Highlights: Covenantal Apologetics by Scott Oliphant

Highlights: “Covenantal Apologetics” by Scott Oliphant

P. 11 – Artists such as “Picasso and Mondrian depicted a world without any kind of trustworthy transcendent meaning.” We could say that non-representational art, as well as ‘evil’ and pessimistic art (term a la Schaeffer) suggests a world into which God has not spoken—thus meaning is relative and is determined by the individual. Only LOGOS provides transcendent, trustworthy meaning (see p. 25—bow before Logos in order to abandon one’s preference for irrationality).

P. 19 – Oliphant enumerates the role of the Holy Spirit in apologetics in contrast to most apologetic books which ask us to choose between pure argument and the ‘Holy Spirit doing it all’.

P. 24 – Excellent on the relation between faith and reason. Argument (all) from reason requires an appeal to final authority—a foundational assumption which is regarded as authoritative. Thus reasoning is necessarily circular because it is based upon faith that the founding assumption is authoritative. The question for the skeptic, says Oliphant, is “On what basis should I accept your circle over mine?”

P. 25 – The only way to think properly about faith and reason (and their relationship to one another) is to ‘take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ (2 Cor 10:5). The beauty of this apologetic approach is that it is naturally and centrally focused on the reality of God’s revelation in Christ and of course the gospel.

P. 27 – Covenantal apologetics (presuppositional apologetics) operates by probing the assumptions of the unbeliever. In part, our confidence in our apologetic efforts rests upon this fact: all ‘truth claims’ which oppose the Word of God cannot be sustained in God’s world.

P. 29 – Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief.

Pp. 30-31 – The entrance of sin and suffering in the world was a function of cosmic rebellion, a frontal attack upon Adam and Eve’s right relationship with God (a relationship based upon knowing, enjoying, and reflecting God by faith in, and obedience to His Word).

Pp. 32-33 – In terms of our inescapable covenantal status of humanity before God: we are either, by rebellion and by nature in Adam, or by regeneration and redemption in Christ in which case we are heirs of eternal life. One of the most common complaints of the skeptics is this, “How can a good God really be in charge of our world if it is permeated with evil, death, injustice, and suffering?” Oliphant’s response is, “What makes you think that God is responsible for those things?”

Pp. 34-35 – We sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts even when we are responding to the charge of skeptics that, “If the biblical God were a good God—He would do something about suffering.” Our response is that in sending Christ to die in our place, He did just that. Suffering will one day cease altogether because Christ obeyed the Father and was willing to be the suffering Substitute. He is worthy—every knee will someday bow to Him.

The lordship of Christ is our basic defense of Christianity. We acknowledge His lordship amidst our suffering. All authority in heaven and earth is given to Him—that authority is the prerequisite to the command to make disciples. Because He is Lord; history is the process of making His enemies a footstool for His feet. Remember, whomever you speak to—Christ is Lord of that person.

Pp. 36-37 – If a skeptic asserts “truth is relative,” that statement by argument betrays that it cannot be. The Bible is authoritative because it is the Word of God—it has the power to subdue the enemy (2 Cor 10:4).

P. 39 – Oliphant explains why he uses the term, ‘covenantal apologetics’ as opposed to presuppositional apologetics.

P. 40 – Here is the useful illustration of the distance between God and the creature likened/analogous to the distance between a man and a snail. The snail cannot transcend his own character to converse with the man—the ontological difference is prohibitive. If there is to be communication it must come from the condescension of the superior being. We think about the disparity between God’s character and ours—and this represents an unbridgeable chasm from our side. These thoughts are essential to our understanding of the voluntary ‘covenant condescension’ of God.

P. 41 – Because God is totally other, communion and communication with Him (and knowledge of Him) can only take place with us by His initiative. We were created in His image to show off His character— this has sweeping implications for apologetics. Our relationship with Him is properly designated a covenant. We owe obedience to Him as our Creator.

Pp. 42-43 – The nature of our rebellion: hide, fight, deny, run, thwart, misappropriate, defy, and break. The gift of Christ is given to covenant-breakers. To be created in the image of God includes knowing that the one true God exists—as Creator, Owner, Ruler, Judge (Rom1). The knowledge of God comes through created things (Rom 1). True self-knowledge depends upon the knowledge of God—He is the ‘original’, we are the ‘reflection’ (image). The nature of our rebellion: as a covenant creature, man takes his covenant relationship graciously initiated by God’s condescension, and attempts to hold down that truth and the implications of that truth—fabricating idols in place of God whom he knows and to whom he owes worship. Our rebellion is summarized in what we do with our eradicable knowledge of God (i.e. “knowing while suppressing” p. 44).

