Let me go ahead and start us with a quick word of prayer. Father, thank you. As we come to this last of our classes, it has been an adventure this spring as we have spent time reading and studying about the life and the ministry of Francis and Edith Schaefer and being edified and encouraged by all that we've learned about them. And we pray that as we bring this to a conclusion tonight, that you would continue to be with us, help us to continue to grow in our own spiritual life and in our own ministries as we continue to think about the lasting impact of these people we've been studying. And we pray these things in Christ's name, amen. So here's the plan for tonight. I put together a short set of notes to get us through the review or at least a kind of a review of Van Til's review so that we get at least a flavor of what he had to say about Schaefer's work. And then we have a special guest who will be joining us for the second hour tonight who is someone I literally just met last Thursday and it turns out that he spent time at LaBrie back in the sixties. And I asked if he would be willing to join us tonight to talk about his experience there and he said he would be willing to do that. So we will look forward to having him in the second hour. So have your questions ready. You know, I was kind of privately hoping that there would be some way, some opportunity to have somebody from LaBrie, who had personal experience at LaBrie, to be part of this class. And in God's providence, we have somebody who's going to be joining us a little later. Did you pray about it? It's one of those things that I thought about it. You know, sometimes you get an answer to a prayer that you didn't get around to praying. That's true. That might be the case in this instance. God hears everything, thoughts and all. I wish you hadn't said that, Kate. I prefer he just hears what I address directly to him and not the rest. At any rate, so it's going to be kind of a jet tour this first hour. I'll cover some of the points that Van Til covers in his critique and then it was my intent to give Schaefer the last word after we've looked at all the critiques. So we'll cover a little bit. Hopefully you've Maybe you already read several months ago the appendix to The God Who Is There, which is the question of apologetics. That was something he added during the revision process back in 1981. It was not part of the original publication. So we'll see what he might have had to say as far as his critics were concerned. So, The Apologetics of Francis A. Schaeffer is an unpublished manuscript I can't give you details but we obtained it from a guy named Sal who claimed to be from Philadelphia. He handed me a thumb drive with his left hand. He did not take his right hand out of the pocket of his trench coat and that's okay. I didn't ask for any more details. This is actually a compilation of several letters written over a period of several years. Some to Schaefer, some about Schaefer. Van Til touches on a number of Schaeffer's works, including all the following. The Wheaton Lectures from 1965 were one of his sources. Then an article from a speech called The Practice of the Truth. Another speech speaking the historic Christian position into the 20th century. And then an assortment of books, starting with The God Who Is There. I would summarize our glimpse into Van Til as a combination of seeing someone who's both eloquent and at times very abstruse and difficult to understand. Hopefully I'm not the only one who ran into that problem. So, here's Van Til, saying that Schaefer, as an apologist, takes his notion of guilt, history, and God from an independent study of nature and man as a joint enterprise with the unbeliever. It's a little like what we were showing last week on my picture here on the board, that he seems to start with the presupposition of the God who is there, and then go into more of a natural theology or rationalistic line of reasoning as he talks to the unbeliever. Van Til says that rational man is allowed to judge whether Christianity is true. And Van Til goes through an assortment of illustrations going way back as well, not just recent apologists, but Carnell is one of the ones that he refers to and he says that both Schaeffer and Carnell are using the word presupposition to mean a hypothesis. And he talks quite a bit about what he calls the traditional method of apologetics. which, quote, assumes that the Christian and the non-Christian agree on their interpretation of at least one major aspect of reality, unquote, which becomes for Schaeffer that point of contact where he can talk to the unbeliever. He says that Schaeffer can't let go of his views on human autonomy, quote, but Christ has not come to supplement the natural man's ideas of himself and the world. Schaefer seems to see man's understanding as not going far enough, but being right as far as it goes. And Van Til's will certainly take him to task on that statement. Schaefer also fails to see that both the ancient and the modern thinkers are relying on the assumption of human autonomy. So there's not this idea that if we go back far enough that we can find a better application of human reason. Can I ask a question? On that point of traditional method of apologetics assumes that the Christian and the non-Christian agree on their interpretation of at least one major aspect of reality. Would you like an example? The idea is that Schaeffer is trying to find a place where he can talk to the unbeliever. So he's assuming that the unbeliever has this worldview, his unbelieving worldview, Schaeffer has his Christian worldview, but there is a point of contact between the two where because the unbeliever is not consistent, in his worldview, he's having to rely on