A Classical Survey of Apologetic Methods

It has been said that talking about method is a bit like clearing your throat at the beginning of a speech. You had better get on with it before you lose your audience. Besides, it does not seem to make much sense for Christians to argue with each other over a strategy of interacting with unbelievers. For one thing, they might overhear us and mock the divisions in our ranks. They may even have pity. They will certainly not have any respect for us.

For others, the debate about apologetic method is much ado about nothing anyway. Apologetics is a practical exercise and each person in our audience will be unique. These should be diverse tools in our bag, ready for anything. That may seem very reasonable at first glance. My own sympathies are with getting done with talking about method as soon as possible. However, the truth of the matter is that some of these controversies radically alter how we interact with the unbeliever, whether we will meet the mind of that person where they are, and in some cases, it will make or break doing serious apologetics at all.

“A method,” says one handbook on apologetics, “is simply a well-thought-out way of doing something, and an apologetics method is therefore a well-thought-out way of approaching apologetics.”1 

How many apologetic methods are there? There is no official or definitive list, as there is freedom of individuals to create any number of hybrid systems. However, there are typically six that are pointed to as distinct: 1. classicalism, 2. fideism, 3. evidentialism, 4. presuppositionalism, 5. Reformed Epistemology, and 6. combinationalism (or an eclectic) approach.

This may be better called “A very, very brief survey of apologetic methods.” It is best to go deeper in separate articles for each, yet we must offer an entry point to the newcomer. Since my own position is the classical approach, we will begin there.

Classicalism

Classical apologetics bears that name, as in the case of other things called “classical,” because it is the historic or traditional variety. Everyone from the earliest apologists of the second century down through medieval scholasticism, and even into the post-Reformation era defended the faith in this basic way. That consists in a two step approach from philosophical demonstrations about necessary truths to the use of evidence concerning the contingent matters of history or science. The first step establishes theism. This disappoints some. It is said to be “too general,” but simply consider how much trouble we avoid by at least building this first step.

Thomas Aquinas wrote, “For, if we do not demonstrate that God exists, all consideration of divine things is necessarily suppressed.”2 That first “step” takes seriously those general revelation passages like Psalm 19:1-3 and Romans 1:19-20. So to borrow from Aquinas again, “beginning with sensible things, our intellect is led to the point of knowing about God that He exists, and other such characteristics that must be attributed to the First Principle.”3

In such traditional demonstrations, also called “natural theology,” we establish that God must exist—that He cannot not be—by inferring from the being, cause, mind, morality, and design in the creation to their ultimate cause or explanation.

There is also a practical advantage to this way. Once perceived, this order of reality will condition the order in which one is forced to think about everything else. In other words, when the existence of God is proven first, this conditions all of the options which follow. Agnosticism, atheism, and all other so-called “theisms” that really involve a plurality of ultimate reference points, are already overthrown.

Our logic can then move on to the dependence of the creation upon God, the inescapability of truth, the immateriality of that fundamental aspect of human nature, the existential reality of evil and death, and the very possibility of miracles and prophecy paving the way for investigating specific claims to them. All of this follows by resistless logic. One is already stuck with only three religions left standing in a very narrow room—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is then that we turn to evidence.

While Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and the Reformed Orthodox championed this view throughout church history, it was reclaimed in recent years by Calvinists like John Gerstner, R. C. Sproul, and Keith Mathison, Evangelicals like Norman Geisler, Douglas Groothuis, and Richard Howe, Roman Catholics such as Peter Kreeft, Edward Feser, Francis Beckwith, and Robert Baron, and in somewhat altered form by William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and Richard Swinburne.

Fideism

Fideism is the approach that marginalizes rational criteria and arguments as a ground of faith. Very often it treats such exercises of the mind as unspiritual and even idolatrous. As to the name fideism, we might consider it “faith alone” as an epistemology (rather than a soteriology). In other words, faith alone is how we come to know God.

Notice that ending: “know God.” The more profound fideist is not so simplistic as to think that our minds are not involved. Rather it is that reason is subordinate to those acts of the will and affections which place the soul more under the humble obedience to Christ. It is that more subjective journey of the soul that begins to open up more of who God is to us.

Having said that, fideism has never been the majority view in church history in almost any tradition until that modern era. Although it can claim such luminaries as Tertullian, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth.

It may be wondered why fideism could be called an “apologetic method.” It seems more like an anti-apologetic. In one sense that is true. However, the best fideists certainly commended their faith to others, and used their minds in doing so. There is something more Christ-like and virtuous in what Kierkegaard called “the knight of faith,” that this way of life becomes a thing of beauty. We have all likely heard some variation of the saying that the best apologetic is a life well-lived. But it is not merely a moral example that may be commended by faith alone.

