Apologetics Seminar

13 July 2008

A local church here has agreed to host a four-week series on apologetics, taught by yours truly and starting this coming Friday (18 July), 7-9 pm in Orange, CA. Sorry about the short notice; we just got the details nailed down Friday night.

I’m titling the series “Biblical Apologetics for Busy Believers.” A rough, and tentative, outline follows:

Session 1: Start with God (Genesis 1-3) — All thinking must start with God, and the nature of God’s claims is such that no one can be neutral. A Christian must always begin with this understanding; to fail to start everything with God’s revelation is to make the same mistake that Eve made in the Garden of Eden. (As an example, we’ll consider a Christian response to the claim that there’s no good historical evidence for Jesus.)

Session 2: Without Excuse (Romans 1) — Unbelief has no excuse whatsoever; the unbeliever really does know the Christian God. To the extent that he refuses to acknowledge the triune God of the Bible, his Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Basic Resources for Apologetics: An Overview

13 July 2008

If you’re looking for encyclopedic, facts-and-figures resources, there’s a ton of them on the market, and Josh McDowell’s material is still some of the best. A recent publication, Evidence for Christianity, combines and updates the evidential material from a number of previous works, and that’s the one I’d recommend, if you haven’t already got a few of McDowell’s works on the shelf.

Facts and figures are important, but in this post I want to address resources for how you use them. McDowell was never the best source for this — he’s more of the “make a bigger pile” school of thought. Until very recently, all the really good basic instruction on how to use the facts was on audio, but there wasn’t a book that did the job effectively and accessibly. Gary DeMar at American Vision has changed all that by transcribing and editing a series of talks Greg Bahnsen did for high school and college students back in the early nineties. The resulting book, Pushing the Antithesis: The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen, is a gem. It’s accessible, relatively simple, and it has study questions at the end of each chapter. It’s also a little spendy, but it’s worth it. Bahnsen’s other basic book, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, is cheaper, but it’s a set of course syllabi edited together by Robert Booth. It’s much denser, and because the material was designed to be accompanied by live instruction, it’s much harder to plow through without help. Thanks to Pushing the Antithesis, the necessary help is now available in print.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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