Presuppositional Apologetics

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.”

Perhaps the reader has heard that statement by either Charles Spurgeon or Karl Barth, “Let the lion out of its cage!” or “Let the Bible be its own defense!” This is the presuppositionalist rallying cry as well. Who would dare to challenge such a pious maxim? Well, I would, actually.

Yes, the Bible has divine power to do what God has intended it to do. But it does not tell you which floor your doctor’s office is on; and, more to the point, it does not even say “Let the lion out of its cage!” and so forth. Now you may say in reply: “But the spirit of that saying very much is taught in Scripture!”

However, let us assume that is true for the sake of argument. Is it not plain that the moment one commits themselves to extra-biblical language and concepts either summarizing or supporting biblical truth, they have, at the same time and for the same reason, abandoned the position that faithfulness to the Scripture demands mere recitation of its words? This will be a recurring problem for the presuppositionalist rationale—namely, that it always has to have a rationale, as we all must, and that such cannot be reduced to a mechanical notion of “starting with” Scripture. The concept itself does not do so, nor can it.

While we absolutely agree with the presuppositionalist goal to defend the precise system of “the biblical worldview,” we do not exclude the common notions that believers and unbelievers might agree are not “unique to” the biblical view: e.g., that every effect must have a cause, that there is a desire for permanence, that Jesus was a historical person, and so forth. One reason that we do not exclude such truths or facts is that the Bible itself would not tell you to do that. In fact, it gives ample ground for the opposite approach. Since that is a subject exceeding the bounds of such introductory material, I would commend the reader to other places I have written on 1. general revelation per se, 2. its audience and content, 3. its media or mode, 4. how that implies an objective natural theology, and 5. other main supporting texts aside from Romans 1:19-20.

There is also a related confusion as to what it would even mean to “use Scripture” in apologetics encounters. It is often very appropriate to do so, but what exactly would that entail? In simple terms, we may cite Scripture: (1) when a text has been challenged; (2) when a text can introduce some relevant concept that would make the next step in the argument more intelligible. But taking Scripture seriously means taking general revelation seriously (Ps. 19:1-3, Rom. 1:19-20, 2:14-15), and that means doing so with the ordinary uses of logic, language, nature, etc. It does not mean rifling off prooftexts with no explanation or no appeal to the reasoning capacities of our audience.

To Show or Not to Show—Getting Specific within Presuppositionalism

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? And before answering that, I should say that this is a good place to point out that presuppositionalists almost universally (James Anderson and a few others are exceptions) confuse “evidentialism” with “classicalism.” So let us set one thing straight up front. All classicalists utilize evidential apologetics, but no evidental-ist is a classicalist.

Strict evidentialists in the modern sense of that terminology reject the classical method for very different reasons (and on much friendlier terms) than do presuppositionalists. For evidentialists like John Warwick Montgomery, Gary Habermas, and others, classicalism is not wholly wrongheaded, but it doesn’t make a bee-line to biblical inspiration and Christ’s resurrection, wasting its resources on philosophical conundrums that are, at the very least, inconclusive.

So an evidentialist begins with evidence—the contingent matters of history establishing that the Bible is God’s word or that Jesus is who He claimed to be and that He rose from the dead—and moves out to broader circles from there; while a classicalist begins with matters of logical necessity and which are metaphysically all-encompassing, so that once the objectivity of truth, God’s existence and man’s mortality are established, there are only a few contenders left standing in the room of rational consideration: namely, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and then one proceeds to the evidence to adjudicate between them.

With that crucial difference out of the way, we can ask with a bit more focus: What about that evidence?

The presuppositionalist, 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.” So the presuppositional view that Frame holds to includes the legitimacy of evidence in all of its classical dimensions: (1) nature, (2) miracles, (3) fulfilled prophecies, (4) the self-attestation of the Scripture. In fact, “The evidence … is of such a high quality that it rightly obligates consent.”1

The objection against evidentialism, then, seems to be that because the evidence is so clear, the argument for it ought to be demonstrative and not merely probable. This might seem confusing to anyone familiar with the arguments for and against empiricism. Isn’t the knowledge of particular effects, by definition, uncertain? After all, not one of them had to be of necessity. It seems that to speak of evidence as “demonstrative” is a confusion of categories. Even by a cumulative case, a larger set of evidence is still merely about a set of events, circumstances, or testimonies, the high probability of which acquires its epistemological status within a larger framework of truths.