In spite of his fideism, Pascal would address this from the perspectives of awe and longing:

“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.”4

He also wrote that, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”5 For all that, he was too brilliant to have been a full fideist. Even Pascal’s Wager involves the calculation of reason in order to assess what is best for one’s whole soul. Yet he concludes that, “Reason’s last step is in the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”6

Evidentialism

Evidentialism is so named because it takes the contingent matters of history and science as its starting point, concluding in the reasonableness of the Christian revelation. From this it is further argued that the specifically God must exist, given the cumulative evidence. Such implies that one can never arise above a high degree of probability in the knowledge of such truth, yet it denies that there is such a thing as epistemological certainty besides in mathematical or logical relations.

Notice that this makes evidentialism move in the exact opposite direction as classicalism. An evidentialist may have little to no use for traditional natural theological arguments, or he may incorporate them, but the crucial point is that he will not begin there.

One of the main works of early evidentialism was the product of the great English philosopher John Locke. He would write The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). The last basic element of full evidentialism was contributed by the American law professor Simon Greenleaf who wrote a book called The Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice (1846). The premise was twofold: first, that matters of history are perfectly knowable, but their method is best compared to that by which juries are to deliberate in a court case; second, if the claims of Christianity are assessed by these same standards, then those claims will be vindicated.

Roughly the same reasoning applies to evaluating the text of Scripture. A threefold criteria for textual evidence consists in (1) a bibliographical test, (2) an internal test, and (3) an external test. In other words, these ask the questions: Is the textual tradition itself corrupted or intact? Is every part of the whole consistent with itself? Are the claims made in it corroborated by external evidence, and, better yet, by hostile witnesses? These are the standards we would expect to apply to any text. If the Bible is subjected to the same, it will be vindicated.

The logic of this method was best argued for in the latter twentieth century by the Lutheran apologist and jurist John Warwick Montgomery. Other evidentialists include Wolfhart Pannenberg and Gary Habermas. It shows up on the popular level in books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1972) or in Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ (1998).

Presuppositionalism

Presuppositionalism is so named because it holds that one must presuppose the Christian theistic position (i.e., the existence of the triune God and / or the authority of Scripture) in order to properly infer any other truth of ultimate consequence. To make things simple up front, we may list seven basic elements of this viewpoint:

1. All people reason from their basic presuppositions.

2. The triune God’s existence and Scripture’s authority are the Christian’s basic presuppositions.

3. Sin distorts human reason such that the unregenerate mind will never accept positive demonstration.

4. The task of apologetics, then, is to expose the inconsistency of the unbeliever’s presupposition, or to show how any reasonable belief the unbeliever holds is only true on the grounds of the Christian presupposition.

5. The form of proof corresponding to this task is indirect (or a transcendental) argument. 

6. Any apologetic that seeks to reason from common ground with the unbeliever rests faith on autonomous human reason.

7. Any such ground by which Christian claims are judged puts “God on trial.”

It may be immediately asked: If the unregenerate mind will not allow any contingent facts, whether of science or history, to be interpreted outside of their own basic set of presuppositions, then what about the use of evidence? John Frame, answers this question by saying that, “Scripture teaches clearly that we can gain knowledge of God through the events of nature and history,” and “The evidence … is of such a high quality that it rightly obligates consent.”7 The objection against evidentialism, then, is that because the evidence is so clear, the argument for it ought to be demonstrative and not merely probable.

So, the presuppositionalist wants to emphasize the relationship of all particular facts to each other. Merely empirical arguments are as weak as they are because, “they deal only with a selection of facts … But the Christian argument, empirical though it is, includes all the facts of experience. God is revealed in every fact of creation. So we are not faced with a situation where some evidence favors our conclusion and other evidence counts against it. All the evidence leads to God.”8

Critics will charge this approach as being guilty of a constant circular reasoning: that is, assuming in one’s premise what is to be demonstrated in one’s conclusion. This they justify on the ground that all human reasoning is circular in the grand scheme of the worldview level. An empiricist will only accept conclusions that answer to empirical verification. A rationalist will only allow what follows certain axioms of the mind. A Muslim will only proceed from what the Qu’ran rules on. And so on with other views.

Greg Bahnsen put the same thing this way:

“Ultimately, then, the details of one’s theory of knowledge are ‘justified’ in terms of their coherence within the distinctive and broad theory of which they are a part.”9

The presuppositionalist is zealous to “take his stand in Scripture,” and to not allow the standards of competing worldviews, which cannot justify themselves, be the rule. This may seem understandable at first glance. But the reality is that the only arena in which this can be shown to the unbeliever is in that of general revelation and common notions. If the question of a skeptic is: What is more reasonable about the Christian circle than the empiricist circle? Or why should I believe the claims of the Christian book over the Muslim book? One must either answer from outside the circle or inside, outside the book or inside. Without some common field of truth that holds over all of the circles, there is no intelligible conversation. There is no real apologetics.

There is diversity within this camp, starting with the followers of Gordon Clark as opposed to those of Cornelius Van Til. On a popular level, there is no shortage of debate among presuppositionalists as to whether Bahnsen or Frame is the more faithful representative of Van Til. Westminster Seminary’s K. Scott Oliphint and RTS Charlotte’s James Anderson are the latest heirs to the tradition.

