Challenge to Unbelief (4 of 6) – The Futility of Unbelief, Part 2

[00:00] I already concede my position. Laws of logic are abstract. They are universal, and they are necessary. But according to the unbeliever, the atheist, who believes it’s just matter and motion, nothing is abstract, there are no universals, and there is no such thing as necessity. We’re in a random universe. Consequently, unbelievers can’t use the laws of logic. And if they can’t use the laws of logic, they can’t reason and debate. Again, this is not just a nick out of the unbeliever. This is devastating to the unbeliever’s philosophy. And we’ve done this five times over in less than an hour.

[00:39] Now, I want to tell you, and you probably know this because you know human nature, that doesn’t mean the unbeliever’s going to fall dead. He’s going to give up, going to not be stubborn, not going to, you know, kind of get cloudy in his thinking and miss the point. It may take you five or six, you know, discussions with the unbeliever to make one of these points. Or, on the other hand, maybe in ten minutes, an unbeliever might say, uh-oh, I’m in deep trouble, philosophically. You will find sometimes unbelievers, once they start seeing the intellectual problems with their position, will not want to discuss it anymore. They’ll decide the philosophy, you know, that’s just too academic and abstract and so forth. So, I mean, there are a lot of strategies people use to escape the force of what I’m talking about here.

[01:25] But my point is that unbelief is futile, is intellectually futile. That if people will not affirm the Christian worldview, they are, in principle, unable to know anything whatsoever or to prove anything at all. Dr. Van Til put it this way, the proof of the Christian position is that without it, you can’t prove anything. Now, you can throw away Christianity, but in so doing, you throw away rationality, argument, induction, science. You throw away man’s freedom, mind, and the purpose of rational debate. You throw away ethical absolutes and the laws of logic. Basically, you can’t make sense out of anything. You can’t even talk.

[02:10] So the futility of unbelief. Answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. show that the unbeliever is without an apologetic? Or as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 1, lay down the challenge. Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Because, you know, human beings have been doing philosophy for thousands of years, and they still haven’t come up with any answer to these five problems.

[02:44] By the way, it gets even worse than this. if I can take a moment to elaborate, it will not be enough to answer one of these in isolation. If you start and think about it, the unbeliever’s got to have an answer to all of these problems. One’s not going to help him. So he’s got quite a task, because it turns out he has to be able to unify. his answer, if it’s going to answer all five of these, must be with itself, and therefore there’s got to be an interrelation between these that is drawn out by his philosophy of life. He’s going to have to show the connection to be consistent as well.

[03:29] But there are other problems. You see, if he were to prove that there’s a basis for induction by appealing to determinants, let’s just take that as an example. That is, he says, the world is not random after all. I believe that everything in the world happens according to law-like explanation. Everything in this world is like free programs. There is no freedom. It’s just a whole causal nexus. Now, of course, he’s begging the question when he says it’s a causal nexus that things do what they do. But nevertheless, let’s say he’s a determinist in order to get nature uniform. With respect to the use of man’s mind, he must be an indeterminist. Because the whole problem here is that if man is nothing but brain, then he doesn’t have any freedom to consider evidence and to make choices in a rational way. He’s just, you know, subject to behavioristic conditioning. And so the unbeliever is going to have to defend freedom for man by being an indeterminist, and he’s going to have to defend the reliability of scientific method by being a determinist.

[04:42] Does anybody see a problem with what I’ve written on the board? Now the unbeliever contradicts himself. In fact, you will find out if you do any extensive study of philosophical worldviews views, that the unbeliever always has these types of internal contradictions within his system. He cannot account for freedom and necessity both. He cannot account for the fact that man is matter as well as mind. He cannot deal with all of these simultaneously.

[05:14] We’ve already seen he can’t deal with any of them in isolation, but he can’t deal with any of them simultaneously either. There will always be found in unbelieving systems of thought a tension, and I’m going to give you, for your note’s sake, two ways of seeing the tension, or if you will, on the one side, every system of thought is going to have some kind of order, unity, and control factor, so that there’s continuity, universality, or standards in this world. Now, that applies to ethics, it applies to theory of knowledge, it applies to our view of reality as well. In one way or another, every system of thought is going to have some kind of continuity, universality, standards, order, or control.

