chapter there in first Peter three, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.

You cannot do that when you're making an argument that presupposes that God doesn't exist, right? How are you setting aside Christ as holy when your argument starts with, well, God might not exist. Jesus might not be Lord. How are you sanctifying Christ as Lord? So I just think that is a so killer there.

Um, when we're thinking about, yeah, another way to put it is you can't at the same time sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart. Yeah. And assume that he might not even exist.

Yeah. Like those things, those two things guys cannot go together. It's, it's impossible.

They're logically contradictory things to hold. You can't sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts and also take on this hypothesis that he might not even exist or might not exist as Lord. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. You might say, okay, he's a historical figure.

Let's start there. We have that fact. Yeah.

But then, but then now you're going to try to prove that he's Lord. Like it's some hypothesis. Yeah.

Well, I think that he might be Lord. So let me set out and go about proving that from this set of data. That's not what verse 15 says.

Exactly. What precedes making the defense, if you'll see the flow of the text is sanctifying Christ as Lord. Yeah.

If he's Lord, he's the starting point. Yeah. He is both the creator and the governor of everything in creation.

Amen. That's huge. So that's that actually you kind of let us and segue that us into that next question of that.

And that's answered in the article of where do we start? Yeah. What's the argument? Yeah. Let's get in there.

So when we do apologetics, why do we start there? We kind of have just touched on that. We start just like Peter tells us to with the assumption, the presumption, let's say, yeah, Christ is Lord. And it's a small set of words.

So it's hard to capture how big it is, but sanctifying setting apart Christ as Lord in your heart is everything. Yeah. It's everything.

It's the start. It's the middle. It's the end, as long as you're an actual Christian.

Right. And at no point in the start, the middle, or the end, are you deviating from that belief that Christ is Lord. Yeah.

So that's kind of where I start. And and that's where we can bring in this idea of what is a presupposition? A presupposition is a term that's used technically within philosophy, within particularly epistemology, which is the study of how we know things. How do we know what we know? And so a presupposition is a belief that you take in advance.

You pre before you presuppose it. So it's something that you assume prior to everything else. Yeah.

Okay. When you go to do a math problem, you go into doing that math problem with several presuppositions, presuppositions about math, you believe things about math prior to ever going to do math. You believe that it's orderly, you believe that the way that you've learned numbers is in accordance with how numbers actually are.

You go into doing math with all of these things that you assume in advance. That's what a presupposition is. And my contention in the article is that if you are a Christian, your basic, your presupposition of all presuppositions is that Christ is Lord.

Yeah. And so and so we apply that to all of life, including our defense of the faith. And I don't really go into a discussion of intercollegiate views of apologetics.

And what I mean by that is the fact that most Christians down through history haven't approached apologetics in that way. Yeah. And have followed a method that's called evidentialism.

And I don't go into that. And I don't think it's necessary to hear. But the point is, I am setting myself up, if you will, for future discussions of the difference between presuppositional apologetics and evidential apologetics, which from my point of view would be something that I would consider extremely substandard, sub-biblical, and ineffective.

Yeah. That's good. Okay, so let's get into the meat here.

So those are kind of like, I would say those are our anchors going into discussing this, right? That's kind of what our anchors are. Yeah. So when we think about the actual argument, how you argue in a presuppositional manner, can you walk me through how do you go about arguing? And let's walk through what are the common objections to the way that you would go about arguing.

And we'll address those as you talk about as you've talked about them in the article. That make sense? Yeah, we'll start with like, what the proof of Christianity is, because that's the title of the article, right? So I'm literally saying there is a proof of Christianity, we can prove it. Yeah.

And that's a bold claim. That's part and parcel of what makes presuppositional apologetics so alluring, so attractive, and so powerful is that it's this paradigm shift of saying, wait, we can prove Christianity to be the only reasonable option, the only option that's available if you are going to be a rational human being. Yeah.

And that will ruffle a lot of feathers. Yes, if you go around and start telling people that, let me tell you. But I find it to be true.