What then is wrong with the typical use of evidence? It is simply this: Whereas the evidential apologist meets the unbelieving empiricist on level ground, pointing out that neither side can establish a necessary proof out of evidence (therefore why the double-standard against the Christian claim?) the emphasis of Frame and presuppositionalists is about 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.”2

But even granting that the Christian argument implies all the facts of experience, how does this fare as a method? One cannot catalogue all such facts in real time. The answer is not that the presuppositionalist expects to do this, but rather that they turn back the conversation to the preconditions for such facticity and the relation of facts to each other. Frame adds, “The very concept of probability presupposes a theistic worldview. What would it mean to say that one event is ‘more probable’ than another in a world of chance?”3 Thus, by definition, it really is true that every fact—if the evidence for it is more probable than its contrary—must be at least a theistic fact.

Apologetics in Scripture

How do presuppositionalists say that the Bible itself models apologetics? The fact that we should use evidences the way that the Bible does rests on the principle that God’s word accompanies His works. He always interprets His actions. It is true that Jesus condescended to the level of Thomas’ felt need for evidence; it is not true that Jesus left Thomas to be his own final interpreter. And, as Frame points out,

“the ‘infallible proofs’” following the resurrection, “were accompanied by forty days of verbal teaching (Acts 1:3).” The miracles and the fulfilled prophesies of Scripture “presuppose an already existing framework of interpretation.”

That explains why Jesus doesn’t spend the rest of the time with those disciples on the road to Emmaus performing more miracles, but rather spends His resurrection time with them opening up the whole of the Scriptures which led up to it. 

Frame then cites Peter’s sermon at Pentecost and Paul’s treatment of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 as the way that the New Testament wraps up the end-goal miracle in the whole Old Testament theology. That was the existing Scripture at the time, and so this is the model for how we should handle the evidences. We have to be doing some biblical theology—or answering the implicit question of how it all goes together—if the evidences are going to make saving sense. At the end of the day it is important to remember that, “though the argument does not produce faith, it warrants and justifies it.”4 In fact Frame would agree that it obligates it.

Autonomous Reason and the Noetic Effects of Sin

Central to the claim of presuppositionalists is that this is the proper “Reformed apologetic,” which is to say that it consistently applies certain principles of Reformed theology that alternative approaches do not. This specifically refers to two doctrines, namely the sola Scriptura principle and the doctrine of total depravity.

The idea of autonomous reasoning has taken on a life of its own within presuppositionalism. The word "autonomous" basically means a "law" (nomos) unto one self (auto). So let us say that some piece of evidence, or the laws of logic, or scientific data, is considered to be a “reason” for belief. The fear becomes this: that this proposed fact from outside of Scripture is now seen to be an authority that permits one to believe Scripture. Furthermore, even though presuppositionalists would recognize the very same breakdown between general revelation (nature) and special revelation (Scripture), the moment a conversation turns to apologetic method or philosophy, suddenly reasoning about objects outside of Scripture is made entirely a matter of “natural reason” or simply “reason” as opposed to “revelation,” by which we must only mean Scripture as revelation.

In response, the classicalist reminds the presuppositionalist that: 1. all truth is God's truth (so that no truth can be a law “to itself”), 2. all facts and laws outside of the Bible are a part of general revelation (so that there is no right reasoning happening beyond revelation), 3. if we have reasoned wrongly about such facts and laws, and need to be corrected by Scripture, it will not be the reality outside of Scripture that was errant, but rather our reasoning about it.

Far from the idea of taking intellectual responsibility for one’s beliefs, when the presuppositionalist uses this term, autonomous reason, he means the notion of reason set up as the final judge and standard for whether something is true: a posture in which one will not have God as authority, but only one’s own reason. In fact, this is being charitable. The term is invariably used by presuppositionalist authors to stand for any act of grounding a Christian truth claim in an extra-biblical premise or evidence. 

By the noetic effects of sin we mean the negative effects on reason that sin had on man as soon as Adam fell. This is used in the context of apologetic method because we want to assess the prospects that presenting a positive demonstration will have on the unbelieving mind. 

What do we lose if we deny any capacity to perceive facts to the natural mind? Two problems emerge. The first is that it does not seem to do justice to Paul’s words in Romans 1:20 where man is rendered inexcusable because of some morally blameworthy response to God’s revelation (verse 18 calls this suppression of truth). How, though, can man be held guilty for handling knowledge which he never had in any sense? A second problem emerges. It begins to recommend either a Double Truth Theory, where a proposition can be true if considered a matter of theology, yet false if as a matter of philosophy, or the identical proposition can be true when a believer utters it, yet false when an unbeliever says the exact same thing.

