Greg L. Bahnsen > Quotes

“Imagine a person who comes in here tonight and argues 'no air exists' but continues to breathe air while he argues. Now intellectually, atheists continue to breathe - they continue to use reason and draw scientific conclusions [which assumes an orderly universe], to make moral judgments [which assumes absolute values] - but the atheistic view of things would in theory make such 'breathing' impossible. They are breathing God's air all the time they are arguing against him.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“The civil magistrate cannot function without some ethical guidance, without some standard of good and evil. If that standard is not to be the revealed law of God… then what will it be? In some form or expression it will have to be the law of man (or men) - the standard of self-law or autonomy. And when autonomous laws come to govern a commonwealth, the sword is certainly wielded in vain, for it represents simply the brute force of some men’s will against the will of other men.”
― Greg Bahnsen

“Without faith, there is no proper understanding by which a man can judge. As Augustine well said, 'I believe in order to understand'.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“There is no way to use non-Christian language and logic to arrive at Christian utterances, conclusions, and behavior.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“We must not be satisfied to present Christianity as the most reliable position to hold among the competing options available. Rather, the Christian faith is the only reasonable outlook available to men.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“God either rules as sovereign in interpretation over *all* areas of life or none.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Christianity is reasonable in virtue of the impossibility of the contrary.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Faith in the self-attesting Christ of Scripture is the beginning, not the end result of wisdom.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“The teaching of Colossians 2:3-8 is unambiguous. ALL knowledge (note: not simply knowledge of "religious" matters is to be found in Christ.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“The Word of God is a seamless garment, and men who deny its law deny its eschatology also, and are deprived of God's power. It is not surprising, therefore, that this is an era of impotence for the church.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“Paul sets forth the attitude to which the defender of the faith must be committed: "Let God be found true, but every man a liar.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“When an apologist attempts to be autonomous in his reasoned argumentation he indicates that he considers God to be less certain than his own existence and that he places greater credence in his independent reasoning than in God's Word.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, all of which are out there and they can give their legitimate efforts to… boy the thing they had to write about was theonomy! How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he doesn’t see the problem?”
― Greg Bahnsen

“To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Those who follow Christ are distinct from the world and the ways of the flesh. As Christ says in John 17:17, they are consecrated or "set apart" from the world, and the distinctive thing about Christians is that they have the truth. Being not of this world, believers are "set apart" by the truth. And Jesus asserts in the same verse that "God's Word is truth."

As we walk before the unbeliever then, the thing that makes us different is our submission to the Word of God. Our lives and thinking are founded on Scripture, while the essence of the unbeliever's life is rejection of the revelation of God. Our presupposition of Scripture's truth is at diametric odds with that of the world, and because we have been given the Word of God, the world hates us. From the outset, the focus of the world's opposition to the faith is the Word of God itself.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

“By reversing the proper order of things, the non-presuppositional apologist sees submission to God's Word as secondary, rather than primary, sees demonstration as the basis for faith, sees independent argumentation rather than the Holy Spirit as the source of conviction, and therefore advances the destruction of his own defense of the faith.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in.

Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“When someone's paradigm changes, the world itself changes with it. So "facts" are only facts *for a system* or paradigm.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“To reason with the non-Christian in a fashion purporting to be independent of God or independent of reliance upon revelation is to honor the unregenerate's notions of "evidence" and "verification" as legitimate and correct. However, for the Christian, it is Scripture that governs *every* aspect of his life, even his concept of "evidence" and the way he reasons with skeptics.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Since the fall of man was ethical in character (not metaphysical) the unregenerate and regenerate share the facts of the world and the rules of thought, but their interpretation and use of them are far from neutral.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Non-presuppositional defenses of the faith tend to be too concessive to the unbeliever's aim and aim to simply show Christianity as probably true. They do not leave the unbeliever "without excuse," but suggest implicitly that he has the prerogative and ability to stand in judgement over God's own Word.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“Humble submission to God’s word must precede man’s every intellectual pursuit.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith

“In the nature of the case, the best witness to God's existence, the truth of His revelation, and the basis of a genuinely sound defense of the Christian faith would be God Himself.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today

“By starting independently of submission to the truth and direction of Christ's Word, we shall never end our arguments anywhere but independently of Christ.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“We must not defend our message (that Christ's Word is self-attesting and possessing ultimate authority from the Lord) with a method that works counter to it- by claiming an ultimate epistemological standard outside of Christ's Word of truth.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“There are no facts or uses of reason which are available outside of the interpretive system. The argument must pit the unbeliever's system of thought as a unit against the believer's system of thought as a unit. Their overall perspectives will have to contend with each other.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

“The foundation of knowledge is God’s revelation.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith