Okay, so you're at your job and one of your co-workers says to you, you know, Jesus isn't really God. He never claimed to be God. You know, the New Testament is full of contradictions. Just as happened to me, literally this week, one of my students who loves philosophy challenged me to a debate. And, you know, at that point, I'm not overstepping my boundaries in a public school. I was personally asked. So I said, let's do it. And he told me that the The Bible is full of contradictions. So I said, OK, can you name one? And this young man could not name one. I find it very interesting. And that's not the first time this has happened to me and probably not in your experience. Now, of course, there are some who will try. And you look on the internet, there's a list of supposed contradictions. Not too long ago, I was watching a clip from Real Time with Bill Maher. If you know anything about Bill Maher, he's an avid hater of Christianity. He had on his show a Christian, someone who studied these things, and he said to him, well, you know, the Bible is, he used actually some language I can't repeat here, and he said, I know because I took a class on it. And I thought to myself how absurd that would be if I were a guest on his show and I were a scholar, let's say, in any other topic, Shakespearean literature, classical antiquity, or, you know, chemistry. And some host said to me, well, I took a class in that. He'd be laughed out of the room. But for some reason, whether it's Bill Maher or my student or your coworker, everyone seems to be an expert on just how full of holes Christianity is, how full of holes the Bible is. And most of what they, most of what they have received comes from YouTube videos and, and memes on the internet and things that they haven't really spent time digging in. and the thing that's so interesting is that christianity has been around for two thousand years and some youtube video is not going to undo two thousand years of christian history a matter of fact what your co-worker or your cousin tells you is just rehashed heresies from the first century and onward there is nothing new under the sun when someone comes to you and says well the bible's full of contradictions or jesus isn't really god Rest assured that somebody throughout the history of the Christian church has already dealt with this. There's nothing new here. There's no gotcha questions. And you and I should not be thrown off guard because some modern day atheist thinks they have it all figured out. And I, I believe this because of the Bible's promise in Matthew chapter 16, when Jesus said to Peter upon this rock, I will build my church. And he said, the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. We can charge the gates of hell and there's nothing that can hold us back because we have the power of the Holy Spirit. We have an infallible Word of God. We have a risen Savior that guides his church. But that also means that we will face opposition. We will face challenges. Some of those challenges will be physical, as in persecution, and some of those challenges will be intellectual, as we've seen throughout history. But rest assured that God's promise still remains. And we can see that by the fact that here we are, in Wayne, New Jersey, 2015 some odd years after the resurrection of Christ, talking about a carpenter from Nazareth. And those of you, all of us who are believers, we know that Christ has made an impact in our lives, that he is truly alive, truly real. And how is that possible? How is it possible that some carpenter in some obscure location, thousands of miles away, could change our life? Other than the fact that when God said he will preserve his truth, he will preserve his truth. Look at first Corinthians with me and you should have a handout. I'm on the outline side of the handout, not the timeline side. And I'm already on point B. We established the fact that God has promised to preserve his church. And one of the ways he does this is he uses people. He uses men. And I know that we have a tendency sometimes to idolize people, to cross the line between following great men of the faith and putting them up on a pedestal. that they don't deserve. So I hope you understand that as I name certain people, whether they are biblical people or historical people, that this is in no way an endorsement of everyone, nor is it a way for us to worship them. Paul certainly would not want worship, but at the same time, he did say, follow me as I follow Christ. And so they have given us this example. Look at first Corinthians chapter one and starting with verse 18, I'll read to verse 25. It says, For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. There's so much we can say about that. But even in the first century, the Apostle Paul, through the inspiration of the Spirit, tells us there were enemies of the Christian faith. The Jews demanded the sign, the Greeks wisdom, right? And the message of the cross spoke to those two groups in certain ways. But then he says to the people he's writing to, he says, not many of you are wise in the ways of the world. You