Another presuppositionalist, K. Scott Oliphint, has entirely opposite concerns. He draws from this idea the strong conclusion that, “if the ‘natural principle’ (generally speaking, the natural man) can judge rightly, it thereby undermines the sufficient reason (ration sufficens) of special revelation.”5

Generally speaking, this whole school will press to its extreme what I have called elsewhere the soteriological critique of nature and reason that was latent in several Reformed orthodox thinkers, but which they always balanced with a role for natural theology. The idea is that when one considers a natural thing—including principles of reason—it must be viewed entirely in terms of fallen nature and thus fallen reason. Ideas of objective truth that remain are not on the radar screen. All questions of epistemology are reduced to soteriology, or how man performs with such truths and natures given man’s chief end and how he is opposed to that end in sin.

The Historical Pedigree of Presuppositionalism

The presuppositional method of apologetics is fairly new in the grand scope of church history. Those who hold to this view will naturally claim an older historical lineage, but in terms of what the view is really saying, it begins with Cornelius Van Til in the 1930s to 1970s in his career at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and another “wing” or “brand” in the thought of Gordon Clark, who taught philosophy at Butler and was also a Presbyterian minister, at the same time as Van Til.

Many have observed seeds of this thinking in the thought of the Dutch theologians Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck from the generation right before. However, some context is in order there. It is true that Kuyper offered a precursor to the notion of the antithesis between worldviews. However, Kuyper did not see this as narrowing for the apologetic task as Van Til would. Moreover, Kuyper’s doctrine of common grace was rejected by Van Til.

For Bavinck, some of the same language was bound up in his insistence that the Christian system of dogmatics not be rooted in a natural theology. While that certainly parallels Van Til’s project, it is anachronistic to join them completely at the hip. According to Bavinck, theology, as an independent scientific enterprise, has its own first principles and does not borrow them from philosophy. Placing apologetics at the head of all the other theological disciplines, as this occurred in Schleiermacher and others, is explicable only from the fact that these theologians no longer recognized theology’s own principles and were forced to look elsewhere for a foundation on which the building of theology could rest.

Bavinck goes further to infer from theology’s ultimate authority that it “does not need the corroboration of philosophical reasoning.”6 Is the only kind of corroboration that of satisfying the skeptic’s demand for signs? What of the growing Christian mind’s desire to rightly order his thoughts? The extent to which Van Til can be rooted in Kuyper and Bavinck (a much clearer link is found with the Dutch thinker Herman Dooyeweerd) has been subject of much scholarly debate, and for our introductory purposes it will have to remain there.

So, whatever the claims, the facts are that presuppositionalism is quite new, less than a century old. What was the difference between those two foundational thinkers?

Frame put their debate in this way:

“Van Til wished to preserve the Creator-creature distinction in the realm of knowledge, and Clark wished to prevent any skeptical deductions from the doctrine of incomprehensibility, to insist that we really do know God on the basis of revelation. Van Til, therefore, insisted that even when God and man were thinking of the same thing (a particular rose, for example), their thoughts about it were never identical—God’s were the thoughts of the Creator, man’s of the creature. Such language made Clark fear skepticism. It seemed to him that if there was some discrepancy between man’s 'This is a rose' and God’s (concerning the same rose), then the human assertion must somehow fall short of the truth, since the very nature of truth is identity with God’s mind.”7

Many concluded that the two men were speaking past each other. The fact is that a long list of continuities and discontinuities could be listed in comparing God’s knowledge to ours.

Because of these two basic strands, diversity emerged among those claiming the title. And there is no shortage of debate among presuppositionalists as to whether Greg Bahnsen or John 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. But no matter which iteration of presuppositionalism is appealed to, the common feature is that one must presuppose the existence of the triune God and / or the Word of God as his revealed authority.

Because of the popularity of teaching that rapid technological advance in the post-war era afforded, such ideas were accessible to a wider segment of the church than among those who read more substantive works. Consequently, the majority of Reformed laypersons who came into contact with presuppositionalism viewed it solely in terms of a method of doing apologetics. For the most part, they were not reading Van Til or Clark directly, but having the concepts distilled to them in Sunday school or through other more user-friendly curricula. It is therefore unsurprising that this same demographic was unaware that the iteration that is often simply called “Van Tillianism” was proposing a revision not merely of the art of apologetic encounters, but an entire religious epistemology which only recent scholarship has been able to catch up to regard as a deviation from both classical Christian thought and Reformed Orthodoxy.

