Ha ha, thanks for being open to it! Could you clarify what difference between Kuyper and Van Til you’re thinking of? They have an official difference over the legitimacy of apologetics, but more broadly, they have very different approaches to cultural engagement and critique.
The presuppositionalism I was given, was very shaped by Van Til, and I think led to less cultural engagement (than Kuyper’s brand) and more of a hunkering down mentality.
Okay, you asked for disagreement, here goes. Two questions for you: (1) of all the supernaturalisms competing for the crown of Single Source of Truth, how is an alien who lands here in 2025 to pick the one to engage with? (2) as someone who believes in objective morality, list its top 10 universal precepts, agreed by all others who aren't in your sect but are also objective moralists.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about the rationalist/EA community and their approach to knowledge from a skeptical starting place. Do you think that is a reasonable place to begin from and then arrive at fullness of truth in Jesus Christ? I've been thinking that the rationalist/skeptic starting place is in some ways great, but can only bring you to the gates of heaven, to step inside requires faith.
So I've started to become interested in the faith & reason discourse of say, Newman, JP2, and Benedict 16 though I haven't gotten very far yet. You're kind of coming at truth from the perspective of someone who's grown up in the faith and is now becoming open to natural law as a source of truth (which is also my story). But my brother went down the path of the skeptic and rejects anything that is not strictly empirical, and while there are empirical reasons to believe in the Christian faith, it is entirely possible to dismiss evidence on rational grounds because the claims of Christianity are indeed quite strange (as recent Substack discourse on Our Lady of Fatima has demonstrated).
I'm coming around to the idea on both sides of the skeptics vs. the faithful divide are axioms taken on faith. For the skeptic they have David Hume's stance on miracles, for the Christian we have Pascal's wager. All this to say, what do you think is the role of a person's disposition when it comes to finding truth?
Geoff, thanks for your thoughtful comment! I had to think about it over the weekend.
Personally, I’m not persuaded that the function of faith is to get us to believe things without reason or evidence. Someone like Aquinas says that reason enables us to believe in the existence of God and the natural law, while supernatural revelation goes beyond these. Supernatural revelation is believed by faith, in his words. But faith is not without reasons or evidence, but chiefly, the evidence it appeals to has to do with the historical life, death and resurrection of Christ.
The book of John is all about evidences of Christ’s identity and mission, from his miracles. Then Jesus says that our love for one and another is evidence to others of the truth of what we preach.
I think folks of that rationalist bent often don’t even consider evidences of Christ. The one counterexample is Bentham’s Bulldog on Substack, whom I highly recommend reading!
I’m open to non-rational sources of belief, like the desire to live forever and see justice done in the afterlife. Those are the focus of Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life - he’s a Catholic existentialist philosopher. But I’m not persuaded of the leap of faith or that we have to rely on Pascal’s wager. I think the evidence of our faith is there!
Hello, I really enjoyed your article. I am a 17 year old who is going to a Christian school to study philosophy in the hopes of then going to law school. I have been thinking about this idea of presuppositionalism as I recently wrote a piece debunking the false dichotomy between autonomy and theonomy as prescribed by thinkers like Van Til and Bahnsen. When it comes to Theonomy, I can come up with a whole host of reasons why it is an awful idea just from the perspective of natural law. But then the Theonomist will scoff and say "you really aren't basing your philosophy on the bible, you pagan". It is just something that really bugs me. Yes, the bible corroborates itself, but nature also testifies the Glory of God. Isn't the Christian called to refer both to general and special revelation? I don't know if I have gone full Christian Humanist yet, especially because I haven't read enough yet, but I look forward to reading more in the future. All that to say, I really enjoyed your article. (also, your website loge thingy is super cool, I made mine in Canva but it is kind of generic).
I feel the need to add something here. All my beliefs go back to the bible. But some are more direct than others. For instance, my belief that murder is wrong has a more direct antecedent in scripture from that of the opinion that theocracy is wrong. I believe that I can use rational objective evidence to support my opinion that theocratic fascism is wrong, but at the end of the day, my implicit trust in such things as objective truth comes from a biblical perspective. How do I square this?
The Bible definitely teaches morality! The funny thing is that people of all belief systems and none all speak and think in moral terms all day long, (p. 1 of Mere Christianity) and they’re not all getting it from the Bible.
I also believe that scripture teaches the existence of the natural law in Romans 2. Those are some of the reasons why I embrace a Christian natural law of view! But thank you for reading 😌
Awesome. I'd not heard of "presuppositionalism" before, but it sounds like a guaranteed path to being wrong about everything!