might not be the most educated, the most intellectual, people and uh... and that's that's true for us isn't it we we are we're not the wisest intellectually we're not we we are we are sinners of those who exalt themselves he said will be uh... humiliate those who uh... humble themselves will be exalted but just because not everybody is wise doesn't mean that god does not save the wise just like those uh... jesus says on those who trust in riches will be hard to get to heaven but then paul later on to be says charge those who are rich So it doesn't mean that rich automatically means not a Christian, and it doesn't mean that wise automatically means not a Christian. If you look at Paul's testimony in Philippians chapter 3, he tells us that he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews. He knew the law inside and out, and God used the intellect of the Apostle Paul, someone who was both wise in the scriptures and wise in philosophy, to preach the gospel to a lost and dying world. And so my point is, while not many of us are wise, God does raise up people for specific generations to defend the Christian faith. And that's what we see throughout history. We see that there are some people who are wise, even worldly standards, intellectual giants, who God has saved, and then they've used that intellect, they've used that argumentation to defend the faith, and it blesses us even today. And so as we talk about apologetics in church history, Be thankful for some of these people. And some of them you can see on the back of your outline. So if you would like to turn to the timeline, I'm going to do my best to go through this timeline and not make it so boring for you, just by making a few comments. And I do have a permanent broad brushing disclaimer for everyone on here, so I don't have to repeat that more than once, okay? The appearance of a person on this timeline does not necessarily mean that he or she, or these are all he's, are endorsed by me or by this church. There may be some people on this timeline that you will not see in heaven. I know it's hard to believe. How could someone defend the faith and yet not be a Christian? There may be. I'm not here to judge their hearts. I'm thankful the Lord raised them up and used their intellect. You're going to see people here who are more into Greek philosophy, some who are very Catholic in their understanding, some of them who Later on in life, even the modern apologists in the last bubble, some of them, you may not like them. They might be too Arminian for you. You know, this is only a timeline for the use of academic purposes. So you understand who some of the key people throughout history and today are. I hope that that's clear. So that being said, what is the history of apologetics in church history? Well, we can't talk about church history without starting with the Bible, right? This is where the church begins. So, I'm trying to go in order. That's why if you look at each box, there's a death date for most of the people there. But the first column or the first row, which is New Testament era, doesn't go by death, it goes by order in the Bible. All right, so we're going to start with the volume that Luke wrote, which is sometimes called Luke Acts, because Luke wrote both Luke and Acts, which was probably somewhere around AD 80 to 90. I may not have time to go through all these passages that are listed, but I would ask that you take it home and take a look. But we'll start with Luke chapter 1, verses 1 to 4. And we could, you know, this is, again, this is broad. There are many other examples in the New Testament of people defending the faith and engaging in apologetics, but it's interesting to look at Luke because he pretty much starts his gospel record by telling his audience that He's here to prove something, to prove who Jesus was. In Luke 1, verses 1-4, he says, "...and as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." When you read the Gospel of Luke, always go back to that first, that passage, that prologue, and understand what's the purpose behind this book? It's to defend the faith. It's to make someone's faith more strong, right? Luke was an eyewitness of the apostles, and it was reported to him of these things, and he wrote it down. And remember, Luke was a doctor, so he has one of the more detailed of the Gospel records, and that's written for our edification. But Luke also records in the Book of Acts some examples of defending the faith. So I want to go to two of those places. One is in Acts chapter two. So if you turn with me to Acts chapter two. And we're just going to read verse 36. This of course is Peter's sermon at Pentecost. And after he goes through this entire sermon, he says in verse 36, let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that god has made him both lord and christ this jesus whom you crucify now for sake of time i'm not going through that entire sermon but this is the culmination of the sermon this is what peter's been preaching what it what is the uh... particularly i've been preaching here he he preach the case of the proof of the resurrection