some part of Christian presuppositions, then there's a way for the two of them to talk. So in the areas of, he refers to the manishness of man, of what man is, and he refers also especially to the idea of reality, the world that we have to live in and the way it's organized, that we can't simply live according to the belief that there's no such thing as objective truth. And I'm just wondering what that point of contact might be. I mean, would it be something like the Bible or some other type of... No, for Schaeffer it's a matter of figuring out what the unbeliever, what his belief system is and then looking for places where he is inconsistent with his own belief system. What he calls taking the roof There is still some way for the unbeliever to talk to the Christian even though those two worldviews are antithetical. Technically, there should be no way for a Christian to talk to an unbeliever. But as a practical matter, there always is because the unbeliever is never entirely consistent with his own view. It can't be because of the constraints of the world that we have to live in. So could I interject or add, and then you could strike it down if you don't like it. Go for it. Okay, so when the unbeliever says, If there's a God, why is there so much evil in the world? And then you reply, well, why is there any good in the world then? Could that be a point of contact? Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily take that approach. I would maybe lean toward a more presuppositional approach and say, how do you define evil? What's the standard? And if this is a world of total randomness, then there can't be any distinction between good and evil. Things just happen. And we can even invoke the God of Darwin and say, it's just survival of the fittest. So if it's all random, how do you even trust your own thoughts about what's good? Sure, and you can go even deeper than that. So even like in the scientific realm, the scientist says, I'm just observing what's happening. I'm observing nature, or I'm running experiments. And then the question is, how do you know what you're seeing? How do you know it's real? And how do you know that if you do the same thing tomorrow, it's going to happen the same way? So the scientist is relying on presuppositions that come only from a Christian worldview. They wouldn't come from a worldview where everything is just random. Yeah, they have to, and that's the point. They have repeatability and stability. Yeah, there's uniformity in the natural world, and there's reliability of our sense perception, to a degree. But even there we would admit that, for example, in the world of jurisprudence, it's well known that one of the most unreliable sources of evidence is eyewitness testimony. because ten people can see the same thing and see ten different things. So, all of those things come into play when it comes to understanding how the unbeliever gets along in this world. He's always having, as Van Til would say, to borrow some capital from Christianity. Alright, where were we? You're on the last pull-up point, I think. Yeah, so at the bottom of page one, Van Til argues that the traditional method, as he describes it, which he epitomizes by Aquinas from the Roman Catholic view and Bishop Butler from the Episcopalian-Arminian view, that it makes compromises with the non-Christian view in three respects, the first being the assumption of human autonomy, second being the assumption of pure contingency regarding facts, that they're just there, And thirdly, the assumption of pure rationality regarding logic. And the point is that from a non-Christian point of view, we don't know what facts are, and we can't assert what logic is. We don't have any basis for those kinds of things. Only converted man can see the space-time facts for what they are. and Schaeffer doesn't do justice to Christ in regard to the truth. And here, Van Til references John 3. And he mentions Warfield referencing Calvin, who says we need not only new light, but we also need new powers of sight. Quote, Jesus told the Pharisees that they utterly misinterpreted every space-time fact confronting them. including his raising of Lazarus from the dead. And that makes an interesting illustration, because we know with all the evidence that was in front of the eyes of the Pharisees at the time, with all the miracles, as well as the teaching, that they didn't accept that this man was the Messiah. And so what else does that point to? They had the evidence of the scriptures, and they weren't paying attention to that either. They had the roof torn off, but they still fought. They said, put that roof back on. Yeah, and what did they end up ascribing the power of Jesus to? This guy looking in on us is the devil. Yeah, so they can see the miracles. They're not denying the miracles per se, but instead of acknowledging that these miracles are works of God that demonstrate the deity of the Christ, they're attributing them to Beelzebub. Van Til would say that on the unbeliever's view, he cannot identify a single space-time fact, nor bring his facts into intelligible relation to one another. Quote, by reason of the autonomous authority of his own reason, the unregenerate man is asked to establish God's authority. And so he sees this as one of the biggest problems with Schaeffer's approach to apologetics is that he's allowing man to sit in the judgment seat over God. Obviously that's a problem. He says that by appealing to fallen man, Schaeffer never challenges autonomous man's authority. And yet, for the natural man, the facts are just there. That is, they are not pre-interpreted by God. And this is what he calls pure contingency. And likewise, the laws of logic are just there. And again, on what basis can the