Apologetics in the Reformation and Modern Periods

I.        John Calvin (1505–1564)

A.    Within every person is a sense of deity. Thus, knowledge of God is possessed by everyone.

B.     All people have an innate knowledge of God and His righteous moral law.

C.     Depravity obscures the natural revelation of God.

D.    If the unbeliever is to be converted God must work through both special revelation (Bible) and the testimony of the Holy Spirit.

E.     Calvin believed in the comprehensiveness of revelation. As Frame states, “Calvin’s view of divine sovereignty enables him for the first time clearly to declare all things wholly revelational of God. Since God’s plan alone determines nature, history and individual life, God is clearly revealed in all of these areas. Thus Calvin opens the full range of created reality to apologetics. All facts are evidence for God, not merely the facts of causality, teleology, etc.” (Frame, “Apologetic Method: History and Current Discussion,” 12–13).

II.     Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

A.    Pascal is known as a fideist although some have argued that he was not.

B.     He believed it was a sign of weakness to try to prove God from nature.

C.     Pascal, who had developed the mathematics of probability in relation to gambling activities such as dice, applied the idea of a “wager” to belief in the existence of God. According to Pascal, it was better for a person to wager in favor of God’s existence than to bet on the opposite idea that God did not exist. Why? The answer is related to the consequences of each option.  If a person wagers on God’s existence and it ends up being true that God does indeed exist, then that person will inherit eternal life. If the end result is that God does not exist, though, then the believer loses little. He merely ceases to exist. On the other hand, if a person chooses to not believe in God and God does exist, then that person will suffer the horrible consequences of eternal punishment in hell. For Pascal, then, the choice was clear. If you are undecided as to whether to believe in God or not, the smart wager is to bet on God’s existence.

D.    Pascal also listed twelve “proofs” for Christianity:

1.      the Christian religion, by the fact of being established so firmly and so gently, though so contrary to nature

2.      the holiness, sublimity, and humility of a Christian soul

3.      the miracles of holy Scripture

4.      Jesus Christ in particular

5.      The apostles in particular

6.      Moses and the prophets in particular

7.      the Jewish people

8.      prophecies

9.      perpetuity; no religion enjoys perpetuity

10.  doctrine; accounting for everything

11.  the holiness of this law, and

12.  the order of the world (Pascal, no. 482).

III.   Joseph Butler (1692–1752)

A.    Butler was born to a Presbyterian family but became an Anglican bishop with Arminian theology.

B.     In his Analogy of Religion (1736), Butler defended Christianity against Deism.

C.     He argued for the probability of miracles.

IV.  William Paley (1743–1805)

A.    Paley addressed the two central areas of traditional apologetics—the existence of God and the truth of Christianity.

B.     Paley offered what has become the classic formulation of the teleological argument. In doing so, he offered the famous analogy of the watch. Just as a watch evidences signs of a designer, the universe, which is much more complex than a watch, also shows evidence of a designer—namely God.

C.     He also contributed to the cosmological argument by claiming that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. In other words, the series of causes that brought our world into existence cannot be infinite. There must, by necessity, be an uncaused cause that started the chain reaction of causes in the universe. This uncaused cause is God.

D.    Paley countered David Hume’s contention that miracles are impossible.

E.     “Paley’s arguments for God and for Christianity still provide the backbone for much of contemporary apologetics” (Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics, 575).

V.    Thomas Reid (1710–1796)

A.    Reid was the founder of Common Sense Philosophy which was primarily a reaction to the skeptical philosophy of David Hume.

B.     Reid argued that knowledge of the external world is possible.

VI.  Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

A.    Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish religious philosopher who by stressing individual freedom and the subjective nature of truth became known as the “father of existentialism.”

B.     He argued that there is no rational and evidential support for the Christian faith.

C.     There is no evidence for belief in God. Belief in God is solely a matter of faith.

D.    Kierkegaard was interested in freedom and individual existence. He held that people have many life options to choose from, but they must decide for themselves which path to commit to. Thus, he advocated the “leap of faith” in which a person makes a passionate commitment to something without having objective certainty about it. For Kierkegaard, the “leap of faith” was a passionate choice to believe in the Christian God apart from evidence that this God existed. This concept of the “leap of faith” is akin to fideism, which is belief in something apart from reason or rational proofs.        

