After reading several books by Greg Bahnsen and one by John Frame, but still feeling like something was missing, Biblical Apologetics was just what I needed: it is solidly Bible-based like Baucham’s Expository Apologetics, but it also confronts other apologetic methodologies head-on and gives voice to the befuddlement and vague uneasiness I have felt about the apologetic approaches of van Til, Bahnsen, and Frame. As a result, I have many, many passages underlined and and quite a few pages with stars an exclamation points in the margins.

This was the first book I’ve read that helped me see the problems with other approaches to apologetics: namely that they’re primarily philosophical arguments, not biblical ones—they attempt to rationalize the unbeliever to faith using his own autonomous reasoning rather than simply “letting the lion [Scripture] out of its cage” as Spurgeon once famously said. The presuppositional apologetics of van Til and Bahnsen are somewhat of an exception: they presuppose the truth of Scripture (in stark contrast to Classical and Evidential approaches), but there’s still too much philosophy mixed into them for my tastes. Neither the apostle Peter nor Paul ever talked about “satisfying the preconditions of intelligibility,” and I have my doubts as to whether the “man on the street” would even be willing to wrestle with such a concept because most people just don’t think about things that deeply. Van Tillian presuppositional apologetics, it seems to me, is perhaps suitable for talking to collegiate philosophy majors, but not so much for “normal” people.

Here are a few choice gems I have highlighted in my copy of Biblical Apologetics:

• Quoting van Til, “I agree that my little book on The Sovereignty of Grace should have had much more exegesis in it than it has. This is a defect. The lack of detailed scriptural exegesis is a lack in all of my writings” (22, footnote).

• “Biblically speaking, there is no such thing as pre-evangelism...It is a man-made concept that actually undermines biblical evangelism and apologetics….God’s mandate for every Christian to engage in evangelism with a hostile world does not need a crutch or a man-made jump-start like the fabricated notion of ‘pre-evangelism” (44, 45).

• “The standard traditional apologists’ definition and application of apologia as used by Peter is flawed” (67). He explains why this is the case, and then offers a correct understanding of apologia: “It is our testimony” (89). It was after reading this chapter (Chapter 2) that I came to the realization that we make apologetics too difficult—everyone knows his own story, and that’s what we’re expected to be able to deliver “with gentleness and respect.” Peter wasn’t commanding us to get advanced degrees in 1 Peter 3:15 (“always be prepared”)...he was saying “always be ready to share your gospel-centered testimony”!

• “Like weeds choking and strangling the wheat, so truth is undermined most subtly among the saints. Apologetics must begin in the church” (113). This notion of “internal apologetics” blew my mind, and embarrassed me that I hadn’t seen it in Jude 3 for myself.

• “There is not one example in the New Testament of Jesus or the apostles ever using apologetics for the purpose of trying [to] prove the possibility of God’s existence, or to justify the logical rationality of the Christian worldview” (119).

There are just too many rich quotes to list here. This is, hands down, the best book on apologetics I have ever read. My only regret is that I was not introduced to it sooner.