Wrestling for the Blessing

"As a young child I used to beat-up my parents till they told me the truth; such was my passion for the absolute. By the grace of God that zeal is still with me! These days I beat-up God till he gives me what I want."

– Kevin Solway in Poison for the Heart

A God of Your Own

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

– Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird 

The Sun and the Rain on the Stony Ground

In a work titled Christ's Last Disclosure of Himself , William Greenhill exposits the last words of Christ in the Bible, Revelation 22:16-17:

“Come. And let him that heareth say, “ Come” and let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.” 

In this series of sermons on the given text, Greenhill is careful to explain who Christ is as the root and offspring of David, and who it is that may come to him and drink. Greenhill says:

“ Objection, but surely these invitations are in vain if a man cannot come when he is invited. To what end are they? Answer: The sun shines upon the rock, and the rain falls upon the rock, yet no man expects that the sun should melt the rocks or the rain should make the rocks fruitful. But the adjacent parts and fields have the benefit; and so, though invitations fall upon rocks, yet other persons may have the benefit.” 

The rocks will not receive the benefit, but the field shall.

– McMahon, C. Matthew in The Two Wills of God 

The Root of Empiricism is Rationalism

"Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

– Richard Lewontin

mene mene tekel upharsin

Extended excerpt from Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis by Greg Bahnsen:

Apologetical disputes between believers and unbelievers depend upon, include by reference, and arise out of conflicting epistemologies. Conflicts over the theory of knowledge in turn incorporate, function within, and must address differing world-and-life views (with divergent concepts of man as a knower), if they would be resolved. The bold defense of the faith offered by Van Til’s presuppositionalism is that the unbeliever’s worldview fails to provide an adequate or workable theory of knowledge in terms of which the non-Christian can intellectually challenge the truth of Christianity. His presuppositions preclude the unbeliever from making claims to know anything intelligible or meaningful.

The Christian worldview begins with the personal, self-sufficient, sovereign, and triune God, who created all things from nothing and made man to be His image. God knows all things, and directs all events by His wise, providential plan. Thus, all objects, properties, minds, events, general laws, and moral prescriptions are determined, controlled, and related to each other by the mind of the Lord. Whatever the Lord says is utterly truthful and unfailing in its purposes, and that includes every passage of the Old and New Testaments. Human behavior and reasoning have become immoral and futile, due to self-centered rebellion against God. Man is biased against and hostile to the Lord and His revelation, wishing to be his own ultimate authority (autonomous). He needs the redemptive work of God’s incarnate Son (as a prophet, priest, and king) and the regenerating work of God’s Holy Spirit to be saved from intellectual foolishness, moral guilt, and eternal damnation. Given this overall “picture” of God, the world, man, value, history, and salvation—the basic biblical world-and-life view—the Christian can give an account of the objectivity of truth; the mind’s correspondence to objects and other minds; the possibility of knowledge; the rational and empirical procedures by which we learn, test, and justify propositions; the possibility of our finite minds knowing universal, absolute, and prescriptive concepts and laws; the human tendency toward disagreement, prejudice, and irrationality, etc.