[06:02] But every system of thought is also going to have to incorporate freedom, diversity, change, individuality, because not every red barn is the same. There’s individuality to red barns. There are changes in this world. Not all red barns stay red. There’s randomness and diversity and freedom in this world. Human beings make choices to paint the barn red, to paint the barn white, whatever. And so the unbelievers got a monumental task in not only answering problems like these, induction, universal, mind, freedom, ethical absolutes, and laws and logic, but the unbeliever’s got to develop a worldview where, in some way, the unity and the diversity of the world are brought together.

[06:53] The oneness of things and the manyness of things is brought together. The freedom and the necessity that are both characteristic of reality are brought together. And unbelievers are not able to do that. They don’t know where to draw the line. They don’t know how. How do you combine abstract reality and particular reality, mental and material? How do you combine that which is free? Is nature uniform and predictable? A man’s nothing but a white rat. Or is it the case that men have personal dignity and freedom, in which case there’s novelty in this world because men make different decisions? Well, which is it?

[07:32] Well, the unbeliever doesn’t know how to answer that, because he knows that nature does have a certain predictability about it. That’s where the laws of science come from. He will attack induction. But on the other hand, he knows that human nature doesn’t fit into a world of determinism and uniformity, because human nature is free and does things that cannot be predicted. How do you bring these two realms together? This is a great question in Immanuel Kant had. He never answered it. Well, not to my satisfaction anyway, and I don’t think the other. Unbelievers cannot develop a world and life view that saves the precondition of science, logic, ethic, human freedom, and dignity. They cannot make sense of the world.

[08:22] Now, before I end, I need to say a word or two and answer to what might be on your mind. Well, yeah, but Dr. Bahnsen, you’ve been dealing with people that are atheists and materialists and so forth. But what about people that have a different philosophy than that? Or what about other religions? I mean, maybe they can answer Christianity. Maybe they have a viable world. No, in fact, they don’t. And you can pick up some tapes and reading material and look into that. But let me try to show you why that would be the case. You should be able to see that that would be the case.

[08:58] The fact that a philosopher says, well, I believe that there are immaterial realities, doesn’t mean he has the right to do that. He does not have within his philosophical framework a justification for doing that. And the fact that you have somebody that promotes a religion, let’s say Islam, the Islamic temple right here. The fact that you have people promoting the theology of Islam and appealing to a God to back up what they are saying doesn’t mean that their worldview is cogent. See, we as Christians are not saying, believe us because we use the name God. That’s settled. Since God is the author of the Bible, then you should believe it. Obviously, anybody can come along and have another book and say, no, God wrote this book instead. But you see, our claim is not that we’re just invoking the name God, and therefore we’re right. What we’re saying is, since God revealed this, when you reject this, you can’t make sense of anything else.

[10:01] Now, other religions cannot make good on that kind of claim. Islam can’t. Orthodox Judaism can’t. Hindus can’t. Buddhists can’t. You doubt that? Okay, well then I’ll give you a proof. Just take a minute or two. What version of Hinduism would you like? How about Hare Krishna? That’s fairly popular, has been in this country. With Hare Krishna, in appealing to the Bhagavad Gita’s revelation, by the way, a revelation of whom? Of course, it can’t be a revelation of a personal God, because on Hindu theology, there is no personal God. All is one. Everything is God. So I don’t know where the notion of a divine revelation fits into Hindu theology in the first place.

[10:44] By the way, that’s not just a mick out of Hinduism. That just destroyed it. Because Hinduism isn’t Hinduism without the Bhagavad Gita. And then you can ask them, well, what’s the Bhagavad Gita? Well, they can’t, like we can, say, well, it’s a revelation of God the creator. There is no God the creator. There is no personal God. And it’s worse than that. Do an internal critique of the full system.

[11:06] The guy at the airport, you know, talking to me. He’s hired Christians worried that I’m not going to get to Nirvana because I’m tied up in Western materialism. I believe that I’m different from you, and my money is my money and not your money. They really don’t like that idea. And there are these distinctions between things. And so every time I argue with the Hare Krishna, he says, that’s the problem. You Christians, you have this Western logical mentality that distinguishes one reality from another. And until you realize that all is one and there are no distinctions, You will always be coming back on the wheel of life, being reincarnated, until enlightenment comes. And then you drop into the shoreless ocean of the oneness of being where there are no distinctions. And then that will be nirvana.