Substack has been recommending lots of theologians to me, and one thing that stands out is how little anyone seems to just, y'know, ask Jesus what He thinks. I know for me, Christianity describes my experience of the divine, it doesn't dictate my beliefs about the divine. How does a personal relationship with Christ fit into your own practice of theology?
What do you mean by asking Jesus what he thinks? Some people mean reading Jesus’s words in the gospel Accounts. Some people mean direct prayer seeking an answer through experience of God.
While I grew up in Pentecostal Christianity, which is much more about trying to directly hear from Jesus, I first shifted towards focusing only on the Bible. My shift that I described in the article of the last 10 years is of believing that God’s will is displayed through nature and human experience, in addition to Scripture.
To some extent, I’ve also shifted from focusing on the letters of Paul more to the words of Jesus. Jesus teaches a faith that is more about living out our faith through love of others, less about getting the details of the theology right.
Maybe that answers your question, but maybe you meant more that we can ask Christ directly. I’ve just never heard an answer!
I mostly mean direct prayer, but there's a meta-level question about what one believes the experience of direct communication with Jesus feels like. I generally regard it as an inner loving voice, loving in the sense of 1 Cor 13. Maybe others expect something more literal or more transcendental. But expecting _something_ helps root theology in experience rather than just presupposition and theory, which is why I start there. And I'll admit I've got a bit of a beef with folks who are very certain that Jesus exists but very skeptical that He talks to anyone directly, as that sounds to me like it's merely a hair's breadth from not actually believing He exists.
I very much agree with your sentence that starts "Jesus teaches a faith..." I think that holds both for the man described in the Bible and the loving inner voice that I give primacy to. Though I do really have a soft spot for (non-Deutero-)Paul; I don't think he was "doing theology" so much as translating for many different audiences. He made such a big deal about tailoring his message for his audience; I suspect he's a bit miffed that folks started treating his memos like the Word of God. It's not Paul that irks me, it's what people do with Paul.
Anyway, your answer was sufficiently "correct" to get me to subscribe. ;-) Thanks for the response! Looking forward to more!
It’s invigorating to hear a critique of a philosophy I love so much. Thank you.
But it strikes me that your interpretation of Presuppositionalism is more Kuyper than Van Til.
(You can correct me it I’m wrong- I discovered Presup while attending RTS-Jackson rather than learned it verbally from CVT or Frame at WTS)
Ha ha, thanks for being open to it! Could you clarify what difference between Kuyper and Van Til you’re thinking of? They have an official difference over the legitimacy of apologetics, but more broadly, they have very different approaches to cultural engagement and critique.
The presuppositionalism I was given, was very shaped by Van Til, and I think led to less cultural engagement (than Kuyper’s brand) and more of a hunkering down mentality.
Okay, you asked for disagreement, here goes. Two questions for you: (1) of all the supernaturalisms competing for the crown of Single Source of Truth, how is an alien who lands here in 2025 to pick the one to engage with? (2) as someone who believes in objective morality, list its top 10 universal precepts, agreed by all others who aren't in your sect but are also objective moralists.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about the rationalist/EA community and their approach to knowledge from a skeptical starting place. Do you think that is a reasonable place to begin from and then arrive at fullness of truth in Jesus Christ? I've been thinking that the rationalist/skeptic starting place is in some ways great, but can only bring you to the gates of heaven, to step inside requires faith.
So I've started to become interested in the faith & reason discourse of say, Newman, JP2, and Benedict 16 though I haven't gotten very far yet. You're kind of coming at truth from the perspective of someone who's grown up in the faith and is now becoming open to natural law as a source of truth (which is also my story). But my brother went down the path of the skeptic and rejects anything that is not strictly empirical, and while there are empirical reasons to believe in the Christian faith, it is entirely possible to dismiss evidence on rational grounds because the claims of Christianity are indeed quite strange (as recent Substack discourse on Our Lady of Fatima has demonstrated).
I'm coming around to the idea on both sides of the skeptics vs. the faithful divide are axioms taken on faith. For the skeptic they have David Hume's stance on miracles, for the Christian we have Pascal's wager. All this to say, what do you think is the role of a person's disposition when it comes to finding truth?
Geoff, thanks for your thoughtful comment! I had to think about it over the weekend.
Personally, I’m not persuaded that the function of faith is to get us to believe things without reason or evidence. Someone like Aquinas says that reason enables us to believe in the existence of God and the natural law, while supernatural revelation goes beyond these. Supernatural revelation is believed by faith, in his words. But faith is not without reasons or evidence, but chiefly, the evidence it appeals to has to do with the historical life, death and resurrection of Christ.
