Monday, June 30, 2008

The Antithesis As It Relates to Apologetics


Believers and unbelievers operate according to fundamentally different, antagonistic, all-controlling principles, the one supernatural and the other natural (and there is no difference in this regard at the deepest level between advocates of non-Christian religions or so-called secular outlooks).

At base, this enmity is moral in character, resulting from the natural man's hostility to God and His Word and the believer's love for the same. This affects the outlook or worldview of the believer and the unbeliever, giving rise to two epistemologies, thereby obliterating any possibility that there should be any common notions between them.

Whatever common ground is to be found between believer and unbeliever, it is not in their professed systems of thought, but in what God speaking through Christ in Scripture says is actually true of men and things. Because the unbeliever is made in the image of God and is surrounded by God's handiwork, he knows that these things are so. Nevertheless, the unbeliever's principled opposition remains, causing him to suppress the truth that surrounds and hounds him, unless, of course, God sees fit to remove this enmity from him through regeneration of the Spirit, taking out his heart of stone and giving him a heart of flesh.

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