unregenerate man try to appeal to facts that he doesn't know how to interpret, or reason that he doesn't have any basis for relying upon? This is an example of how arcane Van Til can be. Quote, by the methodology of traditional apologetics, the God who is there is not presented as the presupposition of all intelligible human predication. And if you didn't have to stop and think about that one, then you're a lot smarter than your teacher. We must show the unbeliever that apart from God, he ends with moral and intellectual destruction. His facts and his logic are unintelligible. Traditional apologetics assumes that the unbeliever knows himself as well as facts and logic. And of course, Van Til's point is that he doesn't know any of those things correctly. Schaeffer seems to be using a traditional form of apologetics that relies on modern man admitting the possibility of absolutes. And that takes us back to what we were describing a week or so ago about verificationism bringing us to a point of probability. It seems like that's the best that you can do in that apologetic scheme, quite frankly. He says that Aquinas wanted to start with the natural man, starting with himself, to proceed from the possibility of God to the probability of God revealing himself. Quote, on the non-Christian basis, possibility is the source of God. Not a very good, solid foundation to stand on. But on this basis, the Christian must allow the unbeliever could be right. And again, that's where Van Til, I think, rightly takes some umbrage because We're not suggesting that Christianity is a possibility, or even a probability, but that it is truth, and that it's the basis for knowing everything that we're able to know. He refers to Paul, who argues that man knows God as the creator, and it's up to the believer then to impress upon the unbeliever the truth, the uncomfortable truth, that the wrath of God still rests upon him. Schaeffer says that apologetics begins with man and what he knows about himself. And as we've seen that statement pop up from time to time, hopefully that makes us a little uncomfortable. Um, Van Til would say that, um, where am I? Sorry. So, Van Til would respond with the statement, this is his description, that man can and must objectively test the claims of Christ. In other words, this is what Schaefer is saying. Quote, the natural man has the competence to judge whether what scripture teaches is true. So again, there's that problem of allowing the natural man to sit in the seat of his autonomy. Van Til says that Schaeffer is frustrating his own purposes by capitulating at the point of facts and logic. And then he spends a fair amount of time in more than one of these parts of his critique talking about the universe and two chairs. So we'll spend a little bit of time considering that. First, Schaeffer does not express the mutually exclusive nature of the Christian and the materialist worldviews. Bantul would say that the materialist cannot interpret the half of the orange that he's looking at, the physical world, and as well he assumes that there's nothing else to see. In other words, for the materialist, observing the material world, He thinks he's looking at everything and there's nothing else out there. He doesn't have half an orange, he has his own fruit, whatever it happens to be. It's not half of Schaeffer's orange, it's a whole of whatever the materialist thinks he can know. He says, quote, quote, he says in effect that the God who is there cannot possibly be there. Van Til points out that autonomous man started way back with Adam, who under the temptation of the devil determined that facts can be independently evaluated, that they're just there, and that it's up to man to interpret those facts. And again, he's kind of obtuse in his language here, that man interprets the facts apart from the creator-creature distinction, which is to say, without using God as the reference point for the God is not true. It wasn't that man was like misinterpreting the facts. Satan was calling God a liar straight out. That's true. He said God is a liar and they questioned and they followed and Eve followed that and Adam followed Eve. So I'm not sure what your objection is. Well it seems like he's embellishing it that somehow that the issue is it's about the way he observed the facts, that he's judging the facts, he's misinterpreting them. It's no, it's an issue of God's integrity. God said, and therefore you will die. Eve was told, no, you're going to be like God. You're going to be no good and evil. God is holding something back from you. But here's what I think he's describing, that the temptation was first of all to doubt God's word, and then to call God a liar, and once they had established that God cannot be reliable as a source of truth, then what happened? I'm saying the man set himself off as autonomous. When the woman saw that the fruit was a delight to the eyes, good for food and desirable for making one wise. There's the human evaluation. Then she took and ate and gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. So I think that's what he's referring to is once we got past that initial, you know, God's trying to hold back from you, they made an evaluation on their own apart from God as the reference point. So All those steps in that process was man becoming autonomous. Yeah, that was how Satan separated man from God's perfect Word and brought man to evaluate the situation on his own by his own powers of reason and observation. So, I don't have a problem with what he's describing here as autonomy starting with Adam. Bantill says, quote, whose very powers of logic, O fallen man, whose very powers of logic are assumed or said to be chance produced, ends up making a universal negative judgment