And I find it to be true in my experience and application and practice of the apologetical method and my observation of it from other people who do it way better than I can. So let's start with that. So what is the proof of Christianity? I love the way that Vantel put it.

I think it's the most concise, but also like, kind of difficult to grasp onto because of how concise it is. But he said, the proof of Christianity is that without it, you can't prove anything. Without Christianity, you can't prove anything at all.

There's a lot to unpack there because Vantel was just an absolute master of taking massive concepts and putting them into this like pithy mic drop statement. I mean, just amazing the way that he could do that. So that's why in the article, I try to say there are several angles from which we can kind of flesh this out and make it a little bit more intelligible, more understandable.

So I say the way I describe it is that we defend Christianity by arguing for the impossibility of opposing belief systems. So we would argue for the reasonableness, let's say the rationality of Christianity in an interaction with a Muslim by demonstrating the fact that Islam destroys the possibility of knowledge because it refutes itself. It contradicts itself.

It works at odds within itself and makes arbitrary and contradictory claims. And we can do that with any other unbelieving belief system. We can do it with all of them.

That's the argument is that instead of saying we need to prove Christianity by gathering all of the evidence for the consistency of scripture and letting that prove that this really is God's word, no, because the problem with that is that now we're not starting with Christ as Lord. In that system, we're not starting with Jesus and his self-attesting word. We can't start out by questioning the lordship of Christ in his word that he has revealed to us.

Yeah. That makes sense. So instead, we look outward.

We presuppose the truth of our system. And in order to argue for our system, we make the claim that every other system outside of us cannot provide an account for understanding the human experience, making logical sense of logic itself, language, dignity of humanity. You can go on ethics, epistemology, all these things, creation, existence, over and against non-existence.

Why does anything exist? Yeah, consciousness, all of it. We can't make sense. The argument is that the other systems can't make sense of these things.

They will either just assert that they're there arbitrarily and you just have to take their word for it. And that's not rational because they can't provide a reason or an explanation for that assertion. Or they also have two claims within their system that don't go with one another.

Yeah. And they contradict each other, which destroys your entire system. You can't have inconsistent claims within a worldview because then it's no longer an intelligible worldview or a rational worldview.

It fails the test of rationality. Yeah. So I conclude with saying, and this is a really important distinction to make, and this is once again that discussion between evidentialism and presuppositionalism.

I say we don't argue that Christianity is one option amongst many alternatives. We don't take Christianity as a hypothesis, a question to be answered. We start with Christianity.

We start with Christ is Lord, like we said. And then we argue that because all unbelieving systems of belief are irrational and that we can demonstrate that they're rational, Christianity then becomes the only reasonable position that's available to us. Yeah.

That's good. So I think I hope that covers that. Yeah.

And we can at least say, just listening to what you just said, if it is true, all the things that you just said, it's logically sound. If you can actually demonstrate contradiction in a worldview and it can't account for the world, that's actually real reality. Yes.

And you have a system that does account for everything in reality, then that is the true system, the correspondence theory of truth. If it corresponds to reality, then it is true. So it's good.

It's good, logically sound. So let's go into maybe some of the accusations and misrepresentations, objections to presuppositionalism. How about we start with, hey, Zach.

Did you want to go into a little bit about application or no? Sure. Let's do application first. So yeah, how would you... Do you think it'll take too long? Yeah.

How about we just stick with that, just the bare bones of it. And then if you want to go read the article, you can see how Zach applies it in some kind of mock conversations. Heck, you could even read one.

Just read one of them and maybe walk through how you would have... Okay. Yeah. So we'll just touch real quick on... You guys got the argument, but then you're definitely going to want to know, how do you actually use it? And those are two different things.

It's like understanding the theory and then being able to practice it. Yeah, exactly. So it's crazy, but there's this book of God's wisdom called Proverbs, and it has a lot of wisdom in it.

And God's wisdom is better than man's wisdom. Amen. Amen.

So I draw, and this isn't my find, obviously, Van Til and Bonsen, I think you could say discovered the full beauty and use of these two verses in Proverbs. But basically Proverbs 26, 4 through 5 is the basis for how we take the argument and apply it to the world, to the unbelieving world in order to defend our faith. So it says, "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him." And then it says, "Answer a fool as his folly deserves, or answer a fool according to his folly, that he not be wise in his own eyes." So it sounds like a contradiction.

It's actually a beautiful system. It's two steps. And the steps don't need to be in a particular order, but they have their own distinctives.

And the first step is, not answering the fool according to his folly so that you won't become like him, is basically from the outset, rejecting his foundational beliefs. You just don't take them. You don't adopt them.

You don't pretend to be neutral with this unbeliever. And you don't see him as neutral either. You stick with what God tells you about the unbeliever, and you believe God over and against what he tells you.

And God says, "This unbelieving man is against my God, or woman, if you will. He is not neutral, because Christ says, "You are either for me or against me." Okay, so even if he says he's agnostic, he doesn't even know whether God exists or not. You say, "No, you do know that God exists, and you are rebelling against him." And you're self-deceived in that rebellion, and you're suppressing the truth, the knowledge of that truth in your unrighteousness.

That's what you say. And that is not answering him according to his folly. So an example of this, I provided an example dialogue.

So let's say an atheist says, "You can't prove God's existence, because you can't provide observable evidence of this God you claim." So the Christian responds, "The Bible teaches that God has revealed himself clearly to all men through his creation and by the scriptures of the Bible, so that no one will have an excuse on the day of judgment." So it's the atheist's presupposition. He is starting with the fact that because you can only prove things that you can touch, see, feel here, therefore God can't even exist. His belief about his presuppositions or his foundational beliefs about how you can know things rule out God in advance.

And when he provides you this objection, he's trying to get you to adopt that methodology. He's trying to get you to adopt his epistemology. He's trying to get you or force you into saying, "Oh yeah, we can only prove things by observation.

We can't only know that something exists if we can observe it." But you're a Christian. You're not an unbeliever. You're not an atheist.

You know things because God has revealed things to you. And so that's exactly how he responds. He's trying to get you to adopt his theory of knowledge, which says that you can only know things and prove that you know things by observation, by touch, by sense perception, that sort of thing, the scientific method.

And since you can't employ the scientific method upon discovering God, therefore he can't even exist. Or at least he might exist, but you can't prove him. And so the Christian does not adopt this methodology.

He doesn't adopt that theory of knowledge. He sticks to his guns. He says, "I know that God exists because God says he's revealed himself to men through his creation very clearly, and he's revealed himself by the scriptures." And so instead of adopting the atheist's position, adopting his foundational beliefs about how we know things and therefore what is real, we just press the difference between us.

We push the antithesis. We say, "I know you believe that. I'm going to show you what I believe.

I believe we know things and that we know them because the Bible teaches them." And so we don't apologize for that. Instead, we push it and we push the difference between us. And so step two, let's go on real quick.

Step two says, "Answer a fool according to his folly that he not be wise in his own eyes." So basically the wisdom is that we can't let this unbeliever walk away conceited and arrogant. We can't let him walk away in his arrogance. God tells us that.

His arrogance is a bad thing for him. So if we love this person, we don't want him to be arrogant and haughty and prideful in his unbelief. We want to cast out on his unbelief and not only cast out, but destroy his position to bring down his lofty thoughts that are set up against Christ.

So the wisdom of that verse is that we actually step into the unbelieving worldview and we critique it from the inside. This is called an internal critique. It means we do adopt the unbelieving worldview for the sake of the argument, for the sake of the discussion.

Not that we in reality actually adopt the worldview because we already talked about not doing that. We don't do that emphatically. What we do is for the sake of the argument, step into the unbelieving worldview and we have a look around from the inside and we see if it's structurally sound.

Yeah, we see, we step into their house. That's right. That's a good analogy.