P. 45 – The unbeliever willfully chooses irrationality—he convinces himself that what he knows about the world as actually true (by reason of general revelation) is not true. He distorts both who we are (image of God) and who God is. We are at war with our true identity. Though surrounded with facts which speak of his covenant identity; we seek the impossible and unattainable, absolute autonomy. Man’s refusal to acknowledge God is not done in ignorance; it is culpable rebellion (no excuse, Rom 1). This is irrational because it militates against the world as it really is. A tactic to use with the unbeliever who has convinced himself of autonomy: Ask him, “How can it be that you think that you are worthy of complete trust so that you are the origin of truth itself?” METHODOLOGY

P. 46 – Probing questions can uncover the unbeliever’s self-diagnosis—for imbedded in the sinful heart is self-deception—a commitment to knowing but suppressing (denying the world as it is, and denying one’s own identity). Oliphant’s helpful illustration shows that the make-believe road (the yellow brick road) can’t get you out of Oz. A foundation of unbelief (imagination) is basically irrational (note Calvin on the futility of descending into the labyrinth of self—self cannot provide the way out).

The preconditions of knowledge and life are: who God says He is, and what God says we are (Acts 17:28). The foundations of unbelief mean that knowledge is not the same for unbeliever and believer alike. In the transcendental method of apologetics there is a worldview (epistemological) collision.

P. 47 – The transcendental method seeks to set forth the real world where the Triune God reigns, exposing the illusory world the unbeliever is attempting to build. The ‘collision’ we instigate is between the presuppositions of the unbelieving position and the covenantal presuppositions of Scripture (in so doing we reach the ‘root’ of the problem). We present Christ, not generic theism.

P. 48 – A summary of Oliphant’s 10 apologetic tenets begin on page 48: 1.) Faith must begin with the Triune God who condescends to create and to redeem (we do not defend general theism). 2.) God’s covenantal revelation is authoritative by virtue of what it is (we utilize God’s revelation as inextricably tied to the authority of its Author). 3.) The truth of God’s revelation together with the work of the Holy Spirit brings about a covenantal change from one who is in Adam to one who is in Christ. 4.) Mankind (male and female) is in covenant with the Triune God for all eternity. 5.) All people know the true God and that knowledge entails covenantal obligations (every person lives coram deo). 6.) Those who are in Adam suppress the truth that they know; those who are in Christ see the truth for what it is. 7.) There is an absolute covenantal antithesis between Christian theism and any other opposing position. Thus Christianity is true and anything opposing it is false (by proclaiming God’s revelation; Christians proclaim the world as it really is. Truth-suppressors create an illusory world). 8.) Suppression of God’s truth is like depravity, it is total but not absolute. All God’s facts are servant facts—therefore the knowledge of them is ethical. 9.) The true covenantal knowledge of God in man, together with God’s universal mercy, allows for persuasion in apologetics. 10.) Every fact and experience is what it is by virtue of the covenantal, all-controlling plan and purpose of God.

P. 49 – God’s revelation is covenantal because: 1) it initiates a relationship between God and humanity. 2) It entails obligations. (See Scriptural authority in the historic confessions this page. Also, that the doctrine of creation anchors our creaturely accountability to God.)

Pp. 50-51 – By virtue of our creation in the image of God we never transcend our covenant relation to God whether we reside in heaven or in eternal hell. Man is always coram Deo. Our Christian testimony/truth claim is that the way reality is set forth in God’s revelation is the way things really are in the world. In other words, what God says about the world is the way the way the world really is.

The unbeliever’s position cannot be made to ‘fit’ with the way the world really is.

Pp. 52-53 – Either we bow the knee to Christ and affirm the truth of what God says, or we oppose Him and attempt to ‘create’ a world of our own making. Our confidence in Christian apologetics is tied to the fact that the unbeliever cannot make sense of things by means of the illusory world of his imagining—that position self-destructs, for it does not match the way the world is.

All of God’s facts in the world are servant facts. Unsaved men will answer for how they handled these facts—even ‘two plus two’ will condemn the unbeliever on judgment day, for facts glorify God. The unbeliever distorts and perverts the meaning of facts. (Note the testimony of Psalm 19; and the finely tuned parameters making life possible, also note the testimony of God in the Wisdom literature: God designing and feeding His creatures, etc.)

P. 57 – The lordship of Christ is conferred upon Him by the Father and is the reward and outcome of His obedience as the Son (Phil 2:1-10) (Note: the glory of Christ and the ‘equipment’ He earned in His humiliation and obedience. Christ’s lordship is intimately connected with our defense of Christianity.

Pp. 59-61 – God is a se—(of Himself) self-existent. He has freely chosen to commit Himself to His creation. What is glorious is that though God is a se, He has also committed Himself to His covenant so that He binds Himself to His people. Jesus is the “I am” who spoke with Moses on Mt. Moriah. The Jews’ quarrel with Jesus during His earthly ministry was an attack on His true identity—God the Son on earth as a man was God’s free decision to condescend.

