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John Frame / Greg Bahnsen etc.

prism

Christ, Our Advocate
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For quite some time, I dabbled with evidential apologetics, Josh McDowell, John Warwick Montgomery, R.C. Sproul, etc., but lately I have been discovering the Presuppositional camp, John Frame, Greg Bahnsen, both students of Van Til.
To tell you the truth, I kinda like what I read. Thoughts? (esp on Frame and Bahnsen)
 
You are talking my language. I have been a student of presuppositional apologetics for several years and could recommend a number of resources for you.

Genealogy of Presuppositional Apologetics​

Dutch Foundations (19th–early 20th century)​

  • Abraham Kuyper
    • Theology of antithesis: regenerate vs. unregenerate thinking.
    • No neutrality—all life is covenantal.
    • Stressed common grace to explain unbeliever’s contributions.
  • Herman Bavinck
    • Systematized Reformed dogmatics with epistemological depth.
    • Strong doctrine of revelation: general + special revelation.
    • Emphasized organic unity of knowledge under God’s revelation.

The Westminster Founder (mid–20th century)​

  • Cornelius Van Til
    • Student of Princeton (Warfield, Machen) but heir to Kuyper and Bavinck.
    • Creator–creature distinction (analogia entis) central to epistemology.
    • General and special revelation are covenantally united.
    • Developed transcendental argument (TAG): the impossibility of the contrary.
    • Exposed the myth of neutrality.
    • Insisted all reasoning is covenantal and analogical.

First Defenders / Systematizers**​

  • Greg L. Bahnsen, "Van Til’s bulldog."
    • Sharpened TAG and popularized it in debate.
    • The Great Debate with atheist Gordon Stein (1985), classic TAG in action.
  • John Frame
    • Student of Van Til, but softened edges.
    • Triperspectivalism (normative, situational, existential).
  • Richard Pratt Jr.
    • Extended presuppositional method into biblical theology and worldview training.
  • Michael R. Butler
    • Student of Greg Bahnsen; co-authored with him on apologetics.
    • Known for his essay "The Transcendental Argument for God's Existence" (in The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen).

Contemporary Westminster Tradition​

  • James N. Anderson
    • Focused on TAG in analytic philosophy; work on logic and epistemology.
  • K. Scott Oliphint
    • Branded the approach explicitly as "covenantal apologetics."
  • William Edgar
    • Applied Van Til to cultural apologetics (music, art, culture).
  • Grover E. Gunn
    • PCA minister, defended Van Til's epistemology but rejected extensions into theonomy.

Broader and Popular Extensions​

  • Douglas Wilson
  • Jeff Durbin

Kuyper gave the antithesis and worldview categories.
⇓​
Bavinck gave the revelational epistemology.
⇓​
Van Til synthesized them into covenantal-transcendental apologetics.
⇓​
Bahnsen, Frame, Oliphint, Anderson, etc. extended and diversified it.
⇓​
Durbin, Lisle, Wilson brought it to the street and culture.
 

To say that logic and science are God-neutral common ground is to deny the existence of the sovereign God of scripture for whom and through whom and to whom are all things. To say that the impersonal axioms of logic and science are the most basic principles of reality is to deny the Christ who is before all things, and in whom all things consist … In its quest for common ground with the skeptic, evidentialism makes concessions that compromise the very essence of biblical Christianity … Not only does evidentialism concede too much, it seeks to prove too little. The most evidentialism claims to be able to do is to prove the probable truth of Christianity. But if Christianity is only probably true, then Christianity is also possibly false.

… The apologist can argue transcendentally that human logic and science have no adequate foundation apart from the Word of the true and living God. [What he cannot do is] make human logic and science his self-authenticating authorities and then use these to prove God. Logic and science derive their authenticity and authority from God, not vice-versa. … Evidence must be presented in the defining context of the gospel message. We must reject the notion that we can somehow use evidence and logical arguments apart from the gospel context to prepare the skeptic's heart and mind for the gospel message. It is in the context of the preached Word that God works his work of regenerating grace which enables the spiritually blind to see and believe.

-- Grover E. Gunn. (Emphasis added.)
 
Basic idea of John Frame's triperspectivalism:
  • All human knowledge and responsibility can be looked at from three inseparable perspectives:
    • Normative (God's standards—what is true, right, or authoritative).
    • Situational (the facts of the world—the situation we are in, reality as God made it).
    • Existential (the knowing subject—our personal experience, motives, and commitments).
  • Frame argues that you never have one without the others. Every act of knowing, obeying, or reasoning involves all three perspectives simultaneously.
 