And we see if there are problems with the foundation. We see if there are things that are out of code. Yeah.

And let me tell you, there are going to be things that are seriously out of code. This house is a house of cards. We're going to poke it and it's going to fall.

So I'll give you another example really quick and then we'll move on. So the atheist goes on to say, "At least I have an objective way of knowing what's real or not. I put my faith in the scientific method because it has actually given us answers in the real world.

If something cannot be investigated by the rigorous methods of science, then it's not worth trusting in and cannot be known in any objective way. You, on the other hand, continue holding on to self-contradictory myths written by ancient authors who can't agree with each other on basic points of doctrine." All right. So the Christian responds and says, "You say that you have an objective way of knowing what's real or not on the basis of your worldview, but the use of the scientific method is dependent on basic assumptions regarding the uniformity of nature and the reliability of your senses and mind, which you cannot rationally account for in your materialistic unguided universe.

You may assert these principles arbitrarily in order to have a basis for science, but there's no rational way to derive uniformity and reliability from a universe that is in essence random. I, on the other hand, know that the future will be like the past and that sense perception can be reliable because the God of Scripture has objectively revealed in His Word that He sustains all things and provides order and consistency to His creation. Additionally, your criteria of what would count as evidence for God refutes itself.

You say we can only know things by observation, but have you ever observed with your senses this truth claim that humans can only know things by sense experience? If all things are known by sense experience, then we would need to be able to have a sense experience of that truth claim. So where is that truth claim located that we might touch it, smell it, see it, measure it? Yeah. So you can see, I take a number of angles in responding to this atheist.

And in every way, we are stepping into his position. And we're starting to look around and we're saying, well, you have this here, but you've got no foundation for it. Yeah.

You've put up these big posts, but they're sitting on sand. They're gonna fall. There's nothing holding this up.

It's just floating, if you will. They're putting things on clouds, and it's gonna fall through. And so you're just showing them that all the way through.

And now I do say that takes a bit of study and skill. You have to be able to accurately represent the other person's position, which means you have to learn it and know it pretty well to be able to do that. But anybody can do what was just done there.

Yeah. Yeah. My big takeaway just from reading your article and learning more about presuppositionalism, you don't have to give... Like every time an objection comes up against Christianity, you don't even have to entertain it.

What you have to decide is were they even allowed to ask me that question from their point of view? Because sometimes I could say some wild, wild stuff about you, Zach. I could basically slander you and say, "Why have you been stealing money from your work?" I could say something, but do I have any evidence or any reason to accuse you of that? No. So you could just basically write me off and say, "I'm not doing that.

Why did you even accuse me of that?" It's the same thing with the atheist saying, "Oh, these are just... I based everything off the scientific method and it's reliable." And all the things we just went through. And you could just respond and say, "Well, actually, based on your worldview, you're not even allowed to say the things you said. You've just slandered me and my position." They don't have... You're taking the legs out from under their objections.

But it takes a lot of guts. I'm going to be honest. Instead of just try to play the neutral ground all the time, because honestly, the less masculine way to do things is the evidentialist way where it's like, "Let's both try our best and see who comes out on top." But the masculine thing would be to say, "Actually, shut your mouth.

Everything you just said was false and a lie and here's why. You should feel bad for lying through your teeth about the world. And here's why." We should cast doubt in their minds about what they're believing.

Yeah. And obviously, we do it with gentleness and respect. Yeah.

But in essence, yes, we are stopping the mouth of the unbeliever. The thrust you were getting at was that we don't allow them to be conceited in their own mind. And that's what the proverb says is, "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be conceited." Yeah, exactly.

So I totally agree. I think the more tempting thing to do is to say, "Yeah, I think your guys' minds are okay as far as they go. I think you guys can reason well.

I think you guys, you've got really good points about things and probably have really good objections that I may not have answers to, but let's just sit down and at the end of the day, we can be okay with each other and say, "Yeah, this is all just... Who really knows?" That's really tempting to some people who don't like conflict. Exactly. But what I would want to say in response to that is, you're not really loving that person.