Covenantal apologetics is another label that has been proposed for presuppositional apologetics. This label is used especially by Oliphint at Westminster in Philadelphia. Following Van Til, this will emphasize the role of the covenant that one is in (either in Adam or in Christ) in terms of what one's epistemic obligations are, and then how sin has affected that. Recall those noetic effects of sin. This is a vast subject, but Oliphint's book Covenantal Apologetics is the main text proposing this view. Frame emphasizes this as well. For example, he writes, “Knowing is the act of a covenant servant of God."8 In other words, all human knowledge is therefore a knowledge about God as Lord (epistemologically) and a knowledge subject to God as Lord (ethically).

On the more popular level, Douglas Wilson, James White, Jeff Durbin, Ken Ham, Jason Lisle, and Voddie Baucham all take an essentially presuppositional approach in their ministries, each of which are either an apologetics (or specifically science) ministry, or which feature a central role for apologetics.

All or Nothing—the Unreasonable Expectation of Presuppositionalism

Van Til insisted that, “we must take the Bible, its conception of sin, its conception of Christ, and its conception of God and all that is involved in these concepts together, or take none of them.”9 While this is a perfectly true statement with respect to an overall attitude to Christian faith—that is, for the one already claiming orthodoxy and his readiness to believe all that God says in his word—it is a logical and psychological impossibility when the question regards building belief, from one reason to another. 

He said elsewhere,

“Calvinism cannot find a direct point of contact in any of the accepted concepts of the natural man. He disagrees with every individual doctrine of the natural man because he disagrees with the outlook of the natural man as a whole.”10

Such statements can be found throughout Van Til’s writings. Their hyperbolic nature is often brushed aside by those coming to his defense as just that: hyperbole. Other times, we are reminded that English was Van Til’s second language. Still other times, we are informed that we have not read “enough” of Van Til. When we show them that we have read his entire corpus, now the problem is that we have failed to appreciate this or that crucial concept.

One might ask: Don’t any later presuppositionalists see the overstated or strained nature of the central ideas of Van Til? Specifically, did anyone see the problem with “utter equivocation” between believer and unbeliever holding to the same proposition? In many ways Frame did. He is not as dogmatic as Van Til was, and even points out places where he cannot agree with the forefather of the method. Van Til would say that many agreements between believer and unbeliever are “‘purely formal,’ that is, the two use the same words to express utterly different meanings.” Frame points out, this is an over-generalization at best, to suggest that all such agreements between believer and unbeliever have this character. Moreover, he says, “If I say ‘2 + 2 = 4’ but mean by it ‘2 + 2 = 7,’ I have not expressed any knowledge, only error.”11

As a final word I should say that to reject Van Tillianism as a total religious epistemology—or even to have reservations about presuppositionalism as an apologetic method—is not to suggest that flesh and blood presuppositionalists have not been used by God in the communication of His truth. It is not even to suggest that there are not valuable contributions.

A famous (or infamous) example comes in the form of the oft-quoted, and occasionally mocked, retort, “BY WHAT STANDARD?” This has become a well-known interrogative maxim of sorts. You may be surprised to know, but from a classicalist perspective, it is actually not a bad question at all.

When Doug Wilson left Christopher Hitchens momentarily stunned and a bit red in the face with that question, its value was on center stage. Hitchens, who was going on in moral denouncements about the God of Scripture, suddenly caught himself and said, “Well, that’s a very good question,” to which Wilson replied, “I know,” followed by some laughter.

And that is just the point. It is a good question—as a question, but not as a jackhammer or as a clanging symbol. Like a good joke, it is to be used sparingly and in just the right spot. If it is not accompanied by further explanation, it begins to come across as a pedantic and obnoxious gimmick.

And such further explanation requires forays into the extra-biblical, into the evidential, into the wide open country of nature and reason. God’s country.

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

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

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

4. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 145.

5. K. Scott Oliphint, Footnote 5 in Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2004), 347.

6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:55-56

7. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 22.

8. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 40.

9. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (Den Dulk Foundation, 1969), 12.

10. Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2005), 146.

11. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 52.