Covenantal apologetics: Unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). Believers presuppose the truth in righteousness.

Unregenerate Suppression
  • Unbelievers know God (vv. 19-21) but do not honor or thank him.
  • They “hold down” (κατέχοντες, katechontes) the truth by their unrighteousness.
  • Their epistemic posture is rebellion: they twist and resist what is plain.
Regenerate Presupposition
  • Instead of suppressing the truth, believers presuppose it—that is, they stand upon God’s revelation as the principium (starting point).
  • They embrace the truth in submission, not autonomy.
  • This is a covenantal act; it isn't neutral reasoning, but obedient reasoning under God.
CategoryUnbeliever (Rom 1:18-21)Believer (Eph 4:22-24; 2 Cor 10:5)
Epistemic postureSuppresses the truthPresupposes the truth
Moral conditionIn unrighteousnessIn righteousness
Relation to GodCovenant-breakers (in Adam)Covenant-keepers (in Christ)
RevelationTwists, denies, exchangesReceives, acknowledges, delights
ResultFutility of mind (Eph 4:17)Renewal of mind (Rom 12:2)
 
For quite some time, I dabbled with evidential apologetics, Josh McDowell, John Warwick Montgomery, R.C. Sproul, etc., but lately I have been discovering the Presuppositional camp, John Frame, Greg Bahnsen, both students of Van Til.
To tell you the truth, I kinda like what I read. Thoughts? (esp on Frame and Bahnsen)
I do not wish to derail the thread, so I will simply post a link to some comments I made a while back.
https://christcentered.community.forum/threads/the-creator-creature-distinction.1290/

@John Bauer
I'm tagged John because he might just like what I wrote in the link.
 
The Great Debate with atheist Gordon Stein (1985), classic TAG in action
I waded through that 2+ hours, (a bit over my head). They kept mentioning the 'laws of logic, which I had to Google.lol. Outside that I found the debate quite interesting. Btw, What is TAG?
 
For quite some time, I dabbled with evidential apologetics, Josh McDowell, John Warwick Montgomery, R.C. Sproul, etc., but lately I have been discovering the Presuppositional camp, John Frame, Greg Bahnsen, both students of Van Til.
To tell you the truth, I kinda like what I read. Thoughts? (esp on Frame and Bahnsen)
Yes, I'm with Presuppositional apologetics.
 
You are talking my language. I have been a student of presuppositional apologetics for several years and could recommend a number of resources for you.
Thank you for those resources. I find apologetics is aimed at the unconverted. Yet, I find it (especially the Presup camp) weighed down with philosophical concepts. I have found those on skid row and Hollywood Blvd much more open to the Gospel message, yet without the philosophical jargon.Then there are students at a school like UCLA who could handle the philosophy but there's little to no hunger for even the Gospel.
 
Last edited:
I do not wish to derail the thread, so I will simply post a link to some comments I made a while back:

https://christcentered.community.forum/threads/the-creator-creature-distinction.1290/

I'm tagging John Bauer because he might just like what I wrote in the link.

I appreciate the heads-up. I had not seen that thread before now.

I do like what you wrote, yes. Some good stuff there. But I'm not sure I have anything meaningful or helpful to add that could justify necroposting, other than explaining what I like and don't like.
 
[Cornelius Van Til] insisted [that] all reasoning is covenantal and analogical.

This one gives me a bit of difficulty. I take it that Van Til is referring to true biblical reasoning?

No, he is referring to "all reasoning." All reasoning is covenantal and analogical, for both the unregenerate sinner and the regenerate saint.

Yes, even unbelievers reason covenantally and analogically. Covenantally because they reason as covenant-breakers, suppressing truth; their reasoning is still within the covenantal relationship that they cannot escape. Analogically because they still depend on God's revelation and borrowed intellectual capital, even when twisting it. Their reasoning never escapes the creaturely condition of dependence.

Van Til's point is that all human reasoning, whether believer or unbeliever, is covenantal (never neutral) and analogical (always dependent).


By the way, what is TAG?

It stands for the Transcendental Argument for God. This is the core argument of presuppositional apologetics, that the triune God—speaking through Christ by his Spirit in the infallible Word—is the necessary precondition for the rational intelligibility of the world and of our experience within it, the ultimate reference point for all predication and meaning.

"Science, philosophy, and theology find their intelligible contact only on the presupposition of the self-revelation of God in Christ" (Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed.). We don't try to prove God exists to those who already know God exists, but to expose unbelief in a way that affords no rational rejoinder—the impossibility of the contrary.
 
You are talking my language. I have been a student of presuppositional apologetics for several years and could recommend a number of resources for you.

Genealogy of Presuppositional Apologetics​

Dutch Foundations (19th–early 20th century)​

  • Abraham Kuyper
    • Theology of antithesis: regenerate vs. unregenerate thinking.
    • No neutrality—all life is covenantal.
    • Stressed common grace to explain unbeliever’s contributions.
  • Herman Bavinck
    • Systematized Reformed dogmatics with epistemological depth.
    • Strong doctrine of revelation: general + special revelation.
    • Emphasized organic unity of knowledge under God’s revelation.

The Westminster Founder (mid–20th century)​

  • Cornelius Van Til
    • Student of Princeton (Warfield, Machen) but heir to Kuyper and Bavinck.
    • Creator–creature distinction (analogia entis) central to epistemology.
    • General and special revelation are covenantally united.
    • Developed transcendental argument (TAG): the impossibility of the contrary.
    • Exposed the myth of neutrality.
    • Insisted all reasoning is covenantal and analogical.

First Defenders / Systematizers**​

  • Greg L. Bahnsen, "Van Til’s bulldog."
    • Sharpened TAG and popularized it in debate.
    • The Great Debate with atheist Gordon Stein (1985), classic TAG in action.
  • John Frame
    • Student of Van Til, but softened edges.
    • Triperspectivalism (normative, situational, existential).
  • Richard Pratt Jr.
    • Extended presuppositional method into biblical theology and worldview training.
  • Michael R. Butler
    • Student of Greg Bahnsen; co-authored with him on apologetics.
    • Known for his essay "The Transcendental Argument for God's Existence" (in The Standard Bearer: A Festschrift for Greg L. Bahnsen).

Contemporary Westminster Tradition​

  • James N. Anderson
    • Focused on TAG in analytic philosophy; work on logic and epistemology.
  • K. Scott Oliphint
    • Branded the approach explicitly as "covenantal apologetics."
  • William Edgar
    • Applied Van Til to cultural apologetics (music, art, culture).
  • Grover E. Gunn
    • PCA minister, defended Van Til's epistemology but rejected extensions into theonomy.

Broader and Popular Extensions​

  • Douglas Wilson
  • Jeff Durbin

Kuyper gave the antithesis and worldview categories.
⇓​
Bavinck gave the revelational epistemology.
⇓​
Van Til synthesized them into covenantal-transcendental apologetics.
⇓​
Bahnsen, Frame, Oliphint, Anderson, etc. extended and diversified it.
⇓​
Durbin, Lisle, Wilson brought it to the street and culture.

Brought it to the street and culture? Where, what , how?
 
Covenantal apologetics: Unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). Believers presuppose the truth in righteousness.

Unregenerate Suppression
  • Unbelievers know God (vv. 19-21) but do not honor or thank him.
  • They “hold down” (κατέχοντες, katechontes) the truth by their unrighteousness.
  • Their epistemic posture is rebellion: they twist and resist what is plain.
Regenerate Presupposition
  • Instead of suppressing the truth, believers presuppose it—that is, they stand upon God’s revelation as the principium (starting point).
  • They embrace the truth in submission, not autonomy.
  • This is a covenantal act; it isn't neutral reasoning, but obedient reasoning under God.
CategoryUnbeliever (Rom 1:18-21)Believer (Eph 4:22-24; 2 Cor 10:5)
Epistemic postureSuppresses the truthPresupposes the truth
Moral conditionIn unrighteousnessIn righteousness
Relation to GodCovenant-breakers (in Adam)Covenant-keepers (in Christ)
RevelationTwists, denies, exchangesReceives, acknowledges, delights
ResultFutility of mind (Eph 4:17)Renewal of mind (Rom 12:2)

I suppose you could just tell an unbeliever that he suppresses the truth, but an exchange is much more interesting when you show them the EVIDENCE that they are doing this. Happens all the time on X.

