Knowledge of God must be rooted in His own self-disclosure.
Page 4
Human understanding can never be made the verification of faith since without faith there is no proper understanding available to man whereby he might judge. As Augustine well said, “I believe in order to understand.
Page 10
However, we must not defend our message—that Christ’s word is self-attesting and possessing the ultimate authority of the Lord—with a method that works counter to it—by claiming an ultimate epistemological standard outside of Christ’s word of truth. The final criterion for the Christian in every department of his thinking (theology and philosophy, proclamation and defense) is the self-attesting word of God.
Page 12
Consequently, we must not be satisfied to present Christianity as the most reasonable position to hold among the competing options available to men.
Page 13
The traditional method … is based on the assumption that man has some measure of autonomy, that the space-time world is in some measure “contingent” and that man must create for himself his own epistemology in an ultimate sense.
13
The traditional method was concessive on these basic points on which it should have demanded surrender! As such, it was always self-frustrating. The traditional method had explicitly built into it the right and ability of the natural man, apart from the work of the Spirit of God, to be the judge of the claim of the authoritative Word of God. It is man who, by means of his self-established intellectual tools, puts his “stamp of approval” on the Word of God and then, only after that grand act, does he listen to it. God’s Word must first pass man’s tests of good and evil, truth and falsity. But once you tell a non-Christian this, why should he be worried by anything else that you say. [sic] You have already told him he is quite all right just the way he is! Then Scripture is not correct when it talks of “darkened minds,” “wilful ignorance,” “dead men,” and “blind people”! With this method the correctness of the natural man’s problematics is endorsed. That is all he needs to reject the Christian faith
Page 13-14
In the nature of the case, apologetics requires that we argue with the unbeliever in terms of each other’s most basic assumptions. We must challenge each other’s final standards.
Page 14
The fall did not take away his reasoning and moral decision-making; it removed their perfection, giving them a new perverted direction. Refusing to be subject to God’s authority and word, the sinner no longer attempts to receptively reconstruct the truth about God and the world, refuses to see the facts as controlled and interpreted by God, and makes himself the ultimate judge of truth. Therefore, the restoration of man to fellowship with God and to constructive use of his capacities requires God’s gracious redemption, which is communicated to us by special revelation in Scripture. All of reality (every aspect thereof) must now be seen correctively through the instruction of Scripture. To refuse to see things through these gracious spectacles is to destroy the intelligibility of man’s experience and to undermine his knowledge; it is to insist on foolishness and blindness.
Page 16
Pretending to be autonomous, the self-sufficient judge of truth, the unbeliever has in fact been dependent of God and His revelation all along. In his heart he has had to believe what he professed to disbelieve with his mouth.
Page 18
A man who holds a basketball under water may deny that he knows anything at all about the truth of basketballs, but the truth keeps exerting its pressure on him! He both possesses the basketball and denies it; yet if he would cease from hindering it, the truth which he possessed all along would surface. So it goes with all intellectual rebels against the truth of God; they inwardly know the truth, but do not have a genuine or proper knowledge since they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They know enough to be responsible, but they do not know in a way that will secure their salvation. Paul teaches both aspects of man’s condition in Romans 1, and our defense of the faith before the unbeliever must take account of, and respond accordingly, to each aspect.
Page 42-43
Our apologetic appeals to what the sinner knows in his heart of hearts. It does not begin with or build upon what the sinner professes with darkened mind and vain reasoning.
Page 46
Without the Word of Christ there is no theoretic basis for logic, history, or science; so when the unbeliever fights against the gospel he is working toward ruining his very tools of destruction! His “wisdom” becomes folly.
Page 49
Intellectual credibility can be maintained only by presupposing the Word of God.
Page 49
He must not assume that God’s Word needs to be proven or shown to be probably correct on the basis of independent scholarly research and autonomous standards of credibility. The defender of the faith must not surrender to the attacks upon God’s Word from unbelievers, and so he must not give in to their improper demands that the Christian satisfy their rebellious minds as to the Scripture’s veracity.
Page 56
To bow to the Word of Christ as a theologian but assume that it must be proven true as an apologist is simply hypocrisy.
Page 60
When the Christian claims to justify his beliefs by reference to God’s authoritative revelation the autonomous man demands proof of God’s Word, in essence demanding that God’s authority be subjected to the authority of the rational man. Obviously if the Christian’s appeal to authority was illegitimate, so also is the autonomous man’s appeal to authority. He falls beneath his own criticism.
Page 101-102
But in that coming day the unbeliever will cease to be schizophrenic and will fully become what he continually strived to be, but as yet could not be—completely independent of God. This will be hell.
Page 116
The Christian accepts as “verification” and “admissible evidence” what God’s Word, not the sinner, tells him.
Page 126
When the Christian speaks apologetically to the skeptic he does so with one view in mind: accurately and fully to set before him the truth of God with hope of seeing the unbeliever converted.
Page 129-130
By reasoning impartially with the skeptic and appealing to the ability of his mind to acquire the truth on his own principles and to reason meaningfully, that is, by not taking a firm presuppositional stance and challenging the sinner’s autonomy (but rather catering to it), we would allow the unregenerate to believe a lie in order that he come to acknowledge the truth!
Page 130-131
The very notion of proving God’s existence is inherently misguided; God alone is adequate to witness to Himself. All of man’s interpretative and discursive reasoning must be self-consciously subordinated to God and the authoritative direction of His Word.
Page 154
When we call the Bible into question, we call God into question.
Page 157
The natural man with his God-given reason has an amazing power to “exchange the truth of God for a lie,” and yet keep his system consistent. He may have to deny some “facts” to do so, but it seems he does not mind denying as “meaningless” whatever does not fit his logic.
Page 167
The only adequate defense is not to try and meet the antagonist point for point but to show him that he must assume the Christian position even to argue against it.
Page 207
This God exists exclusively in terms of Himself, needing nothing over against which He must identify Himself, being subject to neither temporal limitations nor spatial requirements, and requiring no test of internal consistency against principles of logic—nothing is more ultimate than this divine Person (neither non-being, time, space, nor logic).
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