to the effect that God cannot exist. And that's the atheist saying, there is no God. And if you ask for proof, of course, he can't give you any. And he says, there is no proof. In fact, I've been looking for proof and I don't see any. The proof that's available to me is not persuasive to me. And yet Paul says that nature is plenty of proof to show that there is a God. And of course, there's a reference to Psalm 19 as well, that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament declares his handiwork. What is known about God can be seen in the creation and man is without excuse. Vantil says this to Schaefer. Your picture of the universe and two chairs should satisfy an adherent of the Butler-Arminian view very well. I don't think that was a compliment. Any time you use Arminian it's not a compliment. Yeah, I've been using that in Sunday school the last couple of weeks and not in a complimentary way. Bantill says, quote, I have not found any place where Schaeffer offers the Christian position about God, about man and the world as the presupposition of the possibility of predication in any field. That statement sent your teacher to the New Geneva Library philosophy section looking through philosophy dictionaries to see if I could get a pretty good grasp of this idea of predication. And what I've come up with is that It's a way of understanding the relationship between subjects and objects. And here I'm inviting you, if you have a better definition, please let us know. Van Til says, quote, the beginnings of modern science is steeped in a comprehensive view of reality that is the diametrical opposite of that found in scripture. And here I can't but agree with him because the atheist says there is no creator And then he goes to his scientific instruments looking for evidence that everything got to be the way it is today without a creator and without a plan. Van Til points out that the mark of the Renaissance man is independence from God. So the idea that the Renaissance man was somehow better is pretty easily refuted by Van Til. Quote, For Schaeffer, the Christian presupposition is like an hypothesis that meets the need better than does the non-Christian hypothesis. And we, Christian and non-Christian together, are to judge whether the Christian or the non-Christian hypothesis meets the need better. And when he states it that way, there's, you can't really, you kind of feel the force of the argument. Let me put it that way. When you're saying that you're putting yourself on the level of the non-Christian, you're essentially setting aside, in some respect, your Christian presuppositions in order to argue on the basis of the non-Christian's worldview that, you know, it's like going into battle but laying down your arms first. Not a good idea. Quote, the Christian presupposition must prove its case by showing that it fits reality as already interpreted without the help of the Trinity or any other Christian teaching. And then his conclusion is, that for all practical purposes, this means that Schaeffer still employs the traditional method of apologetics, where the notion of freedom is, in some measure, independent of the plan of God for man and for the world. So, Van Til covers a lot of ground in these 60 pages, It was kind of interesting to read it. It's obvious that it was typed on a typewriter. It's obvious at times that he was in a big hurry typing it. You can kind of picture this almost free stream of thought just coming out and he's typing as fast as he can. In some cases letters are overlapping because he's hitting two keys at almost the same time. So it's kind of a tour de force from that standpoint. And he covers a lot of ground, but I think these are some of the keys of what he's covered in that critique. We got into the aspect of Christian love too. You can judge if we're really real by the love we have. How he turns that over to the unbeliever. Right, and so we'll see that show up when we look at Schaeffer's response here in a moment. I'm not going to hang you out to dry here, so here's an insider's tip. You might want to pay attention to this, that you can expect one of your essay questions on the final to be related to Van Til's critique of Schaefer's Universe and Two Chairs. He deals with that in at least a couple of different places in his critique. And I will not torment you by asking about Van Til's critique of Francis Bacon or Andrew North Whitehead. So you can set that aside, at least in your mind. Questions or comments about Van Til's critique? What would you like to add to the points that I raised on that? What do you see as errant about Van Vilt's critique? On its face, I'm not sure there's much that he said that I could disagree with. You might say at times that he seemed a little strong in his tone, perhaps, but, you know, that's... I wouldn't take issue with that because sometimes that's just a question of how you take somebody's comments or speech. One of the prior critiques that we read, maybe it was John Frames, pointed out that there were a few areas where if you either maybe interpret what Schaefer said in a better light or perhaps take into account other things that Schaefer said. Benefit of the doubt. Yeah, the Vantil's Criticism sometimes come across as as being kind of assuming the worst about what Schaefer was trying to say. Randy? Inside our classroom discussion last week There's more common thought between Vantill and Schaefer than Vantill seems to be giving here. Outside the class lecture, so there's a new book just was just published on Christian theory of knowledge, I believe it is. like in those interviews. what we've read this week. Yeah. It occurs to me that even if in Bantill's approach you go straight to the gospel, you still have to