PROGRESSIVE AND REGRESSIVE TENDENCIES IN APOLOGETICS - John Azie Kaivin T. Pascual

PROGRESSIVE AND REGRESSIVE TENDENCIES IN APOLOGETICS

The year 1928 was considered a milestone in the history of apologetics for it was in that year that Cornelius Van Til took the position of Instructor of Apologetics at the Princeton Theological Seminary. A year after, Princeton was reorganized cutting off the tradition of the Old Princeton. As a result, under the leadership of J. Gresham Machen, Van Til left Princeton and helped in the formation of Westminster. It was in this seminary that Van Til developed the new approach in Christian apologetics. His goal was to establish apologetics on Christian foundation.

Van Til’s ambition was “to reinstate apologetics” “on a new basis”. Van Til did not agree with Kuyper’s conclusion. For him much weakness is not due to the inherent nature of apologetics itself, but because Christian apologists allows its critics to occupy a neutral ground. He wants to address this problem.

In the Modern times, modern apologetics was based on empirical foundation “prepared by modern scientific discovery” which makes Christianity impossible. Some of the Christian apologists who employed empirical basis were Bishop Butler, William Paley, and David Hume.

Bishop Butler has an argument about life after death. In here he discussed that our physical death will not destroy our identity. Because of this, it is acceptable to believe that there will be life after death. I also believe this belief that physical death has nothing to do to our real identity as our spirit when we die will come back to God who gave it and who we are in Christ will never be taken away from us. Therefore we must not fear death. But for Hume,the regularity of nature cannot be used to prove the relationship between “what was within experience”. The only alternative is found “by means of the cause-effect relationship.” but it had its meaning only “within the bounds of experience itself.”

I also believe in William Paley when He said that the designs brought us back to the Designer. I remember one of the passages in the Bible that all the works of God’s hand, the creation will speak and prove of His existence. There were other apologists whose arguments were shared on the article but I haven’t mentioned them here. I only give emphasis to the people who had impacted me. After all, I salute all the apologists mentioned for they really taught me to be a critical and analytic thinker.

We will see that the apologists have their own argument. We will also notice that apologetics has its strong and weak points. After discussing the Impericism to Idealism, the birth of Presuppositional Apologetics was discussed. I love the conclusion of this paper where it stated that when you disagree with an author, it entails an extra cautious reading on your part for you to critically assess both the points of disagreement and at the same time, for you to humbly listen and learn from the insights the author is trying to communicate. Every new learning requires further research to come up with the best ideas that we will be able to use not to argue but to provide better solution to the problem.