Knowledge and Love

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’ve been going through 1 Corinthians 13 lately and tonight, I’d like to look at one of my favorite topics as an apologist, and that is the topic of knowledge. After all, for many of us, our books are our life’s blood. A Seminary professor’s wife I know once stated in a talk to women whose husbands were in Seminary “Make peace with the books.” Books mean everything to us.

The relevant part of 1 Cor. 13:2 tonight tells us that if we can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge but don’t have love, we are nothing. Now consider that if you are of the apologetic mindset. Paul refers to many things in the Bible as mysteries. These could not be understood without divine revelation. Note that he doesn’t mean it in the sense in which a pastor often asked how God can be three and one says “It’s a mystery” instead of giving an answer that He is three in one sense and one in another.

Imagine having that spiritual insight that when Paul speaks about a mystery, you could say that you knew it all along. You were able to divine that before the revelation was given. Paul wants you to realize that even if you could do that, if you did not have love, you are nothing.

What about if you have all knowledge? Now Paul does say in 1 Corinthians 8:1 that knowledge puffs up. The solution to this is not to cast aside knowledge but to gain humility in addition to knowledge. Sadly, this knowledge can often come across in the form of spirituality. After all, I know what God approves and disapproves of and I am a better Christian than you for doing what he approves and not doing what he does not approve.

In the apologetics community however, it’s easy to think that you have to answer every objection out there. It’s tempting to see other people as a threat. We have to avoid that. We also have to realize that just because someone knows a lot about God, it does not mean that they really know God. The love of God is more than intellectual knowledge, although it is certainly helped by such knowledge. The more you love something, the more you will want to know about that something.

C.S. Lewis wrote about how it can be to look at the woman in church who is a little old lady and think about what an impoverished life she lives not knowing about such things as the Nicene Creed or the Calvinism/Arminianism debate or who Irenaeus and Justin Martyr were, but then you realize that in her prayer life and devotion to God overall, you are not worthy to untie her sandals, it brings a humility to you. Let us never make the mistake of thinking that being a better Christian apologist means that we are a better Christian.

Now I’m not saying that this lady would not be blessed by knowing about the Nicene Creed and such. In fact, I think she should seek to know about them, but she does not have to be an intellectual. Not all Christians are of that kind of mindset. That is fine. Each has their own part to play.

For instance, in our household, I am the intellectual. My wife is smarter than she realizes, but her bent is more towards matters of the heart. That is fine. She helps me in many ways by seeing things from a layman’s perspective that I often miss and by being a strong encouragement and fortification for me.

Is knowledge important? Absolutely. Knowledge is not love and if we do not have our knowledge with love, we essentially have nothing.

We shall look at the next part next time.

Prophecy and Love

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’ve decided to take us on a tour lately of 1 Corinthians 13 and see what this magnificently beautiful chapter has to say about love. My wife knows that one of my prayer requests every night is to understand this chapter. Tonight, I’d like to look at the first part of verse 2. It raises the point about having the gift of prophecy.

What do we know about Paul and his view of prophecy? Paul was abundantly clear that prophecy was the greatest of the gifts and he advised the church to seek prophecy. Moses in the Old Testament had a wish that all of God’s people could be prophets and in the New Testament we see at Pentecost the start of the fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel as to the pouring out of the Spirit would mean that people would prophesy.

Now we’re not going to get to the end of the verse tonight, but Paul’s point here is that if one has prophecy, but they do not have love, then they are nothing. Note that he is not saying that he has nothing. He is saying that he himself is nothing. As important as prophecy was to Paul, love was far more important.

What was prophecy? Today, we can often think of prophecy as simply foretelling the future. To an extent, that did happen in prophecy in the Old Testament especially, but it was not always that. Much of prophecy in the Old Testament is the exhorting of the people to righteousness. It was not so much telling the future as it was giving commentary on the present.