now the words because jesus rose from the grave invalidates who he is he talks about the uh... validation of the old testament prophecy that jesus had indeed fulfilled the things that were prophesied of the Messiah. And he talks about the gifts that happen at Pentecost. And he takes these three streams into a sermon and defends the validity of the Christian faith. And then he calls, in verse 36, the house of Israel to repent and believe. So Peter was engaging in an apologetic of the Christian faith there. And then Acts chapter 17. If you'll turn there with me as well. So we saw Luke, we saw Peter, and now Paul. in Acts chapter 17. And many people who write about apologetics will call Acts 17 a model passage of how one could engage in a discussion or debate of the Christian faith with unbelievers. Again, I'm not going to read the whole thing for sake of time, but where we would start would be in verse number 16, which says, Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and in the marketplace every day. And those who happened to be there, Paul reasoned with them. He used logic. He used some of the things they were familiar with. He entered into their worldview without compromising the Christian worldview. And he reasoned from the scriptures and he reasoned in their minds so that they would see that Christianity, not only a supernatural, it is also reasonable. And this is, Again, Paul using that intellect that God had given him and blessed him with. So if you look at your timeline, after Luke acts, then there's Paul himself in his writings. And Paul is very apologetic in his writing. Again, not that he's sorry, but he's defending the faith in his writing. And two of those passages would be in Romans 1, and we're not going to go there, and 1 Corinthians 15. In Romans chapter 1, I'm sure you're familiar with Paul defending the faith against those who have turned God into an idol. or even denying God, suppressing the knowledge of God. He says, for the firmaments declare God. His attributes, his wrath, are clearly seen just by beholding the creation. And so that's a defense of the faith. And then in 1 Corinthians 15, he tackles something even more specific, a denial of the bodily resurrection. And in 1 Corinthians 15, he said, if Christ is not raised, then our faith is in vain. The apostle Paul, then we have the apostle John. who dies somewhere perhaps around 100 AD. John 1.1, the Apostle John defends the Lagos, Jesus, as the Word of God against those who would deny that He is God. In John 1.1, he says, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And then in verse 14, he says, The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And then John, just like Luke, he has a purpose statement in his Gospel. If you'll turn with me to John chapter 20, All right, so Luke opens up his gospel by saying, I wrote these things so you would be certain. And he's writing more to a Christian and John is writing to those, even those who don't believe. John chapter 20 and verse 30 and 31. This is the purpose of the gospel of John. He said, now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. And that by believing you may have life in his name, right? So Luke, a little more geared towards the believer, right? Theophilus, lover of God. You've heard these things. I want to confirm them to you. So here's the narrative of Christ. John written in a sense more to the unbeliever so that in believing they might have life through his name. So both of them engaging in forms of apologetics, but with a little different of a perspective. And then the apostle Peter also challenges us as we heard in, in a bold course two weeks ago, to carry on the defense of the faith and we all know first peter three fifteen which is to sanctify the lord god in your hearts and be ready always to give an answer to everyone who asked you of a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear and we can also include jude who then tells us i think inverse three to earnestly contend for the faith once for all deliver for the same so all throughout the new testament we see examples of apologetics both in the written epistles and in the narratives and we also see uh... sort of commands for us to go and continue that example throughout history. So in the New Testament era, you might see on your outline that they dealt with skeptics, they dealt with Judaizers, they dealt with deniers of the resurrection, deniers of Christ's deity, and there's so many other streams of unbelief and opposition, and the New Testament writers and the characters we see actually in the Bible defend the faith against all forms of opposition. But then we leave the biblical period and we go into the historical early church period. And you see in the second row of your timeline, some of the key people. Again, you know, some people may be left out. You might have like a favorite, if you have like a favorite 7th century church father and I left them out, I apologize. But these, you know, the historians basically say these are the big hitters. And we start with Justin Martyr. And I'm just gonna make a few comments