It should not be forgotten in this connection that the minister's duty is increasingly that of an apologist for Christianity. The general level of education is much higher than it has ever been. Many young people hear of evolution in the high schools and in the college where their fathers never heard of it except as far as a distant something. If the minister would be able to help his young people, he must be a good apologete, and he cannot be a good apologete unless he is a good systematic theologian

The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks. Moreover, it speaks of everything.

If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him.

It is the mistaken notion of much Protestant apologetics that a reason which does not from the outset subject itself to the Scriptures, may be expected, nonetheless, to be open and ready to receive its revelation at a later date. It is not true that faith can carry us “the rest of the way.” It is not true that the theistic proofs establish the probable existence of God and that faith must bring us certainty. The existence of God must be presupposed as the basis of all possibility and probability instead of the reverse. It is not true that these proofs may well establish the believer in his faith and be merely witness to unbelievers. What is objectively valid ought to be proof and witness for both unbeliever, and believer, and what is not objectively valid ought to be neither for either.

Anti-theism presupposes Theism

I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else

If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology

You realize that if you are to change your belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about yourself.

Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it.

Plato says that to appeal to the revelation of God is really to give up philosophy altogether. He says that we may ask the oracles of the gods when we have to give up philosophy in despair, but not till then. He would not appeal to what he considered foreign aid until his own efforts were proved useless. And even then he did not really expect any help from the ancients or from the oracles. On the other hand, Augustine is equally convinced that unless human knowledge has the right to appeal to divine knowledge, not as to a foreign something, there will be no knowledge for man. He feels that unless we can appeal to God we may as well give up philosophy. So far from subtracting from certainty of human knowledge, the appeal to divine revelation makes it all the more certain. 'The ultimate ground of our certitude becomes our confidence in God. In the last analysis, God is our surety for the validity of our knowledge; and that not merely remotely, as the author of our faculties of knowing, but also immediately as the author of our every act of knowing, and the truth which is known.

When on the created level of existence man thinks God’s thoughts after him, that is, when man thinks in self-conscious submission to the voluntary revelation of the self-sufficient God, he has therewith the only possible ground of certainty for his knowledge. When man thinks thus he thinks as a covenant creature should wish to think.