In Light of the Gospel

Anytime a new book comes out on presuppositionalism, I am interested. Even more so when the book is by the late Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995). P&R recently printed Greg Bahnsen’s Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended (314 pages), edited by Joel McDurmon. I wasn’t sure if the contents were new or not, but come to find out this book is a manuscript of Dr. Bahnsen’s that was lost until recently. Thanks to Covenant Media Foundation and American Vision for doing all the work to get this published.

The first part (130 pages) is a positive case for presuppositional apologetics. Bahnsen analyzes issues related to the Christian mind, apologetic method, neutrality, and autonomy. The second part (132 pages) examines those who critiqued presuppositionalism: Gordon Clark, Edward J. Carnell, and Francis Schaeffer.

John Frame says,

“This book is an important part of the historical record. It is authentic Bahnsen, vintage Bahnsen. It displays brilliantly his intellectual gifts and his devotion to the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life. Despite my differences with Bahnsen, I revere him yet today as a great blessing of God to the church and as one of the most brilliant apologists I have known. He seeks to set forth the comprehensive lordship of Christ over the human mind as over everything else, and he does that effectively. In that goal, we should all be in agreement, and we should seek Bahnsen’s help to become more consistent in our commitment to the Lord. So I commend this book to all who seek to think God’s thoughts after him.”

You can purchase it here, as well as view some sample pages.

Back when Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens at Christianity Today, I posted some of my thoughts on the debate and the way Wilson was handling presuppositionalism. I have collected the links to those posts below:

• Wilson introduces presuppositionalism to Hitchens
• Presuppositionalism 102
• Responses to Wilson vs. Hitchens
• Wilson & Hitchens, Part 3
• Wilson & Hitchens, Part 4
• Wilson & Hitchens, Part 5
• Wilson & Hitchens, Part 6

If you are interested in presuppositionalism, there are a few places to start. Richard Pratt has a great little introductory book on defending the faith that helps to introduce some of these concepts (Every Thought Captive), and John Frame has an introductory apologetics book titled Apologetics to the Glory of God. In terms of debating, I think the best one I have ever heard was the “Great Debate” between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein. Listening to this helped me pull together several different threads of presuppositionalism. If you have never read Cornelius Van Til, I suggest you start with his article “Why I Believe in God.” If you want to jump straight into a book, the recent 4th edition of his book In Defense of the Faith is the place to start. This edition has been revised and annotated by K. Scott Oliphint, professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary (PA). Finally, Greg Bahnsen’s book Van Til’s Apologetics: Readings and Analysis is the most comprehensive book on Van Til and the place to see it all worked out.

This post is a little late in coming because I was out of town last week without a good connection to the internet. The final installment of the Wilson & Hitchens debate is online. PhilGons has some collected information on the debate here. I discovered that Hitchens’ own brother has thrown his thoughts into the discussion concerning his brother’s book here.

Wilson has been pressing Hitchens to give a warrant for his belief and his convictions, and Hitchens should provide this. He has blasted the Christian faith and doesn’t think it is good for the world, and Wilson’s point is to show Hitchens that he [Hitchens] doesn’t even have a reference point for good. How do you define good if you don’t believe in God and the standard that God provides? Good is simply Hitchens’ opinion because he has no standard outside of himself to provide a warrant for what he calls good and what he calls bad. This is fundamentally important, and Wilson did a good job of working on this throughout the debate.

My final thoughts on this debate [right now] concern what I believe to be the road toward preaching the gospel to Hitchens. Wilson appealed to Hitchens’ baptism: “I noted from your book that you are a baptized Christian, so I want to conclude by calling and inviting you back to the terms of that baptism.”

This is important. Hitchens is not simply a pagan, but he has been baptized and at one point was connected to the church. We should pray that Wilson’s appeal to Hitchens here caught him off guard with something that Hitchens had not thought about before this debate.

I am glad Wilson did this, and I agree that Baptism must mean something and it is a mark upon us. Anyone who has been baptized has been marked, and they have the responsibility to live out of that identity and that baptism because baptism points us to the death and resurrection of life. I like the fact that Wilson used this, but I am not sure I like the way Wilson used it. The concepts of identity and story were left out of the discussion.

I think the post here is right in that Wilson should have used this in terms not only of obligations but also of Hitchens [lost] identity [if you follow the link, be sure to read the comments]. Wilson only uses baptism in terms of obligations, but baptism speaks of an identity. Wilson had an opportunity here to speak to Hitchens about the identity of a Christian in Christ and the life Hitchens left behind [which he might not completely understand]; that his baptism speaks of a better country, that he turned his back on this heavenly country and this heavenly hope [Hebrews 11:13-16]. I think this side of baptism should have been mentioned in terms of what Hitchens lost.