about them as we As we discussed, Justin Martyr died in the second century. He wrote dialogue with Trifo the Jew, which you could imagine is an apologetic work defending the fact that Jesus is the Messiah against an unbelieving Jewish person. He also wrote a few apologies. They're both called apology, like first apology, second apology, which are defenses of the Christian faith. Justin Martyr was a convert from Platonism, a follower of Plato, very much into Greek philosophy. And he used that Greek philosophy to argue for the validity of Christianity. Historians say that Justin Martyr was the first person to attempt to connect Jesus as the Logos, or the Logos of John 1, with Greek philosophy. So he did that. But then came along Tertullian, who didn't quite agree with Justin Martyr's method. So in the modern day we have people fighting over, like we heard last week, evidentialism. No, presuppositionalism. Well, as far back as the second century, there was already fighting amongst Christians of how to defend the faith. So Tertullian, I'm sure maybe he appreciated Justin Martyr. I don't know what their relationship was like. Obviously they lived in two different generations, but Tertullian denied, he didn't like Justin Martyr's use of Greek philosophy. He didn't think that was appropriate for defending the faith. He wrote books like against heretics. He wrote against Gnosticism. Gnosticism is an ancient heresy. Wherein it will comes from the word knowledge you have like the secret knowledge that if you attain this knowledge you've attained a higher plane of spirituality This included a heresy that the human Jesus and the divine Jesus were two different people And so Tertullian while he he did use his intellect. He emphasized simple faith in Scripture as a final authority Listen to what Tertullian said and this sounds very reformational when you think about it. He says my first principle is this I Christ laid down one definite system of truth, which the world must believe without qualification, and which we must precisely in order to believe it when we find it. What you must seek is what Christ taught, and precisely as long as you are not finding it, precisely until then, you must go on seeking until you find it. In other words, what Christ has given us is the standard. You might use some philosophy here, some history there, but the ultimate standard is the Christ-inspired scripture the story of Christ, the message of Christ, and everything falls into place after that. A contemporary of Tertullian, I'm on the third box now, was Origen. And some historians say Origen is the most important Greek apologist of the third century. He wrote a book against Celsus. You know, back then you'd write a book against someone, you would just call it against that person, like against Eli. You know, Damian's book, Against Eli. That's just, they weren't the most friendly of people. But they were straight and to the point. So Celsus, he basically claimed that Jesus had a different origin. And I know some of this is a little heady, but going back to my opening illustration, the person sitting next to you in the cubicle who says, Jesus didn't really come from God, or he's just a product of ancient Egyptian mythology, this stuff is rehashed from as early as the third century. And it's already been disputed, or refuted, I should say. So Origen mounts a defense against Celsus, and he argues that Jesus did not use sorcery. which some people might say today, well, if he was really that powerful, maybe it was sorcery or some sort of magic. He defends the historical resurrection, that it wasn't just a story of Christ rising from the grave, but it's really a historical event. He refuted one theory that some people still lobby or lob at us, which is the hallucination theory. All these people claiming that Christ had risen from the grave, it must have been a mass hallucination. And as absurd as that sounds, that is an actual argument that people use. Everyone was just hallucinating at the same time. And he also showed that the miracles from the pagan stories were not as credible as the miracles in the Bible. Around Christmastime and around Easter, you and I, if we're on social media, or people at work, will probably bombard us with these parallels. Jesus is just like Mithrab, or Jesus is just like Horus. And you may have seen that. And it's just a rehashed pagan myth kind of clothed in Christianity. Again, this stuff is not new. This stuff has been refuted, and the charts that you might see, if you've ever seen these things, are totally unhistorical and unreliable. They make things up in order to make it seem, look, this God over here, he had 12 apostles, and he was born of a virgin, and he died and rose again, and Jesus did the same thing. But then when you actually dig deeper and check your sources, you realize it's all a lie. It didn't actually happen that way, but unfortunately people are very gullible and they just believe it because it's on the internet. They didn't have the internet back then, but people were gullible as well. I would like to talk about the middle one