In the New Testament, the closest role could be to that of a pastor. Because someone was a prophet, it did not mean that they were telling the future. It could mean that they possessed a key insight into the message of God at the time and knew how to apply it to the lives of the people. After all, it is doubtful following the rules of 1 Cor. 14 that God would give one prophecy to one person only to have them sit down when He decided to give another prophecy to a different one.

Paul values prophecy because it is involving the proclamation of the gospel. Tongues would be seen as a means of conveying the gospel, but prophecy would be seen as having to do with the content of the gospel. Paul was grateful to God that he had the ability to prophesy. Of course, being an apostle, he did such on a far greater scale, yet at the same time differentiated. In 1 Cor. 7, we find him making a distinction between what he says and what the Lord says. If anyone could say “Thus sayeth the Lord” surely Paul could, but he did no such thing. He simply pointed to his authority as an apostle and we trust today that God did guide this fine evangelist in what he said.

Let us not skip over this part however. Remember what Paul says about prophecy and look at what he says about it after this chapter and what is his conclusion? IF you have prophecy, but you do not have love, you are nothing. You’re not worth talking about. No one should take you seriously at all.

Let us keep this in mind as we pursue what love really is.

Tongues of Love

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’m going to be continuing again our look at 1 Cor. 13. Last night, I wrote on how agape is the kind of love being discussed in this passage. What is agape exactly? Before he gets to what it is, Paul wants us to know how valuable it is. Often times, I fear some of us can be so eager to get to the latter part which describes love and then get to the ending part with so many great quotes we regularly use, that we miss the gravity of what has been said here.

The text is as follows:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

The text is straightforward enough, but what is being said? Let us consider the surrounding context. Paul has been talking about spiritual gifts and one that has been a hotbed of controversy is the gift of tongues. For now, let us lay aside what we think the gift of tongues is. Whatever it is, we can all agree it is a gift and all sides I know of believe it contains with it a way of speaking another language or understanding another language, be it an earthly language or a prayer language.

Let us suppose that someone has this gift, to which Paul himself later says that he does. Note that in Paul’s time, oratory ability was highly valued. There were several rules for speaking and one needed to be a good speaker in order to get the point across. Paul does the same in his epistles as well as there was a proper rhetoric to follow when giving an argument.

Many of us have experienced today the idea of being dazzled by a speaker and while we cannot really tell what they said, they sure sound persuasive. Politicians try to specialize in this wanting to get an audience caught up in an emotion rather than address the arguments that they put forward. Sadly, a lot of preachers do this as well thinking that a lot of emotion in place of a good point is enough to spur people to Christlikeness and shows that their message is from the Holy Spirit.

In saying that, I am not against rhetoric. I do believe that talks ought to be presented in a way to be persuasive. I believe there is a great importance in emotional appeal, thus there is no reason to decide someone does not know what they are talking about simply because there is great emotion there. There is also no reason to they they know what they’re talking about because they lack great emotion.

However, what Paul is saying is to picture that you are a great speaker in some way and you do have the gift of tongues, even if you could communicate with the tongues of angels. Paul says that if you do not have love while you have that gift, then you are simply making noise.

Consider the magnitude of this. This was a gift that the Corinthians were taking pride in. They were vaunting their spirituality by this gift and what does Paul say about it? “You’ve got the gift? Well congrats. But you don’t have love, so you’re just making noise. Nothing good will come of it.”

What does that say to us today? It tells us that we don’t want to be just making noise either. Now I believe in our evangelism there is a time to be tough and a time to be soft, but there is never a time to not have the love of Christ in what we say. In our talks, we need to be persuasive and prepared, but we must have love. It is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we could spend hours upon hours talking, and we would simply be making noise.

What else has Paul to say about the importance of love? That is for next time.

Agape

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve lately been looking at 1 Corinthians 13 and love. In discussing the four type of love in Greek thought, we are going to be discussing now the one that Paul writes about, which is agape.

We are often told that agape is God-love, but this isn’t really the case. After all, agape is said to describe the love of darkness that some people have. We would not say that they have the love of God of darkness. What can it mean then? I would take it most likely to mean something like the love of devotion.