You're flattering them. Exactly. And flattery is a sin.

Yeah. You are joining in their self-deception. You're enabling their ongoing suppression of the truth that's already within them.

Exactly. So please don't do that. Don't play games.

There are souls on the line. This is all to say, "Apologetics is done within the context of evangelism." You should have already... If someone's coming up with objections, the assumption is, you've already presented the challenge of the gospel to this person. Yeah, that's true.

That's a good point. That's what Peter says to anyone who asks you for a reason. Why would they be asking you for a reason? Yeah, exactly.

Because you've already presented the gospel to them. That's a good point. And if you've presented the gospel to them, you've told them, "You're dead in your sins." Yeah.

You're under the judgment of God and His wrath is hovering over you. You need Christ. So you presumably have already offended this person if you're biblically defending the faith.

Exactly. That's good. Okay, so Zach, so we're not here all night.

I would like one-minute responses to these objections that would come up against presuppositionalism. All right, let's go. Hey, this is just circular reasoning.

You're just using your presuppositions. I'm using my presuppositions to establish my worldview. Why are you allowed to use circular reasoning, and why can't I? Well, I think the main objection would be, you're using circular reasoning with the implication that they're not.

So an atheist is going to say, "You're just using circular reasoning." And then they're going to assume that they aren't. And so my response is that, "Yes, I'm reasoning in a circle epistemologically, and so are you." So my quick response would be, "Everyone has to do this." And the quickest way I would lay this out is that if you have an ultimate authority, an ultimate standard by which you derive knowledge, right? The atheist's ultimate standard is the scientific method, let's say. Yeah.

Is he going to put aside his ultimate standard in order to prove his ultimate standard? Yeah, he wouldn't. Is it even possible? Yeah. Is it logically consistent to do so? The answer is no, because once he sets aside his ultimate standard to prove his ultimate standard, it's no longer his ultimate standard.

Yeah. Do you see that? So everyone has an ultimate standard. And those, and at the level of our theory of knowledge, right? Our rock bottom foundational beliefs, those presuppositions, we call them.

They are self-attesting ultimate authorities. Yes, exactly. Okay.

They aren't proven by lesser authorities, because to do so would make your ultimate authority no longer the ultimate authority. Exactly. That's good.

That's good. All right. Next.

Yeah, thank you for that. Okay, so how is precept not just a leap of faith or feedism? What's your response to that? Yeah, so presuppositionalism is not feedism, because it is the essence of presuppositional apologetics is the argument that it makes. Like we said, the argument is that without Christianity, you can't prove anything.

That is a, like Rocky said, a logically valid argument. It is a transcendental argument, which means it's arguing for the preconditions, the necessary preconditions of intelligibility, the things that have to be true in advance for us to make sense of the human experience. So, so is presuppositionalism is emphatically not anywhere close to feedism, because feedism is completely irrational.

It is inherently irrational, and it rejects the need to provide any argumentation for the faith that you hold to. Yeah, it's just pure faith. Yep.

Just a leap of faith for no reason. All right. So third objection here.

You're just saying that unbelievers, you know, they can't know anything at all, right? Because they're just relying on their presuppositions that are not true, right? At the end. So, you know, you're saying that they don't know anything, but they, you know, I'm an atheist and I could tell the sky is blue, right? What do you say to that? Yeah. So this is a misrepresentation of the presuppositionalist claim that the unbeliever can't know anything on his own worldview.

So to answer the question, unbelievers do know things, but they know them in spite of their presuppositions, not because of them. If they were consistent with their presuppositions, with their worldview, they would have to admit absurdity and irrationality in all respects in life. Because they break down into contradiction or arbitrariness, which is both are equally irrational.

So, but the fact that they know things in spite of their worldview means that there's something else going on. And that's actually something that Christians can account for. We know that though unbelievers profess with their mouth that there is no God.