The book of John is all about evidences of Christ’s identity and mission, from his miracles. Then Jesus says that our love for one and another is evidence to others of the truth of what we preach.
I think folks of that rationalist bent often don’t even consider evidences of Christ. The one counterexample is Bentham’s Bulldog on Substack, whom I highly recommend reading!
I’m open to non-rational sources of belief, like the desire to live forever and see justice done in the afterlife. Those are the focus of Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life - he’s a Catholic existentialist philosopher. But I’m not persuaded of the leap of faith or that we have to rely on Pascal’s wager. I think the evidence of our faith is there!
Hello, I really enjoyed your article. I am a 17 year old who is going to a Christian school to study philosophy in the hopes of then going to law school. I have been thinking about this idea of presuppositionalism as I recently wrote a piece debunking the false dichotomy between autonomy and theonomy as prescribed by thinkers like Van Til and Bahnsen. When it comes to Theonomy, I can come up with a whole host of reasons why it is an awful idea just from the perspective of natural law. But then the Theonomist will scoff and say "you really aren't basing your philosophy on the bible, you pagan". It is just something that really bugs me. Yes, the bible corroborates itself, but nature also testifies the Glory of God. Isn't the Christian called to refer both to general and special revelation? I don't know if I have gone full Christian Humanist yet, especially because I haven't read enough yet, but I look forward to reading more in the future. All that to say, I really enjoyed your article. (also, your website loge thingy is super cool, I made mine in Canva but it is kind of generic).
I feel the need to add something here. All my beliefs go back to the bible. But some are more direct than others. For instance, my belief that murder is wrong has a more direct antecedent in scripture from that of the opinion that theocracy is wrong. I believe that I can use rational objective evidence to support my opinion that theocratic fascism is wrong, but at the end of the day, my implicit trust in such things as objective truth comes from a biblical perspective. How do I square this?
believing in morality is a presupp belief based on the divine revelation of the bible.
The Bible definitely teaches morality! The funny thing is that people of all belief systems and none all speak and think in moral terms all day long, (p. 1 of Mere Christianity) and they’re not all getting it from the Bible.
I also believe that scripture teaches the existence of the natural law in Romans 2. Those are some of the reasons why I embrace a Christian natural law of view! But thank you for reading 😌
Awesome. I'd not heard of "presuppositionalism" before, but it sounds like a guaranteed path to being wrong about everything!
Substack has been recommending lots of theologians to me, and one thing that stands out is how little anyone seems to just, y'know, ask Jesus what He thinks. I know for me, Christianity describes my experience of the divine, it doesn't dictate my beliefs about the divine. How does a personal relationship with Christ fit into your own practice of theology?
Thanks for reading Jack!
What do you mean by asking Jesus what he thinks? Some people mean reading Jesus’s words in the gospel Accounts. Some people mean direct prayer seeking an answer through experience of God.
While I grew up in Pentecostal Christianity, which is much more about trying to directly hear from Jesus, I first shifted towards focusing only on the Bible. My shift that I described in the article of the last 10 years is of believing that God’s will is displayed through nature and human experience, in addition to Scripture.
To some extent, I’ve also shifted from focusing on the letters of Paul more to the words of Jesus. Jesus teaches a faith that is more about living out our faith through love of others, less about getting the details of the theology right.
Maybe that answers your question, but maybe you meant more that we can ask Christ directly. I’ve just never heard an answer!
I mostly mean direct prayer, but there's a meta-level question about what one believes the experience of direct communication with Jesus feels like. I generally regard it as an inner loving voice, loving in the sense of 1 Cor 13. Maybe others expect something more literal or more transcendental. But expecting _something_ helps root theology in experience rather than just presupposition and theory, which is why I start there. And I'll admit I've got a bit of a beef with folks who are very certain that Jesus exists but very skeptical that He talks to anyone directly, as that sounds to me like it's merely a hair's breadth from not actually believing He exists.
I very much agree with your sentence that starts "Jesus teaches a faith..." I think that holds both for the man described in the Bible and the loving inner voice that I give primacy to. Though I do really have a soft spot for (non-Deutero-)Paul; I don't think he was "doing theology" so much as translating for many different audiences. He made such a big deal about tailoring his message for his audience; I suspect he's a bit miffed that folks started treating his memos like the Word of God. It's not Paul that irks me, it's what people do with Paul.
Anyway, your answer was sufficiently "correct" to get me to subscribe. ;-) Thanks for the response! Looking forward to more!
We in the Catholic Church have a word for this. It's being "catholic" (with a small "c").