More can be said about agape love as we go through this series, particularly after we get started on verse 4. However, I do wish to give some general comments. To begin with, I do believe that agape is the love that makes all of the other loves better.

What about storge? As an Aspie, I am familiar with how people can do social niceties and not mean anything whatsoever by it. They just do it because that is what they are supposed to do. I don’t know how many times I heard someone come to me at work and say “How are you?” and then have them walk right on by. It always has left me with the impression of “If you don’t care, don’t ask. I’d appreciate it more.”

Of course, there could be times people really do care and I don’t realize it, but wouldn’t it be best if good manners were genuine rather than something that we do because we think we have to and aren’t going through the motions? Wouldn’t it be great if when someone at church said “I’ll pray for you” that you were sure that they meant it?

What of Phileo? Phileo is the love of friendship and we would like the friend that sticks closer than a brother. What would it mean for phileo if friends were really, well, friends? Christ told us that there was no greater love than that a man would lay down his life for his friends. Do we have that kind of love?

And eros love? What would it mean if sex was more focused on the joy that one person could bring the other than in the joy that person received from the other? Now I do know that you do have to in part focus on your pleasure as well so your spouse can know the best way to please you, but that should not be the focal point. If you are both focused on the love of the other, then will you not find your own pleasure that way?

Agape improves everything. Devotion to that which is good in proper proportion is always good. Let us make sure we are doing both. We should only devote ourselves to that which deserves devotion. We should also not devote ourselves to that thing if we make it greater than what it is. As wonderful as your spouse is, don’t make an idol out of them. My wife and I regularly make sure to state that we are each other’s #2 in life. God is our #1.

Next time, we shall start going through the text.

Eros

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’ve started to take a look at the topic of love as found in 1 Cor. 13 and tonight, I’m going to be talking about eros. Why am I doing so in this order? Storge love is familiar love. Phileo is a higher form of that in friendship. I consider eros a deeper form of friendship and thus a sexual form.

Note that eros is not sex however. Sex is a part of eros and when eros is fully shared, it is an important part, but it is not the whole. A mistake of our society is to confuse sex with eros where if a couple has sex, then it can be seen as automatically having eros.

Sex can in fact be just a physical action between two people. Now I have actually heard a guy tell me before that he thought I was making too big a deal since I did not believe in having sex before marriage. After all, I was told, it’s just orgasm. Such a person however does not understand what is going on.

Sex is a physical activity, no doubt, but it is not just physical. It transcends the physical and while it certainly has great physical sensations, the greater joy of sexual love between two people in a married relationship is the bond of intimacy that they are building with one another.

For a woman, she has to be totally open with her body. She reveals herself entirely to her man. There is nothing for her to hide behind. She has to give total trust to him and open up to him a very vulnerable part of her body and give him the freedom to come and enjoy her.

For the man, he also has to have a high degree of trust. Many men do suffer from insecurities that they will not share, as do women, and for most men it has to do with their bodies. They have to trust that their wives will accept them and put a lot on the line when they engage in a relationship with the woman, particularly the sexual one. Am I really a man? Do I have what it takes to please this woman?

And for both, because they are different sexes, there has to be trust in what is being experienced. A man can never know firsthand what sex is like for a woman. He can study all about the female body all he wants and understand all the physical aspects, but he can never know what it is like the same way a woman can. The same goes that a woman cannot know what it is like for a man.

Thus, in the act itself, the husband and wife have to give total trust to each other in what is liked and what isn’t liked. If the wife says that she likes something, the man has to trust that she really is liking it and she is not just saying it in order to please her husband. The same goes the other way. The woman has to trust that the way she is acting with her husband is bringing him joy or not bringing him joy.

We’re often told that for men the act is physical and for women it is emotional and relational. There’s some truth to that I think, but we need to realize that really, the act is both for both. A man can be incredibly fortified by the act and have an affirmation from his wife that, yes, he is a man. That bond that he feels with his wife is incredibly strong.

