Free Gear on Apologetic Method

While I’m still on the apologetic methodology kick, both on the podcast and blog, I want to briefly point out a few free online resources that most people don’t know about that are excellent starting points for those just getting familiar with apologetic methodology and “presuppositionalism.”

The first is a fabulous article by Michael Kruger on the “Sufficiency of Scripture in Apologetics” published in a 2001 edition of The Master’s Seminary Journal. In short, the guy nails it. And he is yet another Reformed thinker who’s working on/emerged from the Ph.D program at Edinburg (for some reason I keep finding scholars I like coming from Edinburg).

The second is the best book you can give a skeptic or unbelieving friend who wants to know why Christianity is true: Faith With Reason: Why Christianity is True by Joseph Farinaccio. Not too complicated, not too simple. Reformed, presuppositional, and very, very clearly written. I realize that apologetics is often contextual. It’s not a cookie-cutter process where you approach everyone the same and point them in exactly the same direction. However, some thing are uniform, and when skeptics ask or they seem genuinely interested in the truth, I have often found myself responding with something along the lines of, “first, pray to God and just say ‘God, if you’re there, show me your truth,” and then read the gospel of John. After you’ve done that, read this book Faith with Reason, and get back to me.” Indeed, by all means, distribute this book before Strobel’s A Case for Christ or anything else of that nature. Of course, read it yourself, too!

The third free resource is the first chapter of Greg Bahnsen’s Pushing the Antithesis (2007), which is entitled “the myth of religious neutrality.” The whole book is actually rather expensive for its content (I don’t know why Always Ready is cheaper, but, whatever), but you can read the first major chunk here and now, and it’s excellent.