And Wilson might have thought he did this because his last paragraph is full of the language about this, but he should have tied to baptism. Jesus brings about a new history and a new humanity and a new way of being human. Hitchens has turned his back upon not the obligations but the great and glorious future of the kingdom of God. This would have been the perfect opportunity to preach the gospel directly to Hitchens in terms of his baptism and his identity and what that should have meant. Yes, there are obligations. Yes, there are stipulations. Yes, there are serious warnings: “How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” [Hebrews 10:29]. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God [Hebrews 10:31].

But there is glory in baptism because it points to the new creation through Christ.

I am glad Wilson spoke of baptism, but limiting it to the obligations of the covenant does not display force of baptism that seems to be speaking to us in the Scriptures. When you turn your back on Christ [and your identification with Him in Baptism], you turn your back on the hope of the world.

Wilson has said that the penultimate exchange is now online here. This is probably a good thing because I still do not think that Hitchens has answered Wilson’s question concerning “warrant,” and I am not sure he will [see the end of this post for Michael Novak's article]. Wilson says as much in the first paragraph:

I have been asking you to provide a warrant for morality, given atheism, and you have mostly responded with assertions that atheists can make what some people call moral choices. Well, sure. But what I have been after is what rational warrant they can give for calling one choice “moral” and another choice “not moral.” You finally appealed to “innate human solidarity,” a phrase that prompted a series of pointed questions from me. In response, you now tell us that we have an innate predisposition to both good and wicked behavior. But we are still stuck. What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors “good” and others “wicked.” If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin?

I think this is where the debate will have to stay (unless Hitchens decides to answer the question of warrant). I personally enjoyed Wilson’s evidence for his claim that Jesus is good for the world because he is the life of the world. Hitchens said, “You cannot possibly ‘know’ this. Nor can you present any evidence for it.” Wilson is going to give the evidence, but he provides a brief reminder that evidence must be seen within the proper worldview and reasons for its existence [I actually enjoyed the food analogy]. In other words, a reminder that there are not “brute facts.” Nevertheless, here is Wilson’s evidence:

The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he said. A woman’s neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the miry clay, and established forever on the rock.

And then the challenge of faith:

You may say none of this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say grace over all of it. Try it that way.

I actually agree with Michael Novak here [his review of Hitchens' God is Not Great] that Hitchens is a treasure, a very useful atheist, but for some reason he is not at his best when dealing with God. Novak says,

But this time it is a bit disappointing to find so much hostility and so many — unusually many — intellectual missteps in his latest tirade (not his first) against religion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

For something peculiar happens to Hitchens when he wrestles against God with murderous intent. Hitchens always loses (and may secretly suspect that). Preposterous as this seems, one senses he may fear that one day he will wake up and see it all plainly, right before his eyes. Otherwise, why year after year keep striking another stake in the heart of God?

And, later:

Engaged in polemics, atheists like to do two things, which certainly Hitchens does. The first is to make fun of believers on every matter possible, even when that requires outrageous misstatements of fact and employs such clumsy logic as they would mock in others. The second is to generate as many incoherencies in the faith of believers as their fertile minds can make up. Hitchens is in our time one of the great masters of mockery and satire. He out-pains Tom Paine, the same Thomas Paine, mocker of the Bible-toting, who endured imprisonment in France after 1789, forewarning the Jacobins that their atheism would cut the ground out from under their declared human rights. In moral heroism, standing up against angry mobs, Hitchens is often Paine’s equal, just as, like Paine, Hitchens seems quite annoyed by Him in Whom he does not believe.

 Read Novak’s whole article, and check out the post over at Insight Scoop [where I found the link to the article and the long quote]. Carl Olson has a lot more to say about the matter.

The fourth installment of the debate is online here. This debate is getting rather frustrating. In my opinion [I am a Christian and a presuppositionalist-so take the opinion with that in mind], Hitchens has not taken the time to move past his own approach to “religion” or Christianity to even consider what Wilson is doing or how he is arguing. Setting aside whether Wilson is actually giving too much ground [which I have read from some analytical philosophers], Wilson is dealing with the issue of presuppositions, or to use an analytical term, “warrant.” I am beginning to wonder if Hitchens will give any warrant for his belief.

Look in this current installment. At one point Hitchens comes close to answering Wilson’s question about mortality by saying, “When you say that men have never known nor yet understood the essential principle, however, you speak absurdly. Ordinary morality is innate in my view.” Hitchens completely missed the point. First, Wilson didn’t say that mankind doesn’t know how to live. Instead, he said that mankind cannot provide a basis for morality given their own worldview [an unbelieving worldview]. Second, Hitchens actually says that “Ordinary morality is innate in my view.” This is what Wilson goes back to deal with, and this is at the heart of the issue. 