This is something many women can seem to forget, hence that there can be marriages where the man feels he is sexually neglected. For women, I’d say if you think your marriage needs some work, try starting in the bedroom. “Well he doesn’t do what I want him to do!” Okay. Are you doing what he wants you to do? A woman can clean the house all day and take care of the kids and the man can appreciate that and she should be doing that, but what the man will really want is to know that his wife can affirm him sexually. Women need to realize that this is a deep need for a man.

Men on the other hand need to realize that because their wife isn’t interested at the time does not point to a lack of love necessarily on her part. A man can be ready for sex in a moment’s notice. A woman is not that way. It has been said that women are stoves and men are microwaves. If men want to be have times of romance from their wives, they need to do their part. Are the men cleaning up around the house? Are the men helping with the kids? Are they forming dates? Men. Don’t expect to come home, prop your feet up on the footstool while sitting on the couch, expect your wife to bring you dinner while you watch your favorite TV show, and then have her be in a mood to please you when the day comes to an end. Go the other way. Why not wait till she has to go out one day while you’re home alone? Clean up the house, take care of the kids (And send them to their grandparents then or someone else’s house) and when she comes home, have dinner ready and let her hold the remote control. Or better yet, go without the remote and try a candlelight dinner where you just talk. Such actions will build up desire in your wife for you.

Our society has made sex an idol and fails to realize eros has many more components to it. Eros is found when the man is being a man for his woman and the woman is being a woman for her man. It does not have to be necessarily sexual, but there is such an aspect. It is when the woman fixes her hubby dinner, or when the man holds open the door for his wife.

To limit sex to just the physical is to cheapen the activity entirely. You might be able to get a good time out of it, but you wouldn’t be getting the best time that you could get. This happens in the bond of marriage where the two are already committed to each other. Neither one of them needs to think that they are on trial. They have already been accepted and can then give themselves with abandon.

To which also men need to make sure that their women know that they are more than just objects of sexual pleasure to them. Women, on the other hand need to know that the sexual pleasure they give their husbands is important. Sex should not be seen as everything in marriage. The other temptation to be avoided is seeing it as nothing.

In sex in marriage, there is a unique bond in that you two are the only people that can satisfy that desire for the other. If the man wants to go watch a movie, he can call a guy friend up and go watch a movie. If he has to, he can go watch one by himself. If he wants to have sex however, he can’t (Or he shouldn’t at least!) call up another female and ask if they want to get together for sex. The same goes for a woman. She cannot call up just anyone to get that unique closeness she should only have for her husband.

Another mistake we make with eros is that we make eros a feeling. Eros can and certainly often does result in feelings, but strong feelings are not the sign of eros either. When you marry, you do not make a commitment to a psychological state of feelings where you say you will have those feelings for the rest of your life. You make a commitment to a person and that commitment is before God and men and lasts until death do you part. When the feelings are there, enjoy them. They’re great! When they’re not, then oh well. You’re still called to be a great spouse anyway. As one in ministry, I can attest that if I only served Jesus when I had strong feelings for serving Jesus, I would not be serving Him that much.

Eros will also grow deeper over time. For the sexual aspect, the honeymoon is just the start of it and it’s a start that gets better and better as the two of you come to know each other more and more. You will come to understand your spouse in other ways as well and know their personality. My wife and I today are far closer to each other than we were the day we got married and I am still amazed many a night when I go to bed and realize the woman I am sharing it with. God was not obligated to give me a spouse, but He did. That is His blessing and I ought to treasure her more and more every day.

For the young Christian also, enjoy eros. Many of us can have a feeling of shame when it comes to eros. God made the sexual system however. It was His idea. He fashioned all the parts and even has a whole book of the Bible for celebrating sex, the Song of Songs. We can talk all we want of it being an allegory of God and Israel or Christ and the Church, and in some ways it could be, but let us also affirm that it is also a book celebrating sexual love. If God considers it something to celebrate, ought not we?