assume that you're able to communicate some objective truth to the person that you're talking to. So we all have presuppositions. We can't tie our shoes without presuppositions. And so there's always going to be some way for us to communicate with the unbeliever. a Christian ties his shoes in an ungodly way, somehow. Or how about this, that the unbeliever and the believer both tie their shoes in the same way, but the unbeliever doesn't have a good reason for it. That's another aspect of it. He's dealing with reality and tying his shoes, so he's dealing with the world as God created it, but he rejects the God who created it as he's tying his shoes. I've heard it said of Van Til that he's described man like a child sitting in his father's lap in order to slap him in the face. That was an analogy I heard even today driving up listening to another one of those interviews. But in our conversation with unbelievers, if we have no factual data to talk about their objections, why, and we just maintain a stance of, we do presuppose that our God is there, he's real, and that his word is true. And yet they want to know, well, what about this alleged contradiction, and what about this aspect of reality that seems to indicate that there's a God that doesn't care, or there's a God that there's no God. And so if we just, we must be able to relate, or we just, We're just guilty of circular reasoning. Yeah, I like the point that Ginny Lin made with respect to my drawing last week, that it's not just that Schaeffer enters into the unbeliever's worldview, to argue from his regular reference, but that when he asks those kinds of questions, he's drawing back from the Bible and bringing the answers into that perspective. So, it's a funny thing. I still think that there's, you know, I kind of feel like these are two big hefty guys who are kind of going at it and there's, you know, there's maybe some friendliness to it but also it always feels like there's a little bit of a competitive spirit between the two. And as we look at Schaefer's apologetic here in the next few minutes, his response, I want you to be thinking about this and You might see this question again sometime in your life in the next two weeks of how well you think Schaeffer answered in this short appendix to The God Who Is There. So let's take a look at that. He calls it a question of apologetics. He wrote this in 1981 to be added to the new edition of The God Who Is There, part of the complete works that were published in 82. And this represents more or less his last word on apologetics. He did go on to write The Great Evangelical Disaster shortly before his death in 1984. But this is his response for those who have been arguing for maybe the last 10 or 15 years about what they call Schaeffer's apologetic. He starts by saying that apologetes is a matter of definition. And for Schaefer it means being quote, out in the midst of the world, not living in a safe house. And at times I almost get the feeling that he's sniping a little bit at Van Till by talking about those who are professional philosophers and that kind of thing. Maybe I'm reading that into it, or maybe I'm not. I don't think you are, because Van Till said, he goes, you may be talking with intellectuals and entertaining people of whatever academic caliber, and I may be just a bookworm, he'd say. So like I said, the more I read about them and what they've said to each other, it just seems like there's a little bit of, I don't know if it's friendly or maybe even a little unfriendly at times, competition going on. Schaefer says there's no automatic or formulaic application. Again, I feel like he's almost sniping a little bit. Every individual is different. There's no single approach that meets every need. and hence that's kind of led me to my description of Schaefer as either a situational apologist or perhaps an improvisational apologist. Schaefer says the dominant consideration in our conversations must be love, and that means for him meeting the person where he is. In other words, being able to enter into his way of thinking, his thought forms, and understanding his thought forms and speaking to him on that basis. We said that Schaeffer's approach depends upon answering the unbeliever's questions in order to remove his obstacles to belief that, quote, we would take seriously what they are preoccupied with. So again, not just talking to them, but talking with them to understand what they think. He says because everyone has basically the same questions that we have to be able to quote shift gears in language in order to adapt to their differences in terminology. And this takes us all the way back to the beginning of class where we learn about Edith's time in China, learning the language of the Chinese, learning the patterns of Chinese life and culture, in order to better witness. I think there's that very strong kind of missionary connection in Schaeffer's mind throughout his life. He wants to know how the unbeliever talks in order to talk his language. Quote, the Christian answers are truth, the Christian system is a unity of thought, a whole system of truth. And he says that pretty emphatically and yet at times It seems like he's not sticking to Christianity as a system in all of its parts, perhaps. Schaefer insists that all men are caught in the reality of what is, no matter what they claim to believe. Quote, God shuts everyone up to the fact of reality, and everyone has to deal with the reality that is. And so again, that becomes a major point of emphasis in how he's going to speak to the unbeliever. So from that it's not difficult to see that his method of apologetics is going to develop from his starting points. He's going to challenge the unbeliever to consider how his ideas