Quote:
Originally Posted by Hungus  So I have a fellow philosophy student who shames me by memorizing almost all of the Pauline texts and yet is agnostic. Last night while discussing apologetics with him he stated that one of the antinomies that causes him to find Christianity to be not rationally provable is the issue of positive (classical) apologetics. As stated by him:
A rational approach to unbelief is irrational given that the source of regeneration and belief is faith which is inherently non-rational.
Now my immediate response to him was that I agreed that the regeneration of the spirit as done by the Holy Spirit was not done for rational reasons from our perspective and that the reason that a positive apologetic is used is because God commands us to evangelize and has chosen to regenerate people upon hearing the words of Christ (Rom 10:17 "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.")
Comments or suggestions on a reply? |
Quote:
By saying that faith is irrational, he means, in the context of our conversation, that one cannot by rational ascent become a christian. The Holy spirit must regenerate the individual and then they receive the gift of faith logically, but there is no logical ascent to the faith (being as it is a gift and not earned). Regeneration requires the work of the Holy spirit and so one cannot reason in a regenerated state.
Tumeric I think you are correct in your apprisal that this is the same kind of situation as described in 1 Corinthians 1:20-25, but he us the greek seeking wisdom. Now Sroul and Gerstner argue that the proper aologetic is the classical approch using reason as opposed to presuppositionalism. He finds that inconsistant since reason and evidence do nought without revelation
|
Robert:
If your fellow student is critiquing Sproul and Gerstner (and Lindsley, I suppose), or critiquing what he calls the Classical methodology, or critiquing the Word of God, these are three separate things. I'd like to know which he is critiquing.
What is his idea of what is and is not rational? And how does he view what faith is?
If I may reword his critique:
from,
"A rational approach to unbelief is irrational given that the source of regeneration and belief is faith which is inherently non-rational."
to,
"The accusation of unbelief against an unbeliever is as equally non-rational as belief, since regeneration and belief is inherently non-rational."
In other words, belief and unbelief are in the context of the faith that is granted outside the rational sphere.
Is this what he is saying? There are a lot of things taken for granted here. But the most important thing, I suppose, is that God's existence does not depend on man's belief that He exists, as he supposes; nor can God's existence be rationally denied, as he supposes. Believing that He exists is not necessarily the same as belief and faith in God. For even the demons believe, and shudder; but they do not have faith. The same with the philosophers and their philosophies of this world: why do they bend over backwards to argue against the strengths of the Christian religion, if it is not true that they do believe and shudder? If they do not believe in this respect (as opposed to believing and having faith) then why all this attention to something inherently non-rational?
No, Anselm was right: the world cannot deny God's existence and still be rational. On the one hand they have to acknowledge Him, just so on the other hand they can deny Him. There is no other explanation.
What your fellow student is saying is contrived. It puts everything that is under examination into his definitional framework, even though he borrows the whole of it from another frame of reference. He cannot help but acknowledge both the Classical and the Presuppositional necessities that he claims to deny. In other words, to put it very succinctly, he is being irrational.