now, Athanasius. Athanasius wrote against the Arians. There's a phrase you may have heard in church history, Athanasius Contra Mundum, which means Athanasius against the world. Basically, what that means is that during his time, he was one of the only church leaders that stood up for the deity of Christ and the Trinitarian teaching that we have today. This does not mean that no one believed in Jesus as God until Athanasius, which some people might say. But he defended it as if he was standing alone. And God used him, really, to preserve the doctrine of the deity of Christ that we have today against the Arians who believe that Jesus is not God. In other words, they were the Jehovah's Witnesses of the third and fourth century. And he stood up against that. Then you have Augustine. Augustine lives in the 4th and 5th century. He writes The City of God. Augustine was a pagan in his youth. He also belonged to a cult called the Manichaeans and that was like a dualist synthesis of religions, a little bit of Buddhism. It was actually started by Mani, M-A-N-I, not M-A-N-N-Y, who was Iranian, I believe. And Augustine was considered by many to be the first theologian to fully embrace Pauline soteriology, which means He believed in sovereign grace. He believed in it so much that that's why John Calvin quotes him over 400 times in his work. It doesn't mean that Augustine was a card-carrying Calvinist. It doesn't mean that if he were here today, he'd be a member of our church. But in many ways, when you read what he said about the grace of God as a necessity in order to believe in God's sovereignty in salvation, it sounds very proto-Calvinistic. And it's very interesting. And he said that faith must precede understanding. He said this. No one is sufficient for himself either to begin or perfect faith, but our sufficiency is of God." He was probably the first God-centered of all these apologists and theologians we have. Now, you look at your chart, and after Augustine, we went from 1, 2, 3, 4, and now we're at Anselm in the 1100s. So why is there such a big gap here? Well, this is not to say that there were no Christians that defended the faith in that time, but towards the end of Augustine's I guess, prominence, Christianity had already triumphed over paganism. Especially in the Roman Empire, the church began to dominate culture. Now, of course, we as Protestants know that's not necessarily a good thing. We're thankful that Christianity was made legal, thankful that people could have churches without persecution. But then there was, of course, an ungodly marriage of church and state, which leads to a whole host of other problems. But paganism was pretty much whittling away The church dominated Western culture. The threat of Greek philosophy was dim. But there were still threats that remained. There was Judaism, there was Islam, which was on the rise, and rationalism. So at this point, we're kind of at the Middle Ages. And during the Middle Ages, there were two people that were the chief defenders of the faith, and they were Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. Anselm posited something called the ontological argument. And Antos in Greek basically means being. And he said that within all of us, we cannot deny the fact that there is a supreme being that has to be greater than anything we've ever imagined. It's logically inescapable. If you don't have this great being, then nothing can exist. And they also wrote a book called Why the God Man, which is more of a theological word talking about the fact that Jesus had to be God, because if he wasn't God, he could not fully atone for our sins. Anselm is widely interpreted by many people and critics, so as far as what he meant by the ontological argument is really up for debate. But then the 13th century, what happens here now is Europe rediscovers the classics of antiquity. You might remember from world history, humanism, Renaissance humanism, a rediscovery of Aristotle and Plato. So what kind of died out a few centuries ago is now it's coming back in to the Western world. And enter Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas comes in, and he's spelt wrong on your handout. There's no A, the first A. It really bothered me. But I already printed 50 copies, so I wasn't going to do it over. But anyway, Thomas Aquinas, he's famous for his five ways. You may have heard Thomas' five ways. And it's his argument for the existence of God. And I'm going to go through it really briefly. If you want more, just write down five ways, look it up. One is that God is the unmoved mover. Everything in this universe moves, right? It's in constant motion. The laws are in motion. The beings are in motion. The planets are in motion. But you cannot have infinite moving. You have to have something that began that moving process. And that points to the fact that there is a God. That's kind of related to number two in his five ways, which is first cause. That nothing that has an existence doesn't have a cause. Everything has to have a cause. causes something else, everything is kind of reacting against one another, and you