conflict with reality and then show that the Bible contains the answers that actually fit. He says that the present generation is lost in the sense of having no final answers for anything. And that sounds like a very presuppositional thing to say because the presuppositionalist would press the unbeliever to explain the basis for what he claims to believe to demonstrate that he doesn't have any basis in his atheism for what he claims to believe. The answer to the 20th century and its lostness is quote, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And then afterward, we can deal with the spiritual lostness of modern man. So again, the contrast between Van Til saying, you start by telling modern man he's under the wrath of God because he already knows the God who is there. And Schaeffer says, no, we start with God as the creator, with the world that he's created and work our way to the gospel after we've dealt with what we might call the existential lostness of man. Those who reject the good, adequate, and sufficient reasons for the truth of Christianity are left with a leap of faith, a probability that is simply one among many. And even Christianity then becomes one of those probabilities. Now I found this part a little perplexing because it seems to me on the basis of Schaeffer's apologetic, his verificational apologetic, that that's what he's left with as well. He would say it's a very strong probability, maybe the best one, but if we don't presuppose Christianity, then how can we say for sure at the end of our apologetic that that is the answer, the only answer? Schaeffer says that faith is needed to become a Christian, but that embracing Christianity is not a leap of faith because there are good and sufficient reasons why we believe it. And then he asks the question, why don't more people believe? And his response is that Christianity is both the easiest and the hardest religion. It's the easiest in the sense that everything that's necessary for salvation is fully accomplished by God. But then he turns around and says that paradoxically, it's the hardest. because it robs rebellious man of his autonomy. So man doesn't want to give up his autonomy in order to submit himself to God. Quote, unless one gives up one's autonomy, one cannot accept the answers. Now here he starts talking a little about the the charge of rationalism. He says, quote, at times, some have said my way of discussing apologetics, and he puts it in quotes, is a form of rationalism. Some who have said I am a rationalist also speak of my being Aristotelian. And then he says that rational thought, the idea of antithesis, doesn't come from Aristotle, that it comes from reality, and that we must use antithesis even if we're going to try to deny it. And here I would add, it's like the relativist who has to make a logical statement using objective reason in order to deny the truth, the existence of objective truth. Quote, no one stresses more than I that people have no final answers in regard to truth, morals or epistemology without God's revelation in the Bible. So Schaeffer continually emphasizes the necessity of the work of the spirit in regeneration, along with providing sufficient answers that come from the Bible. And then as he concludes his defense of a defense, you might say, he says, I am not a professional academic philosopher. Again, that sounds like it might be sniping a little bit at somebody. He says, that is not my calling, and I am glad that I have the calling I have, and I am equally glad some other people have the other calling. He doesn't seem to have all the correct physical, he doesn't claim to have all the correct philosophical answers, and he's therefore willing to defer, quote, to the more academically oriented to handle those details. It sounds frankly a little dismissive, as if to say if a professional philosopher, I can't think of any names right off hand, but if a professional philosopher were to critique me, then I might respond by saying, hey, I'm not a professional philosopher. I'm going to leave the details to guys like you. Quote, apologetics as I see it should not be separated in any way from evangelism. And I think that's a pretty good bottom line for Schaefer. That's where he starts. He wants to be able to witness to the modern man in his existential despair, to be able to give him answers to the questions that he's struggling to find answers for. And it's interesting that it seems to take us right back to the very struggle that he himself had as a teenager in a liberal church and reading philosophy and not finding answers until he turned to the scriptures. And one of the things that's going to stick with me from what we've done this semester is the response that he had as he started to read the Bible. He said, Genesis speaks with thundering authority. I love that. Philosophy can also be a topic of study, he admits, but it must do more than just offer Christianity as a probability. So the goal is Christianity as the only answer. And in summation, he says, our primary calling is to truth as it is rooted in God, his acts and revelation. And if it is indeed truth, it touches all of reality and all of life. including an adequate basis for and some practice of the reality of community. And here he's talking about how some would say that they appreciate the kind of community that he created at LaBrie, but might have some differences with his approach to apologetics. And for him, there was no distinction between the two. They were part and parcel of the same system. So thoughts or questions? How do you know when you're really doing something right? You don't have much time to talk to people. And I just remember this monk, a Buddhist monk got out of his car to go to 7-Eleven with some