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BULLETIN 116

APOLOGETICS, ARROGANCE AND ACTUALITY

An Overview

Each in place, whether exposition or sermon, apologetics or theology. Because any one thing is not everything, this does not make anything disreputable or flimsy.

Take Biblical Christian Apologetics. Here you do not show the intimacies of God where He does not reveal them. You are not directed to write His book for Him, show His innermost wonders, which surpass human imagination in their infinite greatness.

You ARE however to take hold of what He HAS revealed and show its wonders, harmony, beauty, basis in truth, its personal source, strategic sovereign and ever proficient purveyor, the One whose name is Wonderful, who never lies as behoves the truth. Not for nothing is it the Spirit of TRUTH - what a wonderful name - which conveys what Christ the Truth has to send, He Himself saying, " all that the Father has is mine."

Thus when you take a subject like predestination and freewill, by no means is your apologetics task to show what was the precise process of foreknowing, of divine foreknowledge before the creation, of those who are His and who are not (cf. Romans 8:29ff., Ephesians 1:4, I Peter 2:8): it is not an account of His methodology in choice,  even in terms of what was not in the mode of nature, not even there or in existence.

Yet it is sound to show how it could  in terms as revealed in the Bible, readily be done without demolition of any of the elements of responsibility, liberty and sinful obscuration creating systematic problems. On the contrary, on the Biblical Perspective they fit like toes together on one foot, as expounded in the 7 volumes on the topic on this site (SEVEN VOLUME SET).

It is indeed sound to show that ALL that the Bible says on the topic is harmonious, and to exhibit that it covers every problem that mere human philosophy has at it  attempts to scout or scour freedom. This demonstration is not to go beyond revealed truth but to APPLY IT and show its calibre, neither facile nor obscure, but filled with light.

Now human philosophy is often wanting to do this or that with passion, in various domains. It may wish for example to deliver determinism up as king, not least because some things are set in natural order that is not easy to overcome.

Thus a drug-taking pattern, once it is adopted, whether the drug-induced delusion be partial or total oblivion, or by political, militaristic, psychological skewing, can move with an aura of blatancy or a mist of hiddenness, not facing evil but conforming to it. Again the humanist philosopher may wish to lavish his view of life with a liberty so vast that you can even ignore what your DNA commands INTO existence in the genes, such as gender, and roll one of your own. This is an inventiveness with what is utterly beyond our powers, that confuses desire with nature.

In each case, in the one extreme or the othe r, this is counter-productive,  a matter of extremes at war with data. When however as it comes in life, and in the Bible, it is rather like a hug, each embracing the other and man not a god but a creation who can ignore what he is, supinely glorify it or seek to exploit it, as some may exploit other natural resources, without regard to their sensitivity and need of care.

When, as is the case on this site, this philosophic quagmire like a quicksand which  slowly strangles is shown for what it is, a combination of flimsy expansionism and faulty reductionism, always, like tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, at war and inherently ready for implausible battle, this is apparent from a biblical perspective. This not only  exposes the quirks of pretences which leave  the pit durable, but imposes the principles which  jointly cohere, explain and expound all that is found. It may ruffle the crests, antagonise the precious and appal the proud, but it leaves nothing unaccounted for, in  clash with something else, in contradiction, and has that beauty in the truth which allows one to find ever new wonders as one presses this or that point, and finding it in the biblical perspective, to  rejoice.

It is all uniquely and deliciously covered; but as in the course of an airplane to its aerodrome, you have to keep to it, and not as so often done, assume elements of some other approach, import these to  that of the Bible, and then puzzle the head  about the inequality. Naturally, the supernatural is not nature, but having made it, explains it, and being beyond it, has ways of its own, as we parents have with our children's play equipment when we fix or correct it.

These things are fit and fitting for Christian Apologetics, just as is the concentration on the testimony to and of and in Jesus Christ; but they do not invent it. As in the natural realm, it is what it is, and works as we find in astoundingly precise, brilliant, mathematically outrageously brilliant performance and engineering marvels, as in the DNA. How has genetics taught the ignorant, whose power to prefer ignorance, even this, has a background surpassing all genius, in their very state of being, brain, will and personality! Brilliance (divine) enables them to be dumb (sinking in the insoluble on their own chosen basis).

However, to revert to the point from the outset, this demonstration of the resolving power of the Bible is not to equate to a new revelation, rather being merely  the exposure of the one already sent from  God in incomparable distinctives, known as the Bible. In setting it apart from all competition, this work exhibits as do natural scientists in their realm of study, what is the nature of what is happening (as  far as they can find out by reliable methods, and not in invasive religious effronteries).

The logic which investigates the field of revelation is the same type as that exhibited in natural phenomena, and it is precisely for this  reason that science, when devoted duly to scientific method, gains access to usable knowledge. These logical tours de force match each other in type and are one in mode though one has vast depth, and proceed from one controlling power, sovereign  over all.

Exhibiting and showing all this is a valid study, as is the case in noting and relating elements in chemistry. That it is a matter of manifesting, not inventing what is there whether in matter or its origin, in life or its exponents. What is, is as true for theology as for science, when both are soundly based and not on flimsy wings of mere imagination, inventing scenarios that equal in presumption and irrelevance, what they have in mischief; for then can readily mislead on arrogant premises founded on nothing, and based on 'nothing' in a way irrational and self-contradictory to  the point, let us face it, of delusion.

As so often pointed out, when you contradict yourself, there is no debating need for anyone else to contradict you: you have done the job of self-destruction already, and only ruin steams before the eyes.

Truth is like that: it is incomparably superior.