Of course, the Song includes warnings about not awakening it before its time, so don’t. Be cautious. There are many a couple who have regretted not waiting until their wedding night. I do not know of any who do regret waiting until their wedding night. My wife and I both waited, and we are glad we did.

Next time, we shall look at agape.

Phileo

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I started a look yesterday at 1 Corinthians 13 and decided to start that by discussing the four kinds of love. Yesterday we looked at Storge and today, we will be looking at Phileo, the brotherly love.

Phileo is an interesting love in that it could be possible to live without brotherly love. The race could survive without it even. We would not want to however and we often think our lives are richer because of our friends. Special moments are in our lives as well. When it came to filling out my wedding party, the first place I looked to was to my friends. When I’m in a bind and need someone to talk to, I can often turn to friends as well.

Friendship love is often different amongst males than females. I notice regularly when my wife is with female friends, they will tell her mow much they love her or they will speak of both of us and how they love us. From what I’ve seen, if guys got together and said that, they would be on their way to relentless teasing.

That could be a deficiency amongst us men. Most men are pretty stoic. In fact, it has been noted that when men get together and talk as friends, they don’t tend to look at each other. They tend to look straight ahead in one direction.

C.S. Lewis remarks that most friendships begin with these words. “You too? I thought I was the only one!” There are three kinds of friendships that often form. The first is the friendship of pleasure. These are friends who get together and what unites them most is a form of pleasure. They might watch a TV show or a sporting event or have a hobby together.

The next is a friendship of utility. These are friendships that form because it is beneficial to both, such as two co-workers who happen to work together or two athletes who train together. While both of these exist in some form in the final friendship, having a friendship based on just these principles does tend to make it be not a firm friendship that will last.

The last is a friendship of virtue where the friends seek to bring about the improvement of each other. Unfortunately, this can also work in reverse where the friends drag each other down. Such is the power of friendship. The same principle that makes them build up also leads to the possibility of tearing down.

However, this friendship is the best kind of friendship and the one that we should seek the most. We should seek to be people who will build our friends up and accept it when they seek to build us up. I come to see my friends as comrades in arms as we work together on regular quests.

It is a comfort to be looking at my cell phone list a number of times and see a number of friends that I can call for support if need be, some that are even thousands of miles away.

Friends might be something that someone can live without, but I am very thankful that I do not. To all my friends, I say thanks. I am who I am today in many ways because of the way God has used you in my life.

Next time, we shall look at eros.

Storge

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. Tonight, I’d like to start a new topic to discuss. I recently preached a sermon at my church on 1 Corinthians 13. The sermon was quite popular and now I’d like to write out some more about the topic of love. Before doing that, I think we should take a look at what love is and to do so, we should see what each of the four kinds of love are.

First off is storge, which is familiar love. Storge love is the kind of love you have for your fellow man just because he is a man. It is also the kind of love that you have for family. For example, suppose that you did not know the people that are now your parents. I am assuming that you have a good relationship with your parents for this. If not your parents, try to think of any relative you have a good relationship with. If you were not related to this person and you just met this person, do you think you’d really form such a bonding relationship with them?

It is because they are family that you form such a great bond. For some of my younger readers, I wish for you to know that if you have a relationship with your folks that isn’t terrible, but you wish it would be better, that it does improve when you get out of the house. It’s amazing how much you learn that your parents really do. Now as a married man, I have come to realize more and more that my mother knows a whole lot more than I ever realize and our relationship, though it has never been bad, has never been better.

Storge love does not mean that you make the stranger someone you have a deep devotion to, but it means that all things being equal, you treat them as a human being. You hold the door open for someone just because they are a person. It is the kind of love that we ought to show, which is what should ideally take place when driving for example, a place that we can bear to improve on.

Of course, this does not mean that you can never be tough on someone, but they must give a reason for such toughness. If some stranger comes up to me and insults my wife for example, he’s not going to get storge. He may be the stranger still, but he is also someone who has shown himself to be in opposition to the good of the person that I love far far more.

