Directions for Defending the Faith, by Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen, edited by Robert R. Booth.
In real life and on the blog, I enjoy discussing and defending my faith. I’ve been told, during these discussions, that I argue like a presuppositionalist. If that’s true, it’s been more by accident than plan, because until recently, I had only a vague idea what the presuppositional method of apologetics was.
But over the past few month, I’ve been educating myself about presuppositional apologetics. Lesson number one was that there is a whole lot of confusion, both in print and on the internet, about it. I blame part—but not all—of that confusion on some of what’s been written by presuppositionalists explaining and defending a presuppostional approach. Some of it, frankly, seems unnecessarily unclear.
It’s here that Always Ready by Greg Bahnsen comes to the rescue. Always Ready is an introduction to presuppositional apologetics that almost anyone, even a reader new to the subject, can understand. Bahnsen starts from the ground up, laying the biblical foundation for this method of apologetics, and then teaching the believer how to go about defending their faith.
The first four sections of Always Ready are a defense of the presuppositional apologetic method as the only biblical approach to apologetics. These sections are taken from an apologetics course syllabus and it shows. (Greg Bahnsen passed away in 1995 at only 47, and this book is a posthumous compilation of some of his introductory works on Christian apologetics.) What’s here is repetitive and a little plodding. It doesn’t read like a book usually does, and, I’m guessing, isn’t exactly the way Bahnsen would have presented the material had he been writing it up for a book. But this may work to the reader’s advantage, because presented in this manner, the information is very easy to understand.
If you do take my advice and start reading this book, take this advice, too: Don’t give up because you find the first sections slow going. This foundational material is necessary and things will pick up later, I promise.
In the fifth section, which takes up nearly half of Always Ready, Bahnsen shows how to go about arguing presuppositionally. He does this by countering specific common arguments made against Christianity. As he says,
…when all is said and done, it is not the theory of apologetics which defends the faith and stops the mouth of critics. Only the practice of apologetics can do that.
This is where I began to love this book, because this is where things got fun. Bahnsen demonstrates the presuppositional method by putting it to use, for one, against Bertrand Russell’s arguments in his famous essay, Why I Am Not a Christian. In this section, Bahnsen also counters the very common “problem of evil” argument presented to challenge the existence of the Christian God, as well as anti-supernatural arguments, arguments that faith is irrational, arguments that religious talk is meaningless, and arguments against the possibility of miracles.
Excerpts of Always Ready:
The last section of Always Ready is the appendix containing an exposition of Acts 17, where Paul gives his Areopagus address in Athens. In his argument, Paul appeals always to God’s revelational truth as his authority, and sets
two fundamental worldviews in contrast, exhibiting the ignorance which results form the unbeliever’s commitments, and presenting the precondition of all knowledge—God’s revelation—as the only reasonable alternative. His aim was … to call the unbeliever to repentance, by following the two-fold procedure of internally critiquing the unbeliever’s position and presenting the necessity of the Scripture’s truth.
Yes, it turns out that here in the most complete biblical example a presentation of the claims of Christianity to an audience of secular thinkers, the argument is presuppositional. And, says Bahnsen, the examples of the apostles are “a pattern to follow with respect to both our message and method today.” That means, if we do as Paul did, we’ll argue presuppositionally when we defend the faith.
I do wish that Greg Bahnsen had actually written a book intended to be an introduction to presuppositional apologetics, so that we had something more than material intended for other purposes collected in book form. Instead (and in God’s wise providence, of course) we have something that doesn’t build like a book written as a single unit, and contains a few strangely abrupt (almost Mark 16ish) chapter endings where a paragraph or two summing up and tying together would have been useful. Still, I’d be willing to bet that Always Ready is the best introduction to presuppostional apologetics there is. If you desire to “be ready to give a defense for the hope”—and shouldn’t every believer want this?—you will surely benefit from the substance of this book.
Click on image to purchase Always Ready at Monergism Books. Click here