Paul says in Romans one, that they do know that God exists, but that they suppress that knowledge in their sin, in their unrighteousness. So because of that suppression and that self-deception, the unbeliever is able to hold to an irrational worldview and profess it while reaching over to borrow capital from Christianity in order to have some semblance of rationality. They're cobbling their worldview together and they have to use God.

They have to rely on Him even in their rejection of Him. The way that Vantell said it is just like a child has to sit on the lap of his father to slap him. So the unbeliever has to use God's truth in order to reject his existence.

That's good. Awesome. Anti-theism presupposes theism.

Theism. That'll turn some heads and make some faces red. All right.

And then the fourth objection, you don't use evidence is you're not, you haven't throughout this whole thing provided any positive proof of Christianity. You've just proven that maybe every other worldview that exists right now is inconsistent. What if we find something in the future that coheres better than the Christian world, but you're not using any positive evidence to show that this is the one and only true.

Yeah. So we do use evidences. Pre-suppositionalism is not opposed to the use of evidences.

And in fact, we would consider ourselves to be the ultimate evidentialists. And what I mean by that is that we, because of our presuppositions are able to say that all evidence points to God. Yep.

That's good. We don't limit for historical facts to pointing to the possibility that Jesus was resurrected and was actually the Christ. We believe that every fact that is an actual fact that's true is something that points to God and points to his providence and, and is something that clearly reveals who God is.

All facts, because God says he reveals himself in his creation through what he has made, all facts point to God. So we're the ultimate evidentialists. The problem is when you subject Christ to evidence, that's our issue.

Do you see that? You don't say, well, we can get to Christ if we validate his existence with these set of facts. Yeah. The way I've heard it before is presuppositionalism establishes the evidence.

Christ as Lord establishes the coherence of evidence. It makes evidence actually makes sense. It makes it intelligible.

That's what we've been saying this whole time. Exactly. So that's another aspect or facet of it is that evidences or facts or data has to be interpreted and it gets interpreted through the grid of your beliefs.

Exactly. Facts get interpreted through a worldview. They get put through a filter.

So when you, when you present a fact that you've interpreted as proof of Christ, that unbeliever does not have to interpret that piece of evidence in the same way that you will. In fact, he never will interpret it in the same way. Exactly.

Because you're not accounting for the vast, chasmic difference between your basic beliefs. Yeah. So you have to go underneath the evidence.

I like to say it that way. You have to go underneath the evidence and you have to go down to, well, why is he interpreting the evidence that way? Yeah. How is he, how is he drawing that conclusion from that evidence? And I don't draw that conclusion.

That's where you need to go. Yes, good. Awesome.

Okay. So, uh, as we kind of wrap up here at the end, remind the people real quick in your article, you walk through why it is everyone's, every Christian's responsibility, because every person is called to evangelize in some sense, maybe not the office of evangelists that we see in Ephesians. That is legit in office of the church is the evangelist, right? Yeah.

Not everybody is that office, but everyone is called to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth and be a disciple of Christ. So why, um, why are everyone to engage in this and not just a pastor or, or Bonsen, right? Uh, Greg Bonsen. So, so what are your thoughts there and why do Christians avoid this kind of flip of the coin, this other half of evangelism, which is apologetics? Um, firstly, everyone, not just the church leadership should be engaged in defending their faith because it's an apostolic command to do so.

Yeah, that's good. We've already gone through, um, first Peter three, I covered the fact that verse eight establishes the audience of the command as all of you. And that's all Christians.

He doesn't qualify that this is for, uh, elders. He doesn't qualify it at all. He says all of you be ready, be ready, be always ready to make an Apollo be a reason defense.

So, um, that's basically why everyone should be doing it. Um, but, but to provide a little bit more, put some more flesh on those bones, I would say, um, I think people have divorced in their mind, apologetics from the proclamation of the gospel. They have an incomplete picture of evangelism, essentially.

And the way that I've seen, the way that I've come to see evangelism is that it is a coin with two sides, just like you mentioned. Um, one side of the coin is the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Um, and I think that that's the more essential side of the coin, to be honest with you.

But I, I don't think that we should at all relegate apologetics to this, uh, position of irrelevancy. I think that that's actually wrong because the other side of the coin of evangelism is that once you've proclaimed the gospel, Peter says you need to be ready to provide a rational defense for it. Uh-huh.

That's good. And that's hard for people to hear, but I want to encourage people and, and say the whole reason why I'm writing it is that I believe that anybody can do this. I think that you can teach this to a child.

Yeah. A child may not be able to, to carry out this task of apologetics with the sophistication that you are able to, or that an adult would be able to, but nonetheless, I believe that a child can do this. Just like I believe that a child can proclaim the gospel.

And I think we can all agree that children can proclaim the gospel. Exactly. If they're saved, if they're in Christ, um, and, and they're just, what the difference is going to be is there's going to be degrees of sophistication and depth and how you're able to do it.

But that doesn't mean that these core ideas that we've talked about can't be grasped onto and applied at some level, even if it's just as simple as you can't, maybe you can't do an internal critique of the other person's system. That's fine. Just don't take their presuppositions for yourself.

Don't adopt their worldview. Push the antithesis and just stand on scripture and say, this is God's word. I'm not going to listen to you.

You're a man. Yeah. It can really be that simple of just saying God has spoken.

You're wrong. Yeah. Wow.

That's good. You're just a man. Why should I listen to you? You're just, why would I take the wisdom of man over the wisdom of God? Isn't that foolish? That is straight up.

And even unbelievers, if they were to accept that God existed, which they do, and yet they don't have to agree with that logic. Exactly. What, why would we take the wisdom of man over the wisdom of God? No one would.

No one would. It's logically sound. All right.

So, uh, last thing here, let's wrap up here. So we're naming this episode, you know, a presuppositional apologetics is the key to the post-millennial future, the Christendom for the next thousand years, right? The key to it, the key to the growth of the church is, I mean, first and foremost, the head, the head of the coin, not tails, but heads, which would be the proclamation of the gospel. But what comes with it, what comes with the, the evangelism and the spread of Christendom is like we've been arguing, a reasoned defense of the gospel.

Why is presuppositionalism the, you know, going to be pivotal to the spread of Christendom and the fact that we've abandoned it is why the West is largely Wayne, waxed and waned. And what's going on with Revelation 1952? I can read it. I'll have it ready whenever you want me to read it.

I just wanted to piggyback and say that the coin analogy is, is very useful in that the proclamation of the gospel is the head of the coin. But if you, if you don't have, if you're missing an entire half, you only have half of a coin. Exactly.

And you know, we can only take that analogy so far, but basically what we're saying is there, there, there are two parts to evangelism, to the, to the, to the spread and the faithful and effective witness of the new covenant of Jesus Christ to unbelieving people. And if you have totally cut off one part of it, one half of it, do you think it's going to be very effective? Can someone walk well on one leg? Yeah, not at all. No, I don't mean, I don't mean so.

So we, we've been walking on one leg. And I think that's why we're walking so slowly and so ineffectively. And it's not to say that, once again, it's not as though doing apologetics is doing something that's completely divorced from telling someone the gospel.

It's baked into our apologetic. Yeah. As we go forth and we give someone a reason defense of the gospel, we're going to be telling them the gospel the whole way through.

Exactly. Because we're telling them your worldview is bankrupt. Your gods are false gods return to Christ, who is the, the, the owner and possessor of all knowledge and wisdom.

Yeah. All the treasures of knowledge and wisdom are deposited in him. Exactly.

That's what we're saying. We're, we're, we're making the intellectual challenge of the gospel as we go forth. But let's, let's read this piece of scripture real quick.

Revelation 19, 15 from his mouth comes a sharp sword so that with it, he may strike down the nations and he will rule them with a rod of iron. And he treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the almighty. Wow.