Reformed Epistemology

Reformed Epistemology (RE) arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century and became perhaps the most attractive alternative for college-educated Evangelicals who wanted the best of both worlds—that is, the life of the mind within the totality of the Christian worldview and yet the de-escalation of confrontation with an increasingly hostile secularism. Leading RE thinkers have been Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, George Mavrodes, William Alston, and Kelly James Clark.

There were two root causes at the core of modern philosophy—foundationalism and the so-called “ethics of belief.” Foundationalism holds that the only rational starting points are beliefs that do not have to resort to being justified by still other more foundational beliefs. We have to stop (or start) somewhere. But what could qualify as such beliefs? These must be beliefs that are either 1. incorrigible, 2. self-evident, or 3. evident to the senses. These came to be called basic beliefs—any beliefs not based upon others—as opposed to non-basic beliefs—any beliefs based upon those more basic. What Plantinga wanted to start to challenge was this: “Why shouldn’t the existence of God be in the foundations of my noetic structure?”10

Then there was that second modern idea called the “ethics of belief,” in which the concept of justification of belief began to be defined as a convergence of two elements—sufficient evidence and moral duty. This represents a subtle shift in epistemology from objective truth criteria to something more subjective. If we treat sufficient evidence and moral duty as epistemological equals, then we are really only talking about “whether one” (i.e. a person) is “justified” in believing a thing. Plantinga was motivated by negative implications such as that, “someone who believes that there is such a person as God but who doesn’t know of evidence for that belief” is unjustified.11

An 1877 essay by W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” especially brought this to the forefront. He delivered what became a maxim of late modern epistemology: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”12 RE wanted to challenge these “various Enlightenment epistemological assumptions that have tended to militate against the possibility of immediate knowledge of God.”13 In other words, “warranted belief” that is rational in spite of having no rational justification to show for itself. This is an even more sophisticated path to fideism than we saw about presuppositionalism.

Plantinga defines warrant as “a name of the property that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief.”14 This is comprised of four elements: 1. properly functioning cognitive faculties, 2. in a correct environment, 3. aimed at true belief, and 4. successfully so.15

One immediate criticism cannot help but come to mind. How can we tell if cognitive faculties are successfully aimed at truth and properly functioning toward that end—if we cannot first know the truth on the bases of some other set of criteria?

As to that cognitive faculty, Plantinga interestingly borrows (largely from Calvin) the notion of the sensus divinitatis, that is, the internal sense of God’s reality that God places within all human beings. This faculty does not imply innate knowledge but rather a natural capacity. What matters is that the knowledge obtained by this faculty “is not arrived at by inference or argument ... but in a much more immediate way.”16

It may certainly be helpful to make the distinction between “knowing Christianity to be true and showing Christianity to be true,”17 and seeing how reason plays its ministerial role in each. However, RE goes further than this in its critique of classical apologetics, neutering reason to such an extent that the role it plays in demonstration from one mind to another is very minimal.

Combinationalism

Combinationalism is a name that has been given more recently to the “catch all” view that had often been called a “cumulative” or “eclectic” approach. Each of these labels gives the idea of a kind of pragmatic viewpoint. The idea is less principled about some orthodox order and sees each element of apologetics as a tool in a bag. You simply start with whichever meets the needs of your audience.

E. J. Carnell advances a kind of cumulative approach, yet without an initial emphasis on natural theology. He was one of Van Til’s first students at Westminster. He would retain presuppositionalism’s critique of the traditional natural theological arguments; but he would also deviate from his teacher in starting with the facts of history and moving up to the best probabilistic arguments. Another early student who would draw the displeasure of Van Til was Francis Schaeffer who was less critical of traditional arguments though just as critical of Aquinas. Basil Mitchell, C. Stephen Evans, Gordon Lewis, and Paul Feinberg also advanced a cumulative approach. It has been argued that C. S. Lewis should be placed in this school, in spite of what seems to be a basic agreement he had with classical metaphysical thought. That is a fair point at least when we consider all of the dimensions brought in by his fiction.

From a classical perspective, we would simply say that the classical view offers everything that the cumulative approach does, yet in addition it trains the mind of both apologist and audience to think about the actual hierarchical nature of reality, always moving from the metaphysical picture of God in Himself on to all that is true as a consequence. 

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1. Nathan Greely, Christian Apologetics (Just & Sinner, 2021), 11

2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.9.5.

3. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, I.2.3.

4. Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 4.

5. Pascal, Pensées, 127.

6. Pascal, Pensées, 56.

7. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 142.

8. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 143.

9. Greg Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1998), 482.

10. Alvin Plantinga, The Analytical Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, James F. Sennett, ed. (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1998), 98.

11. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 13.

12. William Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Michael Peterson, ed. Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80.

13. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2016), 82.

14. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 25

15. Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, 26-28, 46.

16. William Lane Craig credits Plantinga for this insight in “Classical Apologetics,” Five Views on Apologetics, ed., Steven B. Cowan, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), Five Views on Apologetics, 28.