Pp. 62-64 – God’s free decision to condescend (in order to deliver) is both cosmic and redemptive. LOGOS is the true light who comes into a sin-darkened world. The Word (as the cosmic light of the world) continues to enlighten. Vos notes that the LOGOS is life-giving and light-giving. As such He reveals the light of the knowledge of God to all people. History can be properly defined ONLY of what the second Person of the Trinity has condescended to do—both in creation and for His people. Thus Logos is our philosophy of history.

Pp. 65-66 – God has made Him Lord (Acts 2:36). Salvation is bowing before the One who is both your Creator and Redeemer. Christ’s lordship is cosmic—He rules creation from the beginning. In order to begin to grasp the extent of God’s condescending love to us, we must focus upon the covenant-historical truth of the cosmic and redemptive lordship of the Son of God. (See the Christ Hymn of Colossians 1:15-21. He has first place in creation, redemption, and judgment.)

Pp. 67-68 – Immanuel Kant was the most influential philosopher since the Enlightenment; he hoped to assign reason to its proper place. He set out to remedy both schools: empiricism and rationalism. He hoped to show the relationship between reason and faith. Kant sought to show that much of what we know transcends experience. In order to know, our experience must be synthesized with our own internal categories. He argued that we impose our own mental categories on our experiences in order to know and understand them. For Kant, it is the faculty of reason that produces the higher, purer concepts of God and the soul. He is forced to conclude that there can be no real knowledge of those things that reason alone assumes. Kant splits knowledge—splits the mind. Kant suggests that things such as God and the soul, by definition, cannot be known. There is no experience of such things.

How opposite is the proclamation of God’s Word: man is without excuse because he is immersed in a virtual ‘sea’ of divine revelation. We could express this inescapable knowledge as a double negative: mankind cannot NOT know what God has so clearly revealed. Kant is saying the opposite that there has been no covenant condescension; no perspicuous authoritative self-revelation by our Creator.

Pp. 70-71 – For Kant (and for countless Westerners who have imbibed his philosophy), since there is no experience of God, faith can have no access to real knowledge; it cannot be known; only (blindly) believed. For Kant (and this may be applied to countless objections to the Christian faith), there is absolutely no category for the Christian reality of God’s covenantal condescension. Kant, by his philosophical position, has assumed then that: 1) we humans have no experience of God, and 2) faith has been divorced from knowledge and relegated to an ‘upper story’ leap (into irrationality). By divorcing faith from knowledge, in order to attempt to understand the concept of the divine, Kant has rejected the God of Scripture and invented an idol in His place.

The Bible is clear; all men at all times and in all places (by virtue of being created in His image), live in God’s world, experience God persistently, and know God. And this knowledge comes because God has condescended covenantally to reveal Himself “through the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20); in His Son (Heb 1:1-3); and through His Word.

We would say to Kant, true, we cannot move from the finite to the infinite (any more than a snail can commune with a human); but Kant has failed to consider that God (the infinite) has moved to the finite. He condescended convenantally in Christ our cosmic and redemptive Lord. We are guaranteed for all eternity to have true and certain knowledge of Him. Now whether we rejoice in the truth of God (in Christ), or suppress the truth of God (in Adam); it is indicative of our covenant status before Him. Salvation is knowing God (Jn 17:3; 2 Pet 1:1-4).

P. 73 – On the problem of being a skeptic in a moral universe: the skeptic can’t help himself, he finds himself frequently invoking the ethical and the moral in his conversations. (On the page Dawkins ‘prioritizes’ levels of evil in certain unethical behaviors.)

P. 75 – Atheists and skeptics cannot, on the basis of their own worldview, make a credible judgment on moral issues.

Pp. 76-77 – “Dawkins could set out a graduation of evils only because he knows deep down that people are more than rational laws and material composites.” Only God as the ultimate good determines what things are good and what are not. As the image of God our consciences contain the moral mark of God (the law, Rom 2), we are designed to recognize evil (and we might add ‘objective evil’ as opposed to the skeptics’ claim that good and evil are subjective).

“Quicksand quotient” is Oliphant’s term for a position or truth claim that is self-refuting because it does not comport with the evidential and the rational.

Pp. 88-89 – In Paul’s Mar’s Hill address, he recognizes that idolatry in Athens is an expression of the suppression of the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18ff.). In pagan worldview the gods are unconcerned for the lives of mere mortals. In contrast, the Bible reveals the one true God who is near to each of us, for in Him we live, move, and exist (Acts 17:28). God is ‘man’s environment’.

Pp. 90-91 – Christ changes the nature of death for those who believe. Shame and guilt, born of their disobedience motivated Adam and Eve’s self-deception. Since that fateful day, mankind has imagined that hiding from God is possible.