have to go again all the way back to this first cause, and that's what we call God. Thirdly, there's contingency. One thing, and it's kind of related to it, one thing is contingent upon another, or depends upon another, but you cannot have infinite numbers of things that depend upon one another, there has to be something that is independent to get, again, it's kind of related to the first two. This is the cosmological argument in some ways, that contingency proves The unmoved mover slash first cause has to be non-contingent. I hope you're edified by this, by the way. But it makes sense when you think about it. All right. The fourth one is degree. If there's an unmoved mover, if he's the first cause, then his degree of perfection has to be the highest in the universe. You cannot have a flawed unmoved mover. You have to have a standard of perfection. When you and I look at the world and we see things that are not the way they should be, How do we know that? There has to be a standard of the way things ought to be, a perfect pinnacle of truth, and that would be God. And then fifthly, it's called a teleological argument. Telos in Greek means design. It's the argument of design that you can't really deny. And this is, by the way, before we had the microscopes we have now to see even more design within our bodies. But just the way that physics works, how can you deny that there's a designer for all these things? So these are his five ways. By the way, he rejected Anselm's ontological argument. So the fighting continues. All right. So after Aquinas, we move into the Reformation era, which is fitting because yesterday we celebrated the, we're almost at 500 years now of the Protestant Reformation. At least the beginning, if you consider October 31st, 1517, the start. So with A few minutes left. Martin Luther, in 1546, nails 95 theses on the church store in Wittenberg, Germany, and chaos ensues, basically. He changes things. I saw a meme on Facebook, and it says, nailed it. I think that's pretty fitting. 95 theses were basically his arguments against mainly indulgences. There was other arguments there against the papacy and so on. If you know indulgences, you can go to a monk in his area of Germany. It was Tetzel. You could put money in the coffer. Every time the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs. You could basically buy your relatives out of purgatory the more money you pay. And obviously, this is not only unbiblical, it's anti-gospel. And Martin Luther raised some serious issues about this. And he sparked a reformation that not only went throughout Germany, but Europe and the world. Whereas in the early church through the Middle Ages, we were fighting more against deniers of Christ deity, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Pelagianism. During the Reformation era, the arguments were against medieval superstition, Enlightenment rationalism, skepticism, modernism, and atheism, and things that came out of the Renaissance. Luther is kind of like Tertullian. He set the standard of solo scriptura. mainly that the Bible alone is the only infallible authority. You may have other authorities in the church, you may have other authorities in the land, but there's only one infallible authority and that's the Word of God. That's why when he was called upon to recant at the Diet of Worms, Luther said, unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason, I will not recant. So then we have John Calvin. John Calvin writes the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He is known as the chief theologian of the Reformation and he kind of takes a lot of Augustinian theology and talks about our depravity in such a way that we are blinded by our sin in such a way that we need God to be the first move upon us before we can believe anything. And this plays into apologetics because if you understand that, you realize that you cannot intellectually argue anyone into heaven. Only God by the Holy Spirit can open their hearts. We have Blaise Pascal who writes Pensées, which means thoughts. He's famous for Pascal's wager. You may have heard of the wager. Basically, what if you're wrong? What if there is no God? And it was kind of a play on emotions. I wouldn't necessarily use this argument, but you say, if you use Pascal's wager to your friend or coworker, you're basically saying it's better to believe in God than go to hell. So you might as well believe. Well, no one who says, okay, fine. I don't want to go to hell. I believe in God is actually believing, right? Faith actually has to be faith. You can't just say, well, I believe just in case it's true. It doesn't really work that way. But Pascal did more than that. He rejected the rational arguments, and he was very big on emphasizing the personal, relational aspects in coming to Christ. And he's one of the first apologists to talk about how the apologist must take into account the differences among the people you're talking to. Everybody comes from a different walk of life or different issues in their own life, and so he made sure that we don't have one cut-and-dry approach to every single person. William Paley, who died in 1805, wrote A View of the Evidences of Christianity. So you could imagine he was more of an evidentialist. He talked about natural theology, which is not using the Bible, but seeing who God is through nature. He's the one where we get the famous blind watchmaker, or the watchmaker argument, basically. I think Jim mentioned this last time. If you see a watch on a beach, you assume someone made the watch. You don't just assume that millions of years of whatever formed into a watch, right? So that was William Paley who supposedly first did that. We're getting towards the end here. Thomas Reed, not someone that we're very familiar with, you may not even have heard of him, but he's important because of his influence on the rest of this era. He was a Scottish Calvinist. He taught that knowing God is basically intuitive for all of us. It's common sense for us to know what is right and wrong. The Bible calls this a conscience. We all have a conscience. And you don't necessarily have to prove to someone what the morals are because morals are embedded in us. Yes, it's seared through sin, it's suppressed through sin, but the way we're made, we know that good and evil exists. And so he may not be the most popular guy on this list, but he had a profound influence on Princeton Theological Seminary in the 19th and 20th century. So if you go to the next box where it says Old Princetonians, you've probably heard of Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield. They were very much influenced by Thomas Reed. They were mainly theologians, but they were actually part of the early fundamentalist movement. Now I can go on forever about fundamentalism, but I'll say this, that when you think of the word fundamentalism, you might think, because of the way the media portrays it, of an anti-intellectual extremism. And in some cases that's true. In some cases, it's changed. And in some cases, people use it for Islamic fundamentalists and all this. But fundamentalism originally was a Christian term. It was a Christian term talking about a movement that spread across a variety of denominations. It wasn't just Baptist. It wasn't just Presbyterian. It was a variety of denominations, all who held to the fundamentals. So they may have argued about baptism. They may have argued about church polity. But they all agreed that Jesus was God, that the Bible was the word of God, that Jesus is coming again, that he truly rose again, all those things that if you take anyone away, you no longer have Christianity. We could debate about what Bible version to use or what music to have, and you might even be right in your argument, but you can't say that because that person disagrees, they're not a Christian. But if someone denies the resurrection, well then, according to the Bible, their faith is in vain. So those fundamental core doctrines were being challenged around the 19th century, the late 19th century, early 20th century, mainly from Germany. So much here higher criticism, which is the idea that, you know, there were two Daniels, there were two Isaiahs, or all Isaiah's prophecies that look like it's Christ were actually written after Christ and all these different things, liberalism sort of seeping in. And the fundamentalists were not just people who believed in the fundamentals. And this is really where it gets tricky. It's the people that separated from those who did not believe in it. So what was happening like in Princeton was, Well, Christianity is on the decline. Let us get some professors from Germany who are really good at New Testament studies. They may not be believers, but they really make our seminary look good. And so they bring them into Princeton and other places. And so people like J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Fantill left Princeton to start a new place called Westminster Seminary. They were all part of the early fundamentalist movements. So it's one thing to believe in the fundamentals, but it's another thing, like Curtis Lee Law said, to do battle royale for the fundamentals, and those were the fundamentalists. They fought against the modernists in that day, and in many ways, we are heirs of that movement, though it has been hijacked by some other groups. So, we're almost at the end here. Abraham Kuyper developed something called the antithesis, where he says that there's an absolute difference between two sets of principles. On one hand, we believe God is sovereign. On the other hand, the unbelieving world says a man is sovereign. So therefore, his idea was that Christianity should expose all the anti-Christian roots of all the non-Christian systems and then reconstruct the world through Christian principles. One of the most famous Kuyperians or followers of Kuyper was Cornelius Van Til. Van Til sometimes is regarded as the father of presuppositionalism. We heard about that last week, so I won't go too much into that. And some of his disciples include Greg Bonson and so on. And then finally, C.S. Lewis, who's not necessarily a follower of Van Til. The arrows might be a little misleading