other monk. And I said, hey, have you heard about what Jesus did for you? He goes, oh, that's old history. He said, you cannot prove that. I went on to say, well, the scripture says he rose from the dead and that he didn't stay in the grave. However, Buddha did. He goes, well, you can't verify that. You can't prove that. How can you know that? You know? And so. On the testimony of a multitude of witnesses. It was dismissive at that point. It was over. So, you know, you may have those kind of encounters. And when you're encountering somebody who is skeptical, I'll say this cynically and then try to explain it. When you encounter someone like that, no answer to any question is going to be sufficient. They're not going to accept any answer. And if you answer one question, then they're going to turn around and ask you another one. And so you may walk away from that encounter thinking that it was a waste of time or maybe you should have said or done something differently. but leave room for the spirit because it may be some little thing that you said on that occasion that starts to work on that person with the work of the spirit later on. Sometimes you just have to think in terms of being able to answer questions and be content to plant seeds even if you're not around to see whether they sprout or not. Yeah, I mean there's There's a lot of resistance out there. My wife and I were going door-to-door, and we talked to this guy. He was also a Buddhist, and he said, I told him about the scriptural account of Jesus appearing over 500 people at one time. And I go, this has never been debunked in the annals of history. He goes, proven either. It wasn't like, oh, really? Wow, that's exciting. It's like war resistance. Well, and that's because you're talking to someone who has not the light. They have not been exposed to the light of the truth by the Spirit. And it's a reminder that whatever we do in terms of apologetics and evangelism, has to ultimately depend upon the work of the Spirit. Because we've said over and over again, and Schaefer would certainly agree, that we don't persuade people into the kingdom of God. It has to be the work of the Spirit working through the apologist and the evangelist, giving good and sufficient answers, and leaving room for the Spirit to do His work with those things. Randy? I'd like to kind of repeat Leland's earlier question, or maybe approach a little. Has your thoughts on or your views of Schaefer and his apologetic changed any over the course of this semester? Oh yeah, absolutely. I can It's much easier for me to understand at least some different categories of apologetics. And again, this picture on the board kind of represents how my thoughts have progressed during the course of this semester. If you simply take Schaefer at his word that he's a presuppositionalist and you think he's arguing along a Vantillian line of apologetics, then yeah, you end up having difficulty trying to figure out exactly what he's doing, because he's not doing exactly that. Yeah, he doesn't follow that straight line. Like I said, he's kind of an improvisationalist, and as we've said many times, wouldn't it be great if we could have an experience of seeing him speaking to different kinds of people, because he may do that in very different ways. So... I avoided it mostly because I didn't understand the first things I read. He's hard to understand. At least I've been challenged with some of the comparative responses to Schaefer that we've had. We've covered kind of a broad spectrum in a fairly short time. You really want to have a mental twisting of trying to untie knots in your mind. Van Til's Introduction to the Authority and Inspiration of Scripture by D.B. Warfield. Just try to get through the introduction he wrote. Okay, I'll put that on my summer reading plan. All right, Eli, you want to add anything before we bring this lecture to a conclusion? Well, yeah, sure. I mean, I'll try to be as quick and brief as I can. You know, I mean, my impression is that Van Til had some very specific points that he was trying to raise. He, I think, liked a lot of what Schaefer was doing and had to say, aside from the points that he raised. Schaefer, I think, also had some pretty, well, I don't know if I can go as far as to say they're valid points, but he had some thought-provoking points. to bring up about, hey, I'm trying to do evangelism. It wasn't necessarily my intent to create some precise apologetic. So can you hear me? Yes. I'm sorry. I think our guest is trying to get in the back door. Oh, OK. Yeah. Thanks, Randy. So I think Schaefer's response had some thought-provoking things that he brought up. You know, and he had the critics from all directions, so I don't even know if he was specifically trying to address Van Til or not. The part that I kind of wish I knew was whether Schaefer, like did he not understand the specific things that Van Til was taking issue with, or did he just not really care? Or did he disagree? Maybe he just disagreed and never really Yeah, I got to say from my standpoint that I thought his response was really kind of a non-response because he didn't really try to address specific points of criticism. So, you know, I'm not telling you how to answer a question if you see a question like that sometime soon, but it really left me wanting more. It kind of felt like that there were valid points that had been raised over years of time about his approach and that He really wasn't going to change anything in the end in how he did things. So let's hang on. I think everybody's locked out now. Let's bring this section to a conclusion. Make it a short break, please, five minutes, and then we'll get started with our second hour. Will that work for you? Yeah. OK, thanks.