Apologetics – Page 2 – Anthony G. Flood

Van Til on C. S. Lewis: man’s problem is rebellion, not finitude

Not able at the moment to cobble together an original post, but also not wanting more time to pass before I post something, I share this brief criticism of an aspect of the theology of Anglican lay theologian and evangelical apologist C. S. Lewis by the Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til.—AGF

A position similar to that of Romanism [i.e., Roman Catholicism] is frequently maintained by evangelical Protestants. As a recent illustration, we mention the case of C. S. Lewis.[1]

Like Romanism, Lewis, in the first place, confuses things metaphysical and ethical. In his book Beyond Personality he discusses the nature of the divine trinity.

To show the practical significance of the doctrine of the trinity he says:

The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way ‘round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance.[2]

The purpose of Christianity is to lift the Bios or natural life of man up into the Zoe, the uncreated life. In the incarnation there is given one example of how this may be done. In him there is “one man in whom the created life, derived from his mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life.” Then he adds: “Now what is the difference which he has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us.”

All this is similar in import to the position of Aquinas which stresses the idea that man is, through grace, to participate in the divine nature.

It is a foregone conclusion that the ethical problem cannot be fairly put on such a basis. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between all forms of non-Christian ethics and Christian ethics lies in the fact that according to the former, it is man’s finitude as such that causes his ethical strife while according to the latter, it is not finitude as such but created man’s disobedience of God that causes all the trouble. Continue reading “Van Til on C. S. Lewis: man’s problem is rebellion, not finitude”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary

This continues a series of posts in which I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V.)

Bill Vallicella asks me if Mariology (the doctrine of Mary, the mother of Jesus) is a part of the presuppositionalist “package deal,” that is, an essential element of the worldview that (I argue) uniquely makes intelligible predication possible.[1]

My answer is, yes, “some version of Mariology,” as Bill puts it, is derivable from an exegesis of Scripture, but not the Roman Catholic version that Bill tacitly presupposes.

That version was unknown to the writers of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. History knows of no writing alleging Mary’s “immaculate conception” (freedom from contracting Adam’s sin, “original sin”) until over a thousand years since Christ’s Ascension had passed. That’s when theologians could consider, and then reject, the musings of Eadmer, a 12^th-century monk who studied under Anselm (who denied Mary’s immaculate conception).[2]

Bernard of Clairvaux rejected the idea as a novum. He was joined in rejecting it (as inconsistent with the need for universal redemption in Christ) by Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Aquinas. The distinctive dogma that the Roman Catholic magisterium has since 1854 taught de fide (that is, as binding on all Catholics) forms no part of the Biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part VI: Something about Mary”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith”

This continues the series in which I discuss Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella‘s critique of my idea of philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV.)

In Philosophy after Christ, I wrote:

The relationship of evidence of one thing to another depends on there being minds fitted with reliable cognition that can surmise and test that connection. What must the world include for evidentiary relationships to be possible?

We may not be certain whether A is evidence of B, but that things are in evidentiary relationships to each other is something about which we not only have no doubt but wouldn’t know how to doubt. Is that merely a brute psychological fact without further ground? For doubting expresses intellectual exigency, critical “demandingness,” a healthy fear of being duped; exercising that virtue makes no sense except in a world that is completely intelligible (formally, efficiently, materially, and finally).[1]

And that brings us, as every philosophical question must, to worldview.

Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part V: Worldview and the “eye of faith””

Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity

This post continues a series on Christianity and intelligibility (Parts I, II, and III) which focuses on Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of presuppositionalism, the position I share with (albeit at a great distance from) Greg L. Bahnsen and his teacher, Cornelius Van Til, whose distinctive approach to Christian apologetics Bill has been studying.[1]

As I’ve been arguing here (and in Philosophy after Christ), unless one presupposes the Bible’s worldview, one’s thinking—including the thinking informing the post under review and the counterexamples Bill adduces in it—reduces to absurdity. Why? Because non-Christian thinking is groundless—it floats in a void—and if it displays any cogency, it’s because it surreptitiously borrows from the biblical worldview. Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part IV: the atheist doesn’t have it made, even if he can fake sincerity”

Christianity and intelligibility, Part III

This continues a series in which I engage Bill Vallicella‘s critical exploration of aspects of biblical theism, especially when he interacts with my efforts to explain what I mean by philosophizing before or after Christ. (See Part I, Part II.)

To return to one of Bill’s recent questions, which I have been answering, but perhaps not (yet) to his satisfaction):

Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity? That and that alone is the question I am raising . . . . The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved when a person knows—if he does know—that Christianity is true.[1]

I gave part of my answer in Part II. The intelligibility of the natural world owes to its being what God in Scripture says it is (including what we are). God says many other things from which one may infer the “specific doctrines of normative Christianity.”

How does one know that the Sun has risen? Well, for practical purposes, one trusts that one’s senses, memory, command of language (to affirm the proposition, even tacitly, “The Sun has risen”), and so forth can support perceptual knowledge claims. But what justifies the trust, the memory, the linguistic command, the imperative to tell the truth (even if only to oneself), and so forth?