P. 93 – In what sense is God man’s environment? 1) He condescends in order to relate to His creatures on their level. 2) He has made us covenant creatures in His image and likeness. 3) He reveals the knowledge of Himself to us (works of creation) and in us (sense of deity).

P. 95 – Humility is incumbent upon us, for we are taken from dust and to dust we return. We are made of the same ‘stuff’ as plants and animals. Man, as God’s appointed vice regent, through rebellion dragged the whole creation into the bondage of decay (Rom 8:19-20).

P. 97 – God is man’s ultimate environment, but fallen man construes the world in such a way that he will not have to face God. (As the image of God, man is responsible to God in all of his thinking, living, and doing.) The image of God revealed in male and female in the Garden prior to sin became a source of shame after the fall. Fig leaf clothes could not hide their real guilt.

Mankind now attempts to hide and cover up whatever remains of that fractured and broken image of God. We pretend that access to God by way of His revelation is impossible. In our suppression we might even come to think that our environment or context is a barrier to sure and certain knowledge of God (as if our problem is metaphysical and not ethical). This issue of pretended barriers is what Paul

is exposing in Acts 17.

Pp. 98-100 – Paul’s point in Acts 17 is that our rescue can only come from something outside of us. Beginning in Romans 1 and 2, Paul describes just what the image of God looks like even while we remain in our sins (in Adam).

The truth that we suppress is not primarily truth about nature or aspects of the world. The truth we suppress is the “clearly perceived” (v. 20) and “understood” (v. 20) “knowledge of God.” The truth of God that Paul intends to delineate is His divine perfections: a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth (Hodge Commentary in Oliphant). They (His character and attributes) are given to us, revealed to us, and implanted in us by the creative power and providence of Almighty God the Creator.

Pp. 101-103 – Truth suppression ultimately fails. The reason why is because attempts to cast away the knowledge of God (and a refusal to honor Him and consecrate our lives to His will) always results in futile thinking. Whether through the rebellion of false philosophies or corrupted worship, the knowledge of God “fixed deep within us” is the ineradicable knowledge “which nature permits none to forget.” See Psalm 19. Truth suppression is a feature of wickedness according to Romans 1:18. The knowledge of God implanted in us by our Creator ought to be thought of as more psychological than epistemological.

Pp. 104-105 – In terms of God implanting knowledge in us, ‘the world known’ in any given culture (the world created by the one true God) stands behind any linguistic construct. And, to put the matter theologically: we must know the world in order to know God, and we must know God because we

are His image.

Pp. 113-115 – One of the weaknesses of evidentialism is the assumption that evidences will always ‘read the same way’. But that is to be oblivious to a person’s worldview assumptions (which totally shape how he handles facts). Oliphant here explains that ‘truth’ is the difference between a logical or valid argument and a solid argument. A given worldview makes truth claims which constitute a grid of understanding— this grid of understanding is essential to all thought and reasoning and predication.

Pp. 118-122 – Great argument on why something within the universe (or something locked in the time, space, mass continuum) cannot be the adequate cause of the universe itself. The very crux of Christianity is the incarnation of Christ. Faith in blind unguided material processes (evolution) is religious in nature. It contains no knowledge, it is simply posited. To hold to determinism means that there can be no real choice for human beings. We are simply the products of the processes of our material make-up. And, if I am materially predetermined to believe what I believe, then what you think about science is a random figment of your own imagination. Only by submitting to Christian theism do you have a basis for scientific inquiry.

P. 161 – The denial of human responsibility for sin results in the normalizing of sin.

P. 163 – Apologetics can be simply stated as a battle over proposed sources of authority.

P. 184 – The way that God relates to the creation in the incarnation is by means of the hypostatic union.

P. 186 – The unbeliever normalizes sin by rejecting biblical categories.

P. 210 – Today faith is seen as the way NOT to reason to the truth.

Pp. 212-214 – What ‘weighs the scales of your worldview’? To what, and by what authority are those scales of your worldview ‘calibrated’? Rationalism is closely tied to philosophic naturalism.

P. 216 – God has given us an authoritative explanation of the radical discontinuity between animals and humans. Naturalism cannot give us an authoritative, sensible, evidential foundation for how the rational can come from the non-rational.

P. 221 – Evolution: I refuse to see God, so I’ll need to find another way to make sense of things.

P. 234 – As Christian apologists, we reason from the position that it is impossible that God does not exist.

P. 248 – God’s self-revelation is of Himself and of His will.

P. 252 – God’s determination to create is joined to His determination to bind Himself to His creation—in a dynamic relationship with all that He has created—especially man and woman, male and female which is the image of God.

P. 255 – The Holy Trinity expresses the equal ultimacy of the one and the many.

P. 261 – An apologetics question which ought to guide our conversations and their content is: are you for

the Lord, or for His adversaries? How would you know which you are for?