Prager used to say: general principles without specifics are platitudes; specific details without observing general principles are chaotic. We as Christians don’t have the option of avoiding specifics. The unbeliever will still do what your chart says (suppress, deny) but we must speak specifically regardless; it is the Spirits job to change them.
 
Violation of rule 4.3. Do not derail or hijack thread.
And, applying presuppositions the other way, what evidence is there anywhere that a thermostat existed that warmed the testicles blue whales enough, the first moment they were in the ocean , to protect their life fluid enough the first time to preserve it?

What I mean is that evolutionary theory is grotesquely theoretical—presuppositional.

The reality is there are no second chances in nature. The design must work perfectly the first moment. Or the species is lost.

So the biological evidence about cosmology is overwhelmingly for Darwin’s “abomination”—his term things that defy gradual change and emergence, bc they were all working perfectly from the moment of creation onward.

So…what use is a gaping distinction between presupposition and specific details? How is presupp a ‘language’ but details are not?

This planet may have existed many years between the ‘spreading out’ and creation week, but no microbes advanced anywhere close to what Genesis 1 meant by life.
 
And, applying presuppositions the other way, what evidence is there anywhere that ... [snip the rest]

Your appeal to evidence is a dead giveaway. It shows that you're still thinking in autonomous categories and defaulting back to an evidentialist framework.

In a Reformed covenantal framework, a presupposition is not a provisional axiom that can be reversed or tested symmetrically, but rather an ultimate, transcendental commitment—one that furnishes the very preconditions for intelligible thought and experience (i.e., what must already be true if reasoning, science, and evidence are to be meaningful at all). As such, presuppositions are not fungible hypotheses to be applied both ways, as it were, but principia that when consistently applied either ground or undermine rationality itself.

Asking such questions as "what evidence is there" signals a return to an evidentialist framework which assumes the very autonomy that presuppositionalism denies—a fallacious move. The issue is not the stock of evidences per se, but the epistemological conditions under which "evidence" has meaning.

There are no brute facts. Every evidential claim—including for or against evolution—is interpreted within a worldview framework. The question is not whether one can marshal credible or sufficient evidence, but whether the very concepts of "evidence" or even "design" can be intelligible apart from the triune God of scripture. They cannot. Only the Christian worldview provides the necessary preconditions: the Creator–creature distinction, the covenantal order of the cosmos, and the reliability of inductive inference grounded in divine providence.

Summary: The transcendental argument rests on the impossibility of the contrary: Without God, one cannot account for the rational structure of reality in which even scientific reasoning—like your critique—takes place.
 
Your appeal to evidence is a dead giveaway. It shows that you're still thinking in autonomous categories and defaulting back to an evidentialist framework.

In a Reformed covenantal framework, a presupposition is not a provisional axiom that can be reversed or tested symmetrically, but rather an ultimate, transcendental commitment—one that furnishes the very preconditions for intelligible thought and experience (i.e., what must already be true if reasoning, science, and evidence are to be meaningful at all). As such, presuppositions are not fungible hypotheses to be applied both ways, as it were, but principia that when consistently applied either ground or undermine rationality itself.

Asking such questions as "what evidence is there" signals a return to an evidentialist framework which assumes the very autonomy that presuppositionalism denies—a fallacious move. The issue is not the stock of evidences per se, but the epistemological conditions under which "evidence" has meaning.

There are no brute facts. Every evidential claim—including for or against evolution—is interpreted within a worldview framework. The question is not whether one can marshal credible or sufficient evidence, but whether the very concepts of "evidence" or even "design" can be intelligible apart from the triune God of scripture. They cannot. Only the Christian worldview provides the necessary preconditions: the Creator–creature distinction, the covenantal order of the cosmos, and the reliability of inductive inference grounded in divine providence.

Summary: The transcendental argument rests on the impossibility of the contrary: Without God, one cannot account for the rational structure of reality in which even scientific reasoning—like your critique—takes place.

There is evidence of the 'impossibility of the contrary' as well as the principi. When Darwin met (realized) what bees meant, he hit a brute fact.

You speak like a person who wants to dictate; I don't accept that. I only accept proof.
 
The healing in Mk 2 that proved Christ's divine authority to forgive was a brute fact without interpretation.
 
Yes, I'm with Presuppositional apologetics.
We can talk to people all day about evidence, but what we should be doing is speaking about Jesus and what scripture says, and continuing to steer the conversations back to that.
 
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