That’s where worldview comes in. Only one fills the bill, in my view.

Continue reading “Christianity and intelligibility, Part III”

Christianity and intelligibility

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force. I fail to see what special problem the “natural world” allegedly poses.

To know anything about something, we need not know that thing exhaustively (that is, the way God knows it). The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does. That’s the claim Bill has to defeat.

How is the Incarnation or the Trinity unintelligible, even apparently?

The equal ultimacy of the one and the many in the Triune Godhead saves predication from the consequences of monism and pluralism.

It’s also unclear what problem someone who affirms exnihilation finds in a divine person’s taking the form of a divine-image bearer. Some atheists have claimed, without justification, that exnihilation is “unintelligible” but they do so because they’ve absolutized the created order instead of relativizing it to its creator, who alone is absolute. Bill affirms exnihilation without exhaustively grasping it conceptually. He can do likewise for the Trinity and the Incarnation.

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Do atheists have an excuse?

An edited version of this post, first published here five years ago today, forms the first half of Chapter 5 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. The post linked in the first paragraph appeared on Bill Vallicella’s blog in 2018 (therefore, more than “a few months ago”).—A.G.F.

In a short post few months ago, Bill Vallicella argued that “If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.” (Italics added.)

Bill takes his definition of “culpable ignorance” from a Catholic dictionary: ignorance is blameworthy if the ignorant one could have “cleared up” his ignorance, but chose not to. “One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant,” the dictionary says, “if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known.”

Bill applies this to the atheist this way:

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

Bill acknowledges that his exculpation of the professing atheist “puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.”

I’ll say! As Bill wrote in the post he linked to: “There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.”

That position reveals a great deal about Bill’s idea of God. It’s not the idea one gets from the Bible, arguably the source of what Bill calls “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” I bring this up because Bill stipulates (in the post under discussion) that for “present purposes, it suffices to say that ‘God’ refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

For Bill’s argument to work, that interpretation of Romans 1:18-20—God infallibly communicates His existence, power, and divinity to all people and they are all responsible for having received that communication—would have to fall outside that “tradition.”

God’s Word is the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1:9). There are no exceptions for professing atheists.

Continue reading “Do atheists have an excuse?”

Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians not to be seduced by philosophy after (κατὰ, kata) “the elementary principles of the cosmos” (τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, i.e., demonic spirit-beings[1]) and not after Christ. This suggests the possibility of “philosophy after Christ,” a suggestion I pursued in a book with that title.[2]

“After” here doesn’t mean chronologically subsequent, but rather “in the manner or style of,” as one might paint after Rembrandt or after Picasso. When we philosophize, that is, pursue wisdom to help us lead rightly ordered lives, we ought to do so as Christ the Wisdom of God (σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, sophia tou Theou; 1 Corinthians 1:21) counsels. All philosophy that’s not “after Christ” (not only, say, Hermeticism) assumes a “neutral” posture toward God’s self-revelation in Scripture.[3]

Interestingly, twenty verses earlier, Paul taught not only that all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) cohere (συνίστημι, sunistēmi) in Christ, but also that He is “before all things (πρὸ τὰ πάντων, pro ta pantōn)” (Colossians 1:17). That is, He ranks above them because He created them: “. . . without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3b). He decrees what is true about anything other than Himself: “All (כֹּ֤ל, kol) whatever (אֲשֶׁר, asher) pleases (חָפֵ֥ץ, hapes) the Lord (יְהוָ֗ה, Yahweh) does (עָ֫שָׂ֥ה asah)” (Psalm 135:6a). That includes the states of affairs we call “facts.”

Christ is not only “temporally” antecedent to (from “eternity past”[4]) His creation, but also pre-eminent over it. The set of “all things” includes His image-bearers: nothing has priority over Him—not even a philosopher’s mind. The thinker who gives epistemic authority to every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God (by which we are to live: Matthew 4:4) is different from the one who awards that status to something else. By “philosophy after Christ” I mean the pursuit of wisdom by practicing what Jesus preached, that is, answering Satan’s lies with Scripture; that is, putting Christ before that pursuit, not the other way around. Continue reading “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter”

Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian”

Listening this morning to an old (well, 2022) podcast[1] by the great Calvinist apologist James R. White, I was startled by his reference to Thom Notaro’s 1980 Van Til and the Use of Evidence. (White says he paid $3.75 for his copy back in the day, but a used copy on Amazon will set you back forty-five bucks.) Startled, I say, because over forty years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical New Oxford Review published, in its November 1981 issue, pages 29-30, my cluelessly negative review of Notaro’s book.

Consistent with my habit of airing my political and philosophical dirty laundry (which exercise works against one’s intellectual pride), I hereunder post that review’s text (and its prefatory note), which I took the liberty of posting in 2013 on my old site (whose anniversary I noted the other day).