Most of us don’t deal with such, although we do deal with some people who get under our skin. It is our case of judgment to know when we ought to say something and when we ought to ignore. As one in the working industry, I often ignore such things realizing when I go home at the end of the day and spend the time with the Mrs., that what was said will not really matter. Are there some battles not worth fighting? Of course. Some are however, and I suggest the reader consider themselves more on which battles to fight and which to not based on their ability, the situation, and the possible consequences.

Next time, we shall look at Phileo.

Coherency And Truth

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we’re diving into the ocean of truth. Lately we’ve been looking at presuppostionalism and I think tonight I’d like to wrap that series up as there are other topics I am wanting to look at more now. Let’s conclude then by looking at the idea of coherency.

Someone like Bahnsen can go to the atheist and say “Do you have an answer for how it is possible to know anything?” “Do you have a grounding for morality?” “Can you really be sure based on your worldview of anything at all?” If the answer is no then Bahnsen can say that his worldview does in fact explain things.

Indeed, it does have explanatory power, but there is more to having a true worldview than explanatory power. A fun exercise to do with a presuppositional work is to go through and see how many times you can change references to God or Christ to be “Allah” and that the argument still functions the same way.

Hence, the problem. A Christian can use the argument. A Muslim can. A Jew can. Another kind of theism could. The approach using a transcendental argument does not prove just Christian theism. In fact, I think the transcendental argument does have some value, but the problem is that when we start saying that only Christianity can explain the transcendental argument, then we start biting off more than we can chew.

Historical apologetics of some kind are absolutely essential. We have to be able to make the case that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot make the case that God exists and therefore Jesus rose from the dead. It is more likely that we could go in the reverse. If we can demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead, then this gets us closer to evidence that God does in fact exist.

The point is that we cannot simply have coherency. Consider a detective who enters upon a crime scene. He has a coherent theory on who did the crime and why they did it, but unfortunately, he has no evidence. When the detective brings the suspect to court, no one will accept it without hard evidence. It could be his theory does explain everything, but having an explanation of everything is not the same as being able to show that that explanation is true.

Now coherency is important in that if a theory is not consistent with itself, then it cannot be true. Coherency is necessary to truth, but it is not sufficient. None of us would be wanting to go sign up at Hogwart’s if we knew that there were no contradictions in the Harry Potter stories.

My conclusion in all of this is that I see a sadly flawed approach and the usages I’ve seen of it thus far have been depressing. I recommend Christians become familiar with the historical and theological arguments. When you read authors of another methodology, be sure to honestly examine them. Just because a side agrees in the conclusion does not mean that they’ve taken the best way to get there.

We start a new topic next time.

Presuppositionalism and Certainty

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I’ve been spending much of our time lately looking at presuppositionalism. I’d like to begin wrapping things up now and the first step in doing that will be to look at the question of certainty and how it relates to the epistemological basis for presuppositionalism.

Do you know anything? If so, how do you know that you know what you know? For the presuppositionalist, the answer is that you cannot know anything unless you are able to ground it in the triune God who is the basic presupposition of understanding anything. If you do not have that grounding, then how could you know anything at all?

Most of us however do think that we know things even if we cannot exactly say how we know them. The idea of knowing how one knows first is far more Cartesian than anything else. Descartes wanted to start with a method for establishing knowledge and come to something that could not be doubted and he got the cogito which goes “I think, therefore I am.”

First problem? It’s doubtful. Because there is thinking, that means there is a thinker who exists and that thinker is an I? What could be said is that thinking exists. There were numerous philosophers in Descartes’s day that raised the objections to him.

Second, was this really the way to go? Do you really have to have total and absolute certainty in order to be able to establish something as true? For instance, I believe that I can tell you what I had for breakfast this morning and be totally correct. How could I establish that to you with certainty? I have no idea. However, I can think of no real reason to doubt it.