[11:57] That’s okay. Now, let me see if I understand what you’re telling me. You’re saying that because I’m tied up with this way of reasoning that says there are distinctions, that that’s keeping me from getting to nirvana. Right? Right. In other words, I’m not now in nirvana, right? Right. And therefore, there’s a distinction between where I am now on the wheel of life and nirvana. Isn’t that right? Right.

[12:27] But my whole problem is that I’m thinking in terms of distinction. On your theology, I’m already in nirvana, because there can’t be any distinction between nirvana and not being in nirvana. All is one, right? Right? So you can do an internal critique of non-Christian religions as well. What right do they have to claim a divine revelation, and is what they are saying internally consistent?

[12:53] The fact that they say this is religious, this is divine, this is God, doesn’t mean you have to accept that. You just go on and do the same thing with them that you do with the atheists. Do an internal critique of their system. I know that time is short. I wanted to cover some of that, though, so you can see that it’s not a matter of which religion is right. It’s all worldviews. And some worldviews name the name of God or a God, and some worldviews don’t. But they’re all worldviews, nonetheless. So, similar kinds of problems. Buddhism. Buddhism is a religion of immanent moralism. Buddhists say they don’t believe in a transcendent. They are not like Hindus in that way. The Buddhist believes that the core of religion is living a particular kind of life, and I don’t have time to describe that for you, but it’s a matter of getting away from suffering, a life of tranquility and peace, and enlightenment, accomplished through, usually, a form of yoga.

[13:53] So, you’re talking to the Buddhists, and you say, well, now if I understand your religion, you’re saying we’re supposed to live a certain kind of life, and there are different versions of it, so you’ve got to get it right. You say I’m supposed to do this, I’m supposed to chant this kind of mantra, whatever it may be. what is a Buddhist? Well, after the Buddhist explains his position, you know, you have every right to say, and did God tell you that that’s what I’m supposed to do? Oh, you don’t believe in God. Well, then in other words, you’re telling me what I’m supposed to do. Oh, but you embody the wisdom of the ages. I say, okay, how do you know you embody the wisdom of the ages? You don’t believe in education and study and all that Western rationality. Okay, well, never mind. Anyway, I’ll grant that you embody the wisdom of the ages. Why should I follow the wisdom of the ages? Maybe I want to be a maverick. Maybe I want to strike out on my own. How can a Buddhist argue with anybody? He doesn’t have any basis for authority.

[14:50] Now, if I could summarize what we’ve been doing in this last hour, and this may prove more valuable to you than even the illustration, what sorts of things have I been doing when I deal with the various kinds of worldview? I’m looking for three things when I argue with the unbeliever to show the futility of his position. One, I’m looking for inconsistency, contradiction. He says one thing, uses this principle here, and turns around and denies it in another part of his philosophical system. You look for internal inconsistency.

[15:25] Secondly, you look for arbitrariness. There’s the Buddha saying, you should live this kind of life because that’s the course of peace and tranquility. and say, well, maybe I don’t believe that it is. Why should I submit to your particular yoga? Why should I submit to your particular ten ways? And so forth. Couldn’t somebody else come up with that? In fact, maybe Confucius. He got it as good as Gautama did, so why shouldn’t I follow the Confucian lifestyle instead? Arbitrariness. On the one hand, inconsistency.

[15:55] Secondly, arbitrariness. And thirdly, the unbeliever cannot, in his worldview, provide the preconditions of intelligibility, the sorts of things we’ve been going over on the board. How man is both free and yet lives in a world that has natural uniformity. How there are universals and yet man has a material body and there are particulars. How there are ethical absolutes or laws of logic. If you remember these three things, you will be able to deal with any unbelieving worldview that comes to you. Now, that doesn’t mean that we have pre-packaged apologetics.