VII.           Gordon Clark (1902–1985)

A.    Clark was a rational presuppositionalist.

B.     Clark took the triune God of the Bible as his presuppositional starting point.

C.     His test for truth was the law of noncontradiction.

D.    He was an empirical skeptic agreeing with David Hume that the senses are deceptive and cannot be trusted. Nothing can be proven empirically.

E.     Every person is in epistemological darkness apart from divine illumination. Apart from divine revelation we cannot even be sure that we exist.

F.      Clark denied the validity of traditional apologetics. Even if we know that a miracle has happened, we cannot know the meaning of that miracle. Jesus’ resurrection may show that his body is alive again but it cannot prove that Jesus died for our sins or that He was the Son of God.

G.    According to Clark, Christianity is true because it alone is free from internal contradictions in its truth claims (Geisler, 151). All opposing religions and worldviews have contradictory beliefs that disqualify them.

H.    Clark rejected traditional arguments for the existence of God like the cosmological argument.

I.        Clark believed that common ground could be found with unbelievers. This common ground includes the laws of logic and a few divine truths that unbelievers know because of the image of God within them. Reason, thus, is a point of common ground between the believer and unbeliever.

VIII.          Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987)

A.    Van Til believed there were serious problems with traditional apologetics. Traditional apologetics compromises God by arguing that God’s existence is “probable” instead of ontologically and rationally necessary.

B.     Van Til thus promoted a presuppositional approach to apologetics in which the Christian presupposes a triune God and His redemptive plan as set forth in the Bible.

For Van Til, “All facts must be interpreted within the framework of the presupposed Christian worldview revealed in the Bible or they are tainted by their rejection of God’s revelation” (Geisler, 754).

C.     “The task of Christian apologetics is not to try to discover some neutral, common ground on which the believer and the unbeliever may both stand. For this fails to appreciate that the unbeliever is already aware of God’s existence and his own responsibility before God. The task is to force him to face up to this and to show that there are no legitimate escape routes. In other words, it is to lay bear the presuppositions of our thinking” (Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, 248).

D.    Van Til believed in the validity of some historic evidences for Christianity but only from the presupposition of biblical revelation (Geisler, 755).

IX.  C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)

A.    Arguably, Lewis was the most influential Christian apologist of the twentieth century because of the vast influence of his books.

B.     Lewis offered a compelling defense of the moral law argument for God’s existence. According to Lewis, there must be an objective, universal moral law. Without one no ethical judgments or decisions make sense.  Without one nothing could be called “evil” or “wrong.” A Moral Law Giver is the ultimate source and standard of all right and wrong (see Geisler, 421).

C.     Lewis also offered a defense of the traditional concept of God in light of the problem of evil. For him, evil came about through free choice.

D.    Like Augustine and Aquinas, Lewis held that evil is not a substance that exists in itself. Instead, evil is the corruption of good.

E.     Lewis defended the concept of miracles and offered one of the best critiques of naturalism.

X.     Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) 

A.    Schaeffer studied under Van Til and had presuppositional elements in his apologetic methodology.

B.     Like Van Til, Schaeffer’s presuppositional starting point was the triune God as revealed in the Bible.

C.     Schaeffer tried to show that non-Christian worldviews were unlivable. Only Christian presuppositions can be lived out consistently.

D.    Schaeffer believed that Christians have common ground with unbelievers. Because we are all made in the image of God both believers and unbelievers share moral and rational absolutes.

E.     The law of noncontradiction was important to Schaeffer’s approach. This law does not come from Aristotle but from humans being made in the image of God (Geisler, 686).

F.      Schaeffer rejected classical apologetics.

XI.  Alvin Plantinga (1932– )

A.    According to Plantinga, both theistic and Christian belief is warrantedly basic. It is rational to believe in God without argument.

B.     Why must Christians prove their convictions based on principles accepted by non-Christians?

C.     Plantinga’s views are linked with Reformed epistemology.