First,  Wilson reminds him that he [Hitchens] has been something of a moralistic prophet against religion:

Your book and your installments in this debate thus far are filled with fierce denunciations of various manifestations of immorality…Why should anyone listen to your jeremiads against weirdbeards in the Middle East or fundamentalist Baptists from Virginia like Falwell? On your terms, you are just a random collection of protoplasm, noisier than most, but no more authoritative than any—which is to say, not at all.

So the problem is that Hitchens wants to denounce certain types of immorality and religious commitment. Why should I listen to him? What is his basis for telling me to stop behaving this way?

Wilson outlines Hitchens three problems.

1. Innate does not equal authoritative; Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within?
2. Millions of humans have a different innate and conflicting morality than that of Hitchens. Why does Hitchens speak of his convictions and tell us how we must behave?
3. The issue of change within creatures as connected to Hitchens own view of evolution.

Here is Wilson’s quote for the third issue:

You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?

This is an important point. If morality is innate, and if we believe in evolution [which Hitchens does], then what about when that innate sense changes. Is it ok for a mother to eat her young if our innate sense changes again?

Wilson then closes the exchange with a reminder of the purpose of this debate and the hope found in the gospel. Is Christianity good for the world? Wilson’s point has been to show that an atheist cannot speak to whether something is good or not. Here is the statement:

If Christianity is bad for the world, atheists can’t consistently point this out, having no fixed way of defining “bad.” If Christianity is good for the world, atheists should not be asked about it either because they have no way of defining “good.”

This however is not the case for Christians. We believe in goodness because God has revealed it to us, and “goodness” is bound up in God’s nature. God reveals this to us through Jesus Christ. In Wilson’s words, Jesus Christ is good for the world because he came as the life of the world.

The third installment of the Wilson and Hitchens’ debate is on-line here. I am really quite surprised that someone of Hitchens’ caliber intellectually [and I mean that seriously] continues to miss the fundamental issue Wilson keeps bringing up concerning presuppositions. Wilson says,

We are talking about (or, more accurately, I am trying to talk about) whether or not atheism provides any rational basis for rational condemnation when others decide to misbehave this way. You keep saying, “I have come to my ethical position.” I keep asking, “Yes, quite. But why did you do so?”

It is that last point that Hitchens continues to miss: why did you come to your ethical position? What is the ground of it? What is surprising is that Hitchens has not caught on to Wilson’s point concerning presuppositions. Oh, the importance of knowing your presuppositions.

I’ve been reflecting upon the gospel and the nature of presuppositional apologetics during this debate. I have read a few comments that presuppositionalism does not provide the best presentation of the gospel. If that is the case, I would have to ask, “What is your definition of the gospel?”

If the definition of the gospel is simply telling someone about the forgiveness of sins through the death and resurrection of Christ, then we have a failure to understand the comprehensiveness of the gospel. Don’t misunderstand me here; I believe in speaking of the death and resurrection of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins [and everything else that means], but Jesus came preaching the good news/gospel of the Kingdom of God [Mark 1:14-15], and the gospel of the kingdom includes something we call the “new creation.”

Now what does that have to do with presuppositionalism? It concerns the issue of how presuppositionalism sets forth a positive case gospel. I was introduced to both biblical theology and apologetics by Dr. William Dennison of Covenant College (and Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at NWTS). Dr. Dennison’s book Paul’s Two-Age Construction and Apologetics was crucial for me in understanding Van Til, presuppositionalism, and Geerhardus Vos’s influence on Van Til. he also helped me to see how presuppositionalism sets forth the gospel. He says in his conclusion:

“Thus, the Christian two age apologetic defends the all-inclusive Kingdom of heaven, the Wisdom of God, the way of the Spirit, and the full-orbed eschatological message of the gospel (age to come) against the all-inclusive Kingdom of Satan, the wisdom of the world, the ways of the flesh, and the foolishness of unbelief (present evil age).” (p. 100)

This is fundamental to presuppositionalism and to apologetics. We are called to make a defense of the age to come against this present evil age. We are called to defend the eschatological message of the gospel. As Wilson moves through this debate he is defending the “full-orbed” message of the gospel and the ways of God. Notice Wilson’s comments,

I would like to do all this in order to set the stage for our unfolding discussion of the central reason why Christianity is good for the world—it is good for the world because Jesus died for the life of the world.

Now whether he pulls this off or not depends upon a number of issues, but everything in the debate is working toward that goal.