[16:33] It doesn’t mean you go out and just memorize a few clever lines and now you’ve got it down. That’ll help, of course, give you a hat rack to begin with so you can hang some of your arguments on. But you need to be able to talk to the unbeliever and let the unbeliever explain where he or she is coming from. You need to master, if it’s a school of thought, what they believe better than they have mastered it so you can do an internal critique without being embarrassed by your inaccuracies and so forth. Another way of putting this is, when we’re dealing with unbelievers, we need to let them talk long enough that they hang themselves. We need to let the unbeliever answer these questions about reality and how he or she knows what they know and how they should live their lives and expand and expand and expand until they’ve finally given you the rope that is necessary to hang themselves.

[17:28] Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

[17:35] One more crucial, I think, block needs to be put into the wall here, or one more step needs to be inserted for you to understand the approach to apologetics that I’ve been trying to get at this afternoon. And I’ll be talking about that at Lord’s Day tomorrow morning when I preach on Romans 1 and the subject of self-deception. because it would be easy for you to have the idea, from what I’ve told you, that unbelievers are stark-raving, mad idiots. They don’t know anything, and they can’t make sense out of anything. What I have said from time to time, maybe I haven’t emphasized enough, but I’ll end with this, is that unbelievers, in principle, could know nothing if what they say about the world is true.

[18:19] If what they espouse as their philosophy is really true, they couldn’t make sense of moral absolutes, the laws of logic, the procedures of science. And yet unbelievers do not believe what they espouse. On one hand they do, they profess it, they try to defend it. But on the other hand the Bible tells us that they in their heart of hearts believe the truth about God. That the revelation of God has not been totally wiped out. and that in terms of what they know about God and themselves internally, then they are able to know things. They are able to balance their checkbook and to drive their car and to hold out for a certain kind of moral decency in this world. But it’s only because they are borrowing from the Christian worldview, which they have to do because God has made himself so perfectly plain to everybody.

[19:12] And therefore, we have to come to the conclusion that unbelievers are basically self-deceived. They have lied to themselves about the nature of reality and what it is to be a human being and how we know what we know. And when you understand that, then apologetics, I’ll be saying this tomorrow morning with both of you who might not be here, then apologetics becomes a matter of reminding people of what they already know. It will, stripping away the mask and the rationalizations and all of the false profession of another worldview and showing that all along they knew this in their heart of heart, and yet they would not bow to God and give him thanks. And that’s why they are under his wrath and curse, and the only hope they have is by turning from their rebellion to submission and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

[20:02] And I’m glad that apologetics comes back to that because I wouldn’t want us to have the idea that apologetics turns out to be an act of addition’s game. Apologetics is a matter of life and death, and ultimately it’s a matter of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and whether those who have been named by him will finally honor his lordship and come to him for his grace and his salvation.

[20:26] Well, you probably have some questions that have developed over this last hour and maybe from the last two lectures and we’ll take just a few minutes and try to cover them with it.

[20:36] Okay, the question is, how would you deal with what is being called a Christian cult? Let’s say one that denies the deity of Christ.

[20:42] Jehovah’s Witnesses perhaps, okay? In the first place, we have to understand that when we set out as Christians our worldview, we are claiming that this is the worldview taught to us in God’s own self-revelation in the Bible. We say that’s where we get our philosophy of life, from God’s revelation in the Bible. Now, when you’re dealing with, quote-unquote, a Christian cult, they are going to agree with that formally. They’re going to say, well, yeah, that’s right. We’re supposed to set out worldview from what’s found in the Bible. But then if they do that, the way you reason what a person that’s in a Christian cult is by showing that they’re exegetically wrong. That is, you use the Bible to disprove them. Now, you could also use stronger stuff than that, but they might at any point say, well, whatever your answer is to that question, that’s my answer too. It doesn’t always work that easily. It gets pretty sophisticated, but if you start arguing Trinitarian answers, and they don’t believe in the deity of Christ, then they can’t make that appeal. But the point is, since they grant the authority of the Bible, instead of going into philosophical apologetics, you should do polemical theology with them. You should just say, okay, let’s go to the Bible and see what it says.

[21:53] Now, what if it’s a Christian cult that doesn’t grant the authority of the Bible? One, you’re not a Christian cult, because Christianity is defined by God’s self-revelation. You don’t have the right to that name without some authorization from God, which wouldn’t be found necessarily in his word. And then secondly, if they don’t appeal to the Bible, then they’re out there in the dark along with everybody else. They’re not able to offer a worldview without being arbitrary, inconsistent, and failing to give the preconditions of intelligibility. So you deal with them just like any worldview. But if they do grant the authority of the Bible, then argue with them on the standpoint of the Bible.

