“Famously, he insisted that faith and reason are in harmonious partnership, integrating the known science, philosophy and theology of his day into a comprehensive, interconnected system. All this helps explain why his work has maintained an enduring appeal, even as equally brilliant medieval thinkers have sunk into oblivion.” - RNS
“ ‘No Plato, No Scripture’—the second chapter of Hans Boersma’s Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew—is a clever title for continuing the Christian Platonist project. But how seriously should we take its underlying arguments?” - Christ Over All
Michael Otazu (Read Part 1.)
The Christian’s daily life is saturated with opportunities for apologetics. Whether those who inquire about the hope that is within us are combatants with a desire for petty argumentation or curious seekers looking for answers to honest questions, we must be ready to make our defense. The following are some practical encouragements in light of the primacy of presuppositional apologetics.
“Philosophers such as Plato, Kant, and Heidegger may champion thought as the means of salvation and freedom. Still, human reason itself is chained in the prison of depravity and can only lead to ultimate death.” - Christ Over All
“The pendulum of 20th-century evangelical scholarship on Aquinas has swung between strongly negative appraisals (…Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til…) and, since the 1980s, more appreciative receptions (…Norman Geisler and Arvin Vos).
“I am becoming concerned that we are witnessing, in the recent ascendency of the ‘premodern’ in contemporary evangelical literature, the triumph of Barth and ultimately of Gnosticism in the evangelical church” - Mark Snoeberger
“The word first appears in the first century BCE in Roman culture, with the Latin word religio. At the time, it meant ‘scruples,’ the concern that some activity is important enough to be performed carefully.” - Psychology Today
“the ‘consequentialist’ or ‘utilitarian’ approach (e.g. of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill), views the morality of a decision or action, based upon the anticipated result of that decision or action. It seeks to quantify the ‘highest good, for the greatest number,’ thereby reducing all ethical considerations to a ‘pleasure/pain’ calculus.” - Common Good
“This shift has landed us in what can be called ‘standpoint epistemology.’ … the view that everything we think and know, and even what we consider knowledge to be, is determined solely by our race, ’gender,’ sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and other identity categories.” - Breakpoint