here, but C.S. Lewis over in England, while this was happening here, over in England, very famous for obviously the Chronicles of Narnia, but he wrote a lot more than just fiction. He wrote a lot of defenses of the Christian faith. He addressed the problem of suffering, which was a big issue for a lot of people. How can a loving God allow suffering? Well, he wrote the problem of pain. He wrote miracles. He wrote mere Christianity, all of which was his way of saying that Christians should keep the faith even if they have some doubts. That you can't just, you know, you have one doubt in one area, the whole thing is gone, but you should try to work those things out and answer those questions, answer those really tough questions. He's the one who posited the famous trilemma that Jesus is either liar, lunatic, or Lord. If he claimed to be God and he's a liar, well, we shouldn't believe him. Or maybe he was mentally insane, he's a lunatic. But if those two things are not true, then the only other option is that he's Lord and we should believe and submit to him. So as you know, today's apologists, you have a whole bunch and maybe your favorite apologist is not in that box. Well, that box isn't big enough for everybody with any smaller than size 9.5 font. So I apologize for that. But here's some of the more famous ones. Again, I don't necessarily endorse all of their opinions or beliefs, but and it's a mix of different types of apologists. But the point is this. Each one of them draws from many of the things I said about church history. There are strands that use a combination, the theology of Augustine and Calvin, the reasoning of Anselm and Aquinas and Pascal, the presuppositions of Reed and Van Til, the evidences of Tertullian and Lewis, all these different perspectives all show the truthfulness of Christianity. And that brings us to point three, and I'm going to wrap it up in just two minutes here. Christianity is a time-tested, well-preserved faith. Even with Christians fighting over who can defend the faith better, We're still here, right? Atheism has not won. Rationalism is not one. They've all lost the battle. And I know that that was kind of academic and heady, but I just want to encourage you just to see in 15 minutes of a timeline that all these things have been mounted against our faith. And yet God has been true to his word and he's kept the faith alive. Um, and many of the things, and I just gave a list of just four things right here in that box of how there's ancient heresies rehashed, like oneness theology, the theology that TD Jake's, claims to have repudiated, but was holding up to a few years ago, that Jesus is the Father, oneness Pentecostalism, well that's just modalism. That's just an ancient heresy rehashed. Or your Jehovah's Witness friends who come to the door and tell you that Jesus is not God, well that's Arianism rehashed. Or Jesus is just a moral teacher. Anyone, and this is many people, who believe that salvation is based upon your works, well that's Pelagianism, already refuted in the 4th century by Augustine. It's just rehashed. Enlightenment reasoning the new age all these things about secret knowledge Gnosticism which was around since the time of Christ and all throughout history And I could give you 10 20 more examples of how the things that your neighbors and co-workers tried to tell you is rehashed Heresies which have just been recycled renamed and they've been refuted. I just made that up right now recycled renamed refuted All right, so I just want to encourage you that Christianity is able to withstand the onslaught of critics, both ancient and new. There may be many methods, but Christianity will rise up, not because we're wise, but because God will provide us with the resources to meet the challenges head on. And I would just say, learn from these guys. There's some resources here if you want to read about all the different people in more detail. I know I went really fast. And do I have time for questions? Probably not, right? It's 11.02. So I could take one or two, I suppose, and then we'll go, Dolly. OK, great. Yeah, so by the end of Augustine's career, the church had pretty much taken over Rome, Roman Empire. That's where Roman Catholicism really, right? So even though, as I said, Protestants, we would see that as a bad thing in many ways, because the church and the state are married. and it becomes like illegal not to be a Christian and then all sorts of heresies ensue from that, right? But they virtually stamped out paganism and the earlier threats. So because Christianity had triumphed, there wasn't as many attacks on it as there were prior. Some things had been established, the Nicene Creed's been established. So it took a good 500, actually 600 years really, for people to start questioning the authority of the church. So it doesn't mean that there aren't any people between here that were defending the faith, but it wasn't as much of a necessity. Or their works are gone, because again, it's ancient history. So who knows? We got to go. All right, well, thank you all. If you have any questions, email me.