Or again, let’s go back to the issue of presuppositionalism and the gospel. Dennison [in the above mentioned book] also observes that an eschatological apologetic must be an an ecclesiastical apologetic because the believer must “defend the message of the church, not his personal religious experience or intellectual comprehension of the gospel. This ecclesiastical defense is expressed when the apologist makes his call to repentance and faith on the past of the unbeliever. It is not a call performed in abstraction to an isolated individual, rather it is a call to the unbeliever to find the meaning of his existence in the covenant body of Christ–the church” (pp. 103-104).

This is precisely what Wilson is doing. He is calling Hitchens to faith and repentance. In the last exchange, he was doing it through atheistic hypocrisy. By calling Hitchens to repentance, he is pointing him to true life–life in Christ’s church. Hitchens is living on borrowed knowledge–borrowed from God’s world and yet not acknowledged.

At the same time, Wilson is defending the church. That is why he engages, however briefly, with the confusion Hitchens presents concerning the law and the parable of the good Samaritan. But notice that Wilson does not let this distract him from the fundamental issue; he goes right back to the issue: presuppositions. Why? Because as he uncovers Hitchens’ presuppositions, he uncovers the unbelief in Hitchens’ worldview. That is the point of the discussion concerning “ethical imperatives.”

Hitchens briefly tried to explain the basis of his ethic by appealing to ethical imperatives and saying that they are “derived from innate human solidarity.” Really? The string of questions that Wilson presents shows that Hitchens cannot give an account of “innate human solidarity” when it comes to ethical imperatives. Wilson is forcing Hitchens to deal with his own [Hitchens] presuppositions, and by doing this, Wilson is unmasking his unbelief and hypocrisy. At the heart of this debate is a discussion of the gospel.

David L. Bahnsen remembers his favorite part of the “Great Debate.” I have reproduced it below:

Dr. Bahnsen: Are all factual questions answered in the same way?

Dr. Stein: No, they are not. They’re answered by the use of certain methods, though, that are the same – reason, logic, presenting evidence, and facts.

Dr. Bahnsen: All right. I heard you mention logical binds and logical self-contradictions in your speech. You did say that?

Dr. Stein: I said…I used that phrase, yes.

Dr. Bahnsen: Do you believe there are laws of logic, then?

Dr. Stein: Absolutely

Dr. Bahnsen: Are they universal?

Dr. Stein: They’re agreed upon by human beings. They aren’t laws that exist out in nature. They’re consensual.

Dr. Bahnsen: Are they simply conventions, then?

Dr. Stein: They are conventions, but they are conventions that are self-verifying

Dr. Bahnsen: Are they sociological laws or laws of thought?

Dr. Stein: They are laws of thought which are interpreted by men and promulgated by men.

Dr. Bahnsen: Are they material in nature?

Dr. Stein: How can a law be material in nature?

Dr. Bahnsen: That’s a question I am going to ask you

Dr. Stein: I would say no.

[MODERATOR: Dr. Stein, you now have an opportunity to cross-examine Dr. Bahnsen]

Dr. Stein: Dr. Bahnsen, would you call God material or immaterial?

Dr. Bahnsen: Immaterial

Dr. Stein: What is something that is immaterial?

Dr. Bahnsen: Something not extended in space

Dr. Stein: Can you give me an example of anything other than God that is immaterial?

Dr. Bahnsen: The laws of logic

[MODERATOR: I am going to have to ask the audience to hold it down please. Please. Refrain from laughter and applause. Can you hold that down please?]

[HT: Glenn Jones]

CT has posted the second part of the debate between Wilson and Hitchens here. I thought we would be able to move on to Presuppositionalism 201, but it seems we need another semester of the basics.

Hitchens completely disregarded Wilson’s questions and presuppositional analysis of his own [Hitchens] thought. He even failed to understand Wilson’s point. Now Wilson is going to come at it another way: through atheistic hypocrisy.

Now my question for you is this: Is there such a thing as atheist hypocrisy? When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying?

Wilson has backed Hitchens into a corner. Will he answer this question? Will he condemn the acts of Stalin or Mao? If he does, then why? As an atheist, he simply cannot agree to some “common objective standard” because it doesn’t make sense given his worldview. If he does condemn them, he is being a hypocrite. So Wilson concludes:

And if there is not a common objective standard which binds all atheists, then would it not appear that the supernatural is necessary in order to have a standard of morality that can be reasonably articulated and defended?

This argument by Wilson is really very important. He has moved to atheistic hypocrisy because he is moving toward the gospel. The business at hand is the issue of “intellectual repentance.” So Wilson is addressing his [Hitchens] need for repentance before addressing his need for Christ as Savior. The gospel is at work in presuppositionalism even from the beginning of the debate because presuppositionalism shows the contradictions of atheism, the hypocrisy of atheistic thought.

