Vos on the Impossibility of Neutrality

“Where the love of God is absent, there an idolatrous love of the world and of self enters, and a positively offensive and hostile attitude toward God results.....Man is so necessarily bound to God in his inmost consciousness, that absolute indifference and neutrality are excluded.”

Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1972), 93.

Three Views on Apologetics

In defending the Christian faith, believers should be aware of the three general approaches to apologetics, and which method is the most consistent with that faith.  The three approaches are the classical, the evidential, and the presuppositional methods.  First, there is the classical method, which operates on a form of rationalism.  Generally speaking, rationalism maintains that, beginning with self-evident truths and applying the laws of logic, the human mind can arrive at epistemic certainty by deduction.  Additionally, the legitimacy of natural theology is assumed; that is, that man can begin with general human experience alone and arrive at an accurate understanding of God, the world, and man’s relation to both.  Moreover, classical apologetics presupposes that the reprobate mind is neutral toward God’s truth, and functions properly independent of God (contra, Jn. 3:19; Rom. 8:7; Eph. 4:17—19).  Classical apologetics, then, appeals to human autonomy as the source of ultimate authority.  Secondly, evidential apologetics, or evidentialism, is similar to the classical view.  However, evidentialism begins with the presupposition of empiricism rather than rationalism.  Empiricism supposes the validity of sense perceptions; and, applying induction and verification, man can arrive at true knowledge.  Similarly too, evidentialism makes its final court of appeal the authority of autonomous human reason.  Lastly, presuppositional apologetics, or presuppositionalism, works on the epistemological presupposition of revelation, that of Christ and the Scriptures.  Because unbelievers suppress the truth of God clearly and authoritatively revealed in the natural world, the Scriptures are required as corrective lenses for reinterpreting natural revelation after God (see Rom. 1:18ff;).  Presuppositionalism does not rely on human wisdom to persuade the unbeliever.  Rather it rests on the foolishness of the cross and the saving, regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit, without which no one can believe (1 Cor. 1:18—25; 2:14).  Presuppositionalism makes the self-attesting Word of Christ its final authority, seeking to bring the sinner’s intellect in submission to the Lordship of God in Christ.  Classical and evidential apologetics suggest that human reason is competent to authoritatively judge the veracity of Christ and his Word.  Therefore, of the three approaches to apologetics, presuppositionalism is most consistent with the faith that Christians are defending.    

Public Schools are Not Religiously Neutral!

Horace Mann, the father of compulsory education, made this remark:

“The common school [public school] is the institution which can receive and train up children in the elements of all good knowledge and of virtue before they are subjected to the alienating competitions of life. This institution is the greatest discovery ever made by man: we repeat it, the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man. In two grand , characteristic attributes, it is supereminent over all others: first in its universality, for it is capacious enough to receive and cherish in its paternal bosom every child that comes into the world: and second, in the timeliness of the aid it proffers, - its early, seasonable supplies of counsel and guidance making security antedate danger. Other social organizations are curative and remedial: this is a preventative and an antidote. They come to deal diseases and wounds; this, to make the physical and moral frame invulnerable to them. Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened. [Common School Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan., 1841, p. 15.].”

This quote comes from a brief article written by Randy Booth, discussing the fact that public schools are not religiously neutral. It is no wonder that 80 – 90% of young adults leave the Church, which they spent three hours a week of their childhood at, after at least 12 years of 36 hours a week being taught a religion antithetical to our holy Confession. Parents must wake up to the fact that they are merely fostering children for Caesar by allowing them to be nutured in his “paternal bosom" with a false gospel!