* * *

On a “cringe-ometer” scale from 1 to 10, with 10 inducing a coma from embarrassment, this rates a 9. I pontificated about Van Til’s thought, about which I knew little first-hand, instead of actually reviewing a book about the role of evidence in an apologetic often mischaracterized as anti-evidence (even “fideistic”). In less than 600 words, I managed to beg every apologetical question, rendering myself a poster boy for the epistemological un-self-consciousness that, Van Til argued, renders every anti-Christian theistic worldview impotent.

In slight mitigation of my offense, I recall that as a New Yorker, who was not long before writing this a student in a doctoral program in philosophy, could not interact regularly with Van Til’s protégé, California-based Gregory L. Bahnsen, a Ph. D. in philosophy (USC, 1978). Had I been able to, my confusions would have been exposed and rectified much sooner. As it happened, I had to wait for the day I could carry around dozens of mp3s of his recorded lecture series and read many articles that are now freely available online. Even the very best of Bahnsen, his Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, was not available until after his passing.

I am posting this only to memorialize the flawed inception of my investigation into Van Til’s thought. I also observe that I did not give up.

Anthony Flood

January 16, 2013 (Slightly amended January 21, 2019) Continue reading “Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian””

Retrospects and Prospects

This year will be better than next year. Yes, that may reflect more my mood than reality, but it’s a mood that reality reinforces daily.

I’m an eschatological optimist—Christ’s saving work has given me peace (true union) with God, which is all that really matters—but a secular pessimist. The intermittent news of resistance to the totalitarianism that’s coming like Christmas may be accurate, but “So, cheer up, old boy!” doesn’t make me feel better (and making me feel better is no one’s obligation). Things will change for the better, or they won’t; I’ll know which soon enough, should I live so long.

Those charged with preventing with catastrophes (e.g., my country’s invasion) are in fact facilitating them, thereby undermining the good of order that makes the regular enjoyment of other goods possible. I cannot train my attention on the facilitators, however, if the criminal invaders in my vicinity are concentrating my mind wonderfully. Like them, the criminal overlords can be dealt with only by violence; I see no timely way to exercise legitimate violence against either class of criminal. So, I pray each day for safety but, failing that, at least for the opportunity to take a few of the bastards with me.

I will write until I can no longer, content with the probability that what I write might be picked up, if it ever will be, by people who won’t be born until after I’m dead. Perhaps 2024 will see the publication of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers (the latest draft of which I’m sharing with beta readers) and of the second, expanded edition of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. Maybe I’ll get around to mining the 25 diaries (1970-1994) that record my interactions with the remarkable people I’ve met (and the mistakes they couldn’t prevent me from making).

Ultradispensationalist that I am, even the great Reformed Baptist apologist James R. White (b. 1962), whom I’ve been reading and listening to for about ten years has not been able to make a Calvinist out of me (not that he’s tried), but he certainly has ruined any Roman Catholic apologist’s chance of winning me back. Auditing many of his over 180 moderated debates over the past ten years, White always strikes me as having the better of the argument. To the task he always brings not only great learning and preparation, but also grit and not a little humor. A student of history, he teaches biblical Hebrew and Greek, yet wears his learning lightly, if I’m any judge of such things.

A couple of diamonds in the cultural dung heap, however, postpone utter esthetic despair.

One is the Bebop guitar virtuoso Pasquale Grasso (b. 1988) who, after the passing of my teacher and friend Pat Martino (1944-2021), showed me I could get excited about a player again. Here’s a great example.

The other gem is Harlem-born performer Wé Ani (b. 1999), the most versatile, and powerful, pop singer I’ve ever heard, whose voice salves my charred soul and never fails to plaster a smile on my face. My wife and I had first seen her in 2016 on The Voice (when she went by “Wé McDonald”). A physically different (almost unrecognizably so) Wé competed in last season’s (2023) American Idol, making it into the top five. Research revealed she was indeed the same person. What she did this year, however, hooked me. She can belt like nobody’s business, folk her way through any ballad (guitar and all), or rock it out, or out-Broadway any veteran of The Great White Wé, I mean, Way.

There seem to be at least a half dozen Wé Anis: after watching any two videos, I sincerely wonder, “Is that the same singer?” Without, I stress, impersonating any of them, she can put you in mind of Nina Simone, or Mary J. Blige, or Idina Menzel, or Whitney Houston, or Aretha Franklin, or Barbra Streisand. (This list is not exhaustive, but it risked becoming exhausting).

And she gave off a different vibe when belting out a Stevie Wonder classic for Tony Bennett (who clearly inspired her final tonal choice), bringing the Constitution Hall audience to their feet.

And then there’s the uncanny sonic chasm between her childlike speaking pitch and her robust, gritty singing voice: she says she wants to be taken seriously, but “it’s not easy sounding like a 12-year-old at 23.” The simile that comes to my mind is fiction’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (minus the creepy associations): she makes a fool of anyone who prejudges her talent on that basis. (For instance.)

She’s also a modest and charming interviewee (sans tatoos, nose ring, acrylic claws and other accoutrements of female celebrityhood): consider one from 2018 and another from September. The Standard, her latest, will drop on January 12, 2024.

Such are my few oases of refreshment these days. I feel better having shared these sentiments. However quixotic it may sound, I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy and safe 2024.