Then Wilson gives a brief reminder of presuppositionalism 101 and Hitchens intellectual responsibility:

So I am not saying you have to believe in the supernatural in order to live as a responsible citizen. I am saying you have to believe in the supernatural in order to be able to give a rational and coherent account of why you believe yourself obligated to live this way.

Of course you can live a morally upright and ethical life if you do not believe in the supernatural. That is not the purpose of this debate. This debate deals with intellectual and rational reasons why we do what we do. Hitchens cannot give a rational and coherent account of his behavior given his belief system. 

In conclusion, Wilson does exactly what he is asking Hitchens to do; Wilson gives a rational basis for the Christian faith. He is demonstrating true Christian love for his neighbor: providing an example to Hitchens of what he needs to do with his own intellectual thought.

The Christian faith is good for the world because it provides the fixed standard which atheism cannot provide and because it provides forgiveness for sins, which atheism cannot provide either. We need the direction of the standard because we are confused sinners. We need the forgiveness because we are guilty sinners. Atheism not only keeps the guilt, but it also keeps the confusion.

Tim Keller says in his article “Post-everythings” that presuppositionalism provides us with the tools we need to engage our culture with the gospel. The use of the gospel brings up another very important aspect of presuppositionalism.

One of the things I remember from Bahnsen’s debate [see previous post] is that he continued to challenge Stein’s unbelief.Arguing from the perspective of presuppositionalism gave Bahnsen the opportunity to present the gospel in a unique setting in order to explain belief and unbelief while calling for faith.

Notice how in the current “frank exchange of views” Wilson does not back away from his commitments in this debate in order to prove something about theism in general. He is concerned to demonstrate that Christian Trinitarianism is the only possible presupposition that can make sense of our experience in the world. In order to do that, he will challenge Hitchens with the gospel. Wilson says,

The second thing to observe in this regard is that Christians actually do not claim that the gospel has made the world better by bringing us turbo-charged ethical information…the world is not made better because people can understand the ways in which they are being bad. It has to be made better by Good News—we must receive the gift of forgiveness and the resultant ability to live more in conformity to a standard we already knew (but were necessarily failing to meet). So the gospel does not consist of new and improved law. The gospel makes the world better through Good News, not through guilt trips or good advice.

If I might use the title of my blog, Wilson is showing Hitchens that everything changes “in light of the gospel.” We pray that God might change Hitchens heart as well.

When I was studying philosophy during my undergraduate days, I would not be exaggerating to say that Cornelius Van Til [see the Van Til web-site] and his apologetic known as persuppositionalism literally saved my convictions (and faith) on several occasions. During struggles with both theory and faith, many of Van Til’s arguments for the Christian faith were very influential in developing my “worldview.”

In the process of studying presuppositionalism, Greg Bahnsen’s introductory book on presuppositionalism is a great place to start, but be sure to move on to his large book on Van Til’s apologetics because it is as comprehensive as they come. At the risk of frustrating some, I might as well admit that I benefited from John Frame’s book on apologetics and Van Til .

One of the more helpful resources in pulling some of the loose threads together and seeing how it works practically is the so-called “Great Debate” between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein. This was the first time I had heard someone use presuppositionalism in a debate format, and Bahnsen did it as well as anyone else.

Now you can see it worked out practically in the current debate between Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens over at Christianity Today. In this first round, Wilson is giving Hitchens an introduction to the basics of presuppositionalism. He is forcing Hitchens to come to terms with his own [i.e., Hitchens] presuppositions, and Wilson is pointing out each step along the way how Hitchens cannot make the claims he is making given his own worldview.

Notice a few of Wilson’s questions:

But why should this “damnation by history” matter to any of us reading Bible stories to kids, or, for that matter, to any of the people who did any of these atrocious things, on your principles?

Or again, Wilson says,

On your principles, why should he care?

Now notice the wave of questions at the end of Wilson’s exchange:

Given your atheism, what account are you able to give that would require us to respect the individual? How does this individualism of yours flow from the premises of atheism? Why should anyone in the outside world respect the details of your thought life any more than they respect the internal churnings of any other given chemical reaction? That’s all our thoughts are, isn’t that right? Or, if there is a distinction, could you show how the premises of your atheism might produce such a distinction?

Wilson is forcing Hitchens to come to terms with his own presuppositions, and Wilson is going to argue that Hitchens cannot give a satisfactory answers to these questions without borrowing from the Christian worldview.

Let us attend to Presuppositionalism 101.