These 2 Presuppositions Are Most Basic for Christians (According to John Frame)

What two beliefs are most important when beginning to approach the discipline of apologetics? I answered this question in my paper, The Doctrine Shapes the Defense, which has been published as a book and is available on Amazon (see below).

Here’s the answer:

1. Biblicism

This means that, when the apologete wants to prove the authority of Scripture can appeal to nothing more basic than Scripture itself. There is no presupposition more basic. The authority of Scripture must never be abandoned….

The revelation of God revealed in the Bible is the most basic presupposition for the apologete; all apologetics must be based on Scriptural reasoning. And what is the message of the Bible? That question has two answers--one for the Old Testament and one for the New Testament. The message of the OT is, ‘God is Lord.’ And the message of the NT is, ‘Jesus is Lord.’

2. The Creator-Creation Distinction

(That is, what God is like, and that He is not to be identified with His creation (as in some religious systems), but rather He is distinct from creation and has certain attributes. Read on.)

The Trinity is a necessary conclusion from biblical study, therefore God is absolute tripersonality. This fact undergirds all reality, and therefore all knowledge about reality reflects God’s tripersonality and is impossible without it. 

…There is only one God—and certainly only one that the Christian [apologist] is interested in proving—the triune God revealed in Scripture.

So every statement of predication (affirming a state of affairs) has the invisible prefix in front of it, “Because God, therefore,....” And since God is triune, we might say instead, “Because the triune God, therefore,....”

Get The Doctrine Shapes the Defense, by Joel Settecase, on Amazon.