[22:33] What about one, though, that has a different revelation and a personal God that goes along with it, like Islam. I do have a tape of my debate with an Islamic scholar from last fall that you can pick up to get more information on this. But again, if you study Islam so that you understand it internally, it’s not difficult to see how you answer in the first place. It turns out that Muhammad, who had hoped that the Jews and the Christians might cooperate with him, Muhammad made the mistake when he got these divine revelations of writing down that we are to honor the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel. So the Quran itself tells us that we can rely upon the Torah, the Law of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the Gospel of Jesus.

[23:23] And so when I debated with this Islamic scholar, I said, since your holy book says that, then together we can go to the Old Testament and to the Gospels and argue what God is like. And obviously, you can show that Allah, as presented in the Koran, is contrary to the God that’s revealed in the Bible. And at that point, all Muslims can do, and this is what they do, is say, oh, well, you’ve got a corrupt version. We’ve got the pure version. Well, that would be quite a trick for you to have a version that comes 700 years later from a different geographical location and it conflicts entirely with the tradition that we do know has a textual history going right back to the earliest days.

[24:13] And they’ll say, yeah, but there’s so many variations in the Bible, textual criticism. And then there are no variations in the Koran, right? Right. And why are there no variations in the Koran? Because in the third caliphate, anybody who had a variation that wasn’t turned in to be burned was killed. Oh, yeah, I mean, Christians could get textual unity if they wanted to practice that kind of thing. I mean, that’s really no grand and glorious. So we’re back to, if you grant that the Bible is the Word of God, then you’re going to have to deal with the contradictions between the Bible and the Koran.

[24:48] Moreover, if we even forget that problem, you can look at the internal problems in the Koran itself. The Koran presents Allah as so distant and different from the world that nothing can be said of Allah in human language. But what’s the Quran if it’s not an attempt to describe Allah in human language? So you can do an internal critique of that as well.

[25:09] Well, a couple of things happen. Sometimes when you argue with a person and you’re patient and they finally get to the end of their rope, you say, okay, well then I give up rationality. If being rational means I have to be a Christian, then I give up rationality. At that point, you want them to make sure they tell everybody that. So what I found out is the only way to affirm rationality is to be a Christian. The opposite of Christianity is irrationality. And I’m just going to make a personal choice for irrationality.

[25:40] From an apologetical, not evangelistic, from an apologetical standpoint, you’ve won the day, haven’t you? That’s all you want to show, is that rationality demands that a person be a Christian. And the person saying, I don’t want rationality because that means I have to be a Christian, that are granting the very conclusion that you were driving for.

[25:58] But then you can say something further to this person. Because if this person says, well, then I renounce rationality, you can say, well, then you don’t. No, I just said that I renounce rationality. I know. And since you renounce rationality, then you don’t believe that consistency is demanding. And since a person can be inconsistent when they renounce rationality, when you renounce it, you don’t renounce it. You see, a person can’t get away from the demands of rationality just that easily. And so what will have to take place is the person then will have to be quiet. You see, then you just close their mouth, literally, close their mouth. They can’t talk, and every time they affirm something, you can deny it if they renounce rationality.

[26:41] But you see, the fact that they are quiet doesn’t mean that God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, can’t convict their heart. And so while they’re sitting there, quietly, not able to say anything, I think at that point, you really want to preach the gospel and say, no, you’re not going to be able to run away from God. And even if you take the wings of the morning and go across the sea, they’re God’s spirit waiting for you. You can’t get away from the hound of heaven. And so at that point, all they can do is affirm insanity. But that won’t work either, because you see, God saves people out of insane asylums as well. And that’s just how powerful he is. And that’s where you want to leave the person, in the hands of God.