The counter to Descartes is to think of foundational beliefs instead. It is not that you begin with how you can know something, but you begin with what you know and then you think about how you know it. There are a number of propositions that you can be given and when asked how you know that they are true, you eventually say “I just do!”

From what I see in the presuppositionalist approach, the idea is to go with the doubt of Descartes instead and ask how someone knows something apart from God. The response to give would be “I have no reason to doubt it. Can you give me one?” Now I’m not against asking someone how they know something and I think if you can give reasons for doubt, by all means do some. Doubt can be a very powerful weapon.

However, I am against an epistemological approach that bases itself more on doubt than on truth finding. I have not seen an epistemological method given yet from the presuppositional approach. In all of Bahnsen’s “Van Til’s Apologetic” there is no epistemology mentioned. There is just the assertion that reality needs to be grounded in the triune God. Now I agree that God is the basis for reality and it is all grounded in Him, but we need more than just saying “It is.”

Thus, my first major objection is this idea of absolute certainty. By all means, be as sure as you can in your beliefs, but do not make it a statement of saying that unless you can absolutely positively know something without a shadow of a doubt, you do not know it. The presuppositionalist approach if they want to hold to their arguments needs to have an epistemology in it.

 

Glorious Circles?

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve lately been looking into the topic of presuppositionalism. Tonight, I’d like to look at the idea of circular reasoning. I think that those of us who are classical and evidentialists do rightly charge the presuppositional camp with circular reasoning. The problem I see however is that the presuppositional camp freely admits this.

Don’t believe it? Consider what Greg Bahnsen says in “Van Til’s Apologetic” on page 518. In stating the way that he answers the charge of circular reasoning, Bahnsen says:

Our answer to this is briefly that we prefer to reason in a circle to not reasoning at all.

He later states on the same page that:

Reasoning in a vicious circle is the only alternative to reasoning in a circle as discussed above…

John Frame says on page 305 of “Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought” that:

Such circularity is unavoidable, and it exists on both sides of the debate.

Indeed, presuppositionalists seem to revel in the circularity. For instance, on the Unbelievable broadcast, through Premier Christian Radio, Sye Tenbruggencate in round 2 of a debate with Paul Baird was told that his reasoning was circular to which he answered, “What’s wrong with that?”

Only everything.

To begin with, circular reasoning does not cease to be circular reasoning just because it’s about God and fallacies do not cease to become fallacies ever just because the subject matter one is thinking about is God. A fallacy is a fallacy is a fallacy. God is not glorified when we misuse our logic in his service.

Second, it does no good to say that the argument is not viciously circular. This is a distinction without a difference. In other places, a presuppositionalist would be very quick to point out when an unbeliever was engaging in circular reasoning, and they should rightfully do so. The problem is that the rules seem to change for them. I have long deplored how atheists can often make Christians have to prove every claim they have but when it comes to some theories like a multiverse, all of a sudden we don’t have to have proof for that. All sides should agree on the ground rules for debate and follow accordingly, and those ground rules are the proper use of reasoning first off.

Now it could be said that we are circular in assuming reason. The reply to this is to say that we do no such thing. Reason is what we have to start with. To assume it would be to take it for granted. However, if I am told that I should question reason at the start and see if it’s a valid starting point, how am I to do that? Do I do see reasonably or unreasonably? If I am told to go to Scripture first, am I to conclude that that is what I should do reasonably or unreasonably?

If we said “Begin with revelation” then we have to ask “Which one?” Should I begin with the Hindu or the Buddhist or the Christian or the Muslim or the Mormon revelation? (I do realize that in pantheistic faiths and some Eastern thought that the idea of revelation is a problem, but for now let us approach each faith as if we were uninformed.) If we believe God’s Word can stand any test, then we should not hesitate to bring any test to it and we should not believe that we have to assume it in order to see its truth.

We conclude then that any system that engages in circular reasoning is faulty and to be avoided. This does get us into epistemological issues and I plan to address those more next time.