Rocky, you want to talk about what we mean by that? What, what interpret that? Yeah. So what I was thinking, uh, kind of hearing you talk and how I'm going to connect this, baked into the, this apologetic method is if somebody says, why do you think that about the world? Oh, cause Christ is Lord. Why do you think this about the world? Oh, cause Christ is Lord.

Yeah. That there's the gospel baked into the apologetic method the whole time. That's right.

What's your presupposition as to why you think science makes sense? Where's the scientific method? Oh, okay. God created the earth and Christ is born, right? It's just baked into it. So when we see here in revelation, 19, 15, when Christ comes to judge, you know, Babylon, mystery Babylon, um, which, you know, we're postmill here, so we know what's going on here, but that's beside the point.

That's beside the point. What does he always do when he comes to judgment, regardless of who he is judging, whether that's one individual unbeliever or a whole corporate entity. What's he do? He cuts them down with his mouth, right? And there's a sharp sword coming with it.

So this is, this is metaphorical language for God's word being dividing. We see in a Hebrews four, God's word is likened to a sword. We also see in Hebrew or sorry, Ephesians six, God's word is likened to a sword.

So let's let scripture interpret scripture here. When we see a sharp sword coming from his mouth, well, it's no coincidence it's coming from his mouth. This is the word of Christ going forth, uh, that the wrath of God is being poured out from it's from the proclamation of the word.

So the gospel, the gospel is a blessing to those that believe in it, but it's also a curse to those that reject it. And that's why the sword, it, it, it cuts bone and marrow that either cuts you away from Christ towards judgment or cuts your heart in, cuts your heart of stone and turns into art of flesh and brings you to Christ. So that's what's going on here.

So, I mean, I would just say when we're thinking about precept, we're thinking about post-millennialism, we're thinking about just Christianity going forth. It is founded upon kind of what we just talked about. I don't care what some man has to say.

I care what God has told me. All I care about is what God's truth is, how he's made the world. I'm trying to think God's thoughts after him.

I'm not trying to listen to what a man has said. So don't take Zach's word for it. Cause he wrote some article only judge what Zach has said, right? If it's according to God's word and guess what? It's actually very difficult.

Everything that God, everything that Zach has said is very difficult. So that's kind of how I'm interpreting this. That's how I would look at revelation in 1915 and what's going on there.

Yeah. I think the only, I just thought of this phrasing while you were talking that kind of sums it up in terms of the sword from the mouth of Christ, which is going to slay the nations. Yeah.

Is you can put it as simply as this. That is the full application of God's word. Yeah.

Wow. That's good. Sola scriptura, tota scriptura to all of life.

God's word alone is God breathed. The Bible is the only thing that is God breathed. All of it is inspired.

So we take all of it and we apply it to every area of life. And I think that the way that we ought to think about apologetics is that we are applying the wisdom of God to the knowledge of men. That's good.

Area of knowledge in our lives to the intellectual realm. God is Lord there. Christ is Lord of the intellectual realm.

And so we are applying all of scripture to that area of life. And I think to the degree that we haven't done that, we haven't had success in this area up to now. But I think that because God used men like Bantill and Bonson, we are going to see this as it becomes more normative.

And I believe that it will be. We are going to see this give evangelism two legs, and it's going to start to walk. And it's going to start to run.

And it's going to start to take over the world. It's going to strike down the nations like the promise says. That's good.

Amen, brother. Well, I'll end with Proverbs 25. Zach, thanks so much, brother, for coming on and walking through that with us.

And guys, please go read his article on SpeakingBasicTruth.wordpress.com. I'll link it in the show notes. And yeah, please go check that out and support Zach. Zach's got a lot of good knowledge that God has part in.

I'm thankful for this, brother. And I'll end with this right here. Proverbs 25.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter. Let's live like kings. Let's search out what God has revealed to us in His word.

And let's apply it to all of life as Zach is just exhorting us to do. So thanks for listening, guys, to the King of the Ages, the mortal, the visible, the only God, the honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Solely, day-o, glory.

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