[27:20] To a certain extent, we’re using the word rationality in the same way. But then when you push beyond that to get a theory of rationality, it will turn out that he didn’t mean the same thing I did. And what we were originally agreeing on, he can’t make sense out of. For instance, he might say, sure, we should be rational. We should abide by the laws of logic. And then when you push further and you find out he has no basis for the laws of logic, Basically, when I say be rational, I’m saying you need to be God-like. You need to think God’s thoughts after him. He’s consistent. He does not lie. Therefore, you must be consistent and not lie. That isn’t what he meant. The unbeliever meant by rationality.

[28:00] However, for a time, we were both saying, well, we have to abide by the laws of logic. It’s not until you push further that you find out there are theoretical differences. Earlier, I had said the believer and the unbeliever don’t agree on any single point. And therefore, when we find that we’re agreeing, that’s what we want to go after, and we’re going to push him to give an account of that. So it looked like we agreed on rationality, but after a while, it turned out he had no foundation for rationality at all.

[28:28] Yes, sir. Well, I don’t believe anybody… The question has to do with coming up against somebody who understands presuppositional argumentation but is not using a Christian foundation.

[28:40] Well, my whole point is, you cannot make sense out of reasoning, cannot make sense out of science or ethical absolutes apart from the Christian perspective. That is, I’m not going to grant your premise that someone has a presuppositional approach that’s not Christian. Anytime you do an internal critique of a worldview, unless it’s Christian, it will turn out to disintegrate. It will turn out to have these problems and show its foolishness. Now, somebody might propose this.

[29:08] What if they had a worldview that was exactly like Christianity on every detail, only the names have been changed. Well, this is kind of a silly hypothetical, but if that were to happen, I’d simply say that is the Christian worldview. Because in a sense, that’s what you have when Christianity is described in English, and that’s what you have when Christianity is described in German. You’ve got the same worldview, but different tags, if you will, a different linguistic system for it. And so if somebody in English were to come up with another religion, but it turns out you have a triune God whose son came to save people from sin and so forth, but we don’t call that Jehovah and Jesus and so forth. I’d say we really have just aped the Christian system and changed the names. So that’s not really another worldview. That’s just the same worldview under different titles.

[30:01] For those listening by tape, the question has to do with an evaluation of the apologetic E.J. Carnell, who said that we do have to presuppose Christianity, but then went on to offer standards of verification, systematic consistency, he called it, as a way of showing that our presuppositions are true. First of all, it should be evident to us just in this description of Carnell that you verify your presuppositions, that he is not using the word presupposition in the way that I have in my lecture today. Because presuppositions are that by which you buy everything else. And so, if systematic consistency verifies your presuppositions, then, in fact, systematic consistency is your ultimate presupposition. So, in that way, Carnell was not presupposing Christianity. What he meant by Christianity as a presupposition might better be called Christianity as a supposition, not a presupposition, but a hypothesis, a supposition.

[31:04] Now, supposing Christianity is it, then you can take, or setting that out as a possibility or a hypothesis, perhaps would be a better way of putting it, then you take systematic consistency and you apply it to Christianity, and it comes out doing a better job than the other religions or the other philosophies of men until you affirm it.

[31:24] Carnell had some pretty bold declarations in his writings about, you know, bring on your revelations and let the rational man judge them, and then it will be worthy of a rational man’s faith or whatever. I could look them up to get them exactly right. But that was the spirit of it. It’s that we’re going to show the rationality of Christianity using standards which all men should agree to. Well, that’s not presuppositionalism in the transcendental way that I presented it, arguing from the impossibility of the contrary. That assumes that all men have common notions, that the unbeliever is reasoning all right as far as he goes, it’s just that he needs to apply his reasoning and his standards to Christianity to see that it too is true. But according to the Bible, the unbeliever is without an apologetic means of fool if he does not affirm the Christian worldview or the revelation of God found in the scriptures.

[32:18] Okay, why is it wrong to take the approach that we verify our hypothesis or supposition of Christianity? It’s wrong, first of all, because no one reasons that way. That is, with the idea of neutral epistemological methods applied to a hypothesis, a religious hypothesis. Everybody reasons within a worldview. Carnell’s system assumes you can step outside your worldview and evaluate it against other ones on the basis of some neutral standard of reasoning. But there is no such neutral, universal standard of reasoning. Secondly, no one can step outside of his or her worldview to evaluate other worldviews. So he’s just wrong philosophically, but more tragically, Carnell was wrong theologically and ethically.

[33:04] You don’t put the Lord your God to the test. You don’t say, God will be admitted to my universal thought after he passes my standard. As Dr. Van Til used to say, God may even pass summa cum laude, the point is it’s a man who’s conferring the degree on God rather than the other way around. And that is the deep-seated religious problem of Carnell’s apologetics. and does not understand the ultimate authority of God as self-attested.

[33:31] Well, there’s a similar problem when you read the bumper sticker, give Jesus a chance. Right. No, the bumper sticker should say, pray that Jesus will give you a chance.

[33:42] Okay, two more, and then we’ll be done for at least this part of our conference. Sure. How would we deal with Judaism? Again, I would remind you I have a debate tape. You’re not going to believe this. You’re going to say, boy, you’re a fool, Dr. Bahnsen. I debated a Muslim and an Orthodox Jew over a two-day debate, simultaneously. These guys could not stop arguing with each other over Palestine. I mean, it was horrible.

[34:08] Anyway, what I found fascinating, although I should have known this would be the case, is that I wanted the Orthodox Jew to engage in exegetical polemics with me. I wanted to go to the Law of Moses and show the need for a Savior, to show that salvation is by grace through faith, that the law cannot be used as a basis of merit before God, those sorts of things. And he would not touch exegesis with a ten-foot pole.

[34:35] He simply wanted to get away from that and to talk about tradition. Well now, that shouldn’t surprise me, should it? Isn’t that what we saw in Jesus’ own day? The Jews were much more devoted to the tradition of the elders than they were to the law of Moses. And that is still the case. I think this fellow, I can give you, well, I will real quickly. This fellow knew the Talmud better than he knew the Torah. We were at lunch on the second day of this debate cycle with a number of professors and students and so forth. And it was just a social sort of thing. One girl asked the Orthodox Jew about intermarriage, you know, Jews marrying non-Jews.

[35:15] And he talked about how that wasn’t a good idea, that marriages don’t work out that way, that smokers and non-smokers don’t usually get along, college graduates and uneducated people don’t usually marry each other. He used that kind of way. He said, it’s not good for a person with Jewish tradition and someone non-Jewish tradition there. That was his answer.

[35:34] So I asked him, not trying to be, you know, giving him a hard time, but just continuing the conversation, I said, yeah, prudentially, it doesn’t work out well, I’m sure. Would you also say that it was immoral for an Orthodox Jew to marry a non-Jew? He said, yeah, we would say that as well. Of course, it was strange he didn’t bring that up. But nevertheless, here I am, nice Dr. Bahnsen, sociable, I said, you know, kind of like not being unequally yoked together, right? And he looked at me like, what are you talking about? I said, not being unequally yoked together like Paul appeals to the law of Moses against intermarriage.

[36:13] He said, what in the law of Moses? You’re not to plow with an ox and an ass together? And you know, he had the most quizzical look, an actor about, oh, it seemed like two minutes, it was probably 10, 15 seconds. He said, wow, he thought that was the law about farming. This is an orthodox Jew. I know the law of Moses better than this man. You know, you would think that would be his pride and joy. You would think that he’d be glad to debate Old Testament theology.

[36:44] But one, I found him to be ignorant of some of the most obvious things of the Old Testament. and secondly, unwilling to debate them at all. I mean, I challenged him about blood atonement. I said, what is all this stuff about animal sacrifice? Because he had given the answer that the way we’re right with God is we tell God we’re sorry for our sins and we try to do a good job. You know, like lead a good life. I’m saying, why then in the law of Moses was there a need for blood sacrifice? What is the altar? What is it about? Nothing.

[37:15] The way you argue with an Orthodox Jew is you force them back to their claim about the Old Testament being your authority and argue from the Old Testament. In a sense, this is the easiest. This is what the apostles said all the time. They proved from the Old Testament that Jesus was the Messiah.

[37:31] One last question, quick. The question is, how would I respond to those who say, our task as Christians is to win souls, not to win arguments? I would say, I agree. Our aim is to win souls, not simply to win arguments. And then I go on to say, and God is insulted when we think souls are won and we lose arguments.

[37:52] Okay, thank you very much for coming.