Resources for Further Study:

• Philosophy of Revelation by Herman Bavinck
• CT article on Bavinck by Dr. Sutanto
• Christian Apologetics  by Cornelius Van Til
•  A Sense of the Divine by N. Gray Sutanto

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The Questioning Belief podcast explores objections to Christianity through in-depth discussions with experts. Drawing from her background as a former atheist and her experience in apologetics, Dr. Kathleen Noller invites you to explore thoughtful responses to serious questions about faith. Learn more.

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Explore written reflections from Dr. Kathleen Noller and get in touch with her through her Substack, The Reformed Gadfly.

Transcript

Welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute. Join me as we interrogate Christianity to see if it can stand up to some of our toughest objections. On today's episode, we are discussing apologetics. What exactly is it? Why is it biblical?

Kathleen Noller: We're going to go through some of the main objections to Christianity that I have heard and that apologists should be prepared for and regular Christians should be prepared for as well. And then we're going to go into a background on some famous Reformed theologians and church history figures. And the person who's going to take us through all of this is Dr. Gray Sutanto. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is an assistant professor of systematic theology at RTS, or Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He is the author of God and Knowledge, co-author of Neo-Calvinism, Theological Introduction, and co-editor for Herman Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation and Christian Worldview. He's also an author of The Sense of the Divine, an Effective Model of General Revelation from the Reformed Tradition. His research interests include Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, Humanity and Sin, Christianity and Culture, amongst many, many others.

Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Sutanto.

N. Gray Sutanto: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you so much. So, let's start out before we dive into apologetics. What exactly is apologetics? Why is it biblical? And why specifically is cultural apologetics something that we should be tuned into?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah, thanks so much for that. Wow, that's a great group of questions there. Apologetics refers to the discipline of defending the Christian faith. I try to think of apologetics as the vindication of the Christian faith. And in contrast to other faiths or other worldviews that are out there. And Christian apologetics is in fact biblical because the Bible mandates us to do apologetics. Peter, of course, is a text that immediately comes to mind. There, Peter argues that Christians must be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within them, to give a defense. And the Greek term there is apologia. So, in other words, apologetics not about apologizing or being sorry for your faith, but it's about giving reasons for the hope that is within you and Because in the context of Peter, you know, Christians are being persecuted and they're supposed to suffer well. And they're supposed to give an account for why it is that they would suffer for the faith that they have in Christ Jesus. And cultural apologetics has to do with the contextualization, I would say, of apologetics to a particular culture or social environment, it argues that we must be attentive to the narratives, cultural intuitions that we find in our own context. And we've got to show how Christianity addresses those very particular objections and makes sense given the objections of the day.

So, because Christianity is truly Catholic, truly universal, that is, it can address any questions and ah that is thrown our way. And so, we see a paradigmatic example of this again in the Bible. In Corinthians, about verses to, Paul argues that Jesus Christ is wisdom to the Greeks and a stumbling block to them because of that. And at the same time, Paul argues that Jesus Christ is a stumbling block to the Jews because Jesus Christ looks weak to them. But Jesus Christ has both power in addressing the Jews and wisdom in addressing the Greeks. Now, why would he talk about Jesus in terms of both power and wisdom? Well, it's because the Jews were seeking a political sign. Jews wanted to be vindicated because they were a minority class within a Greco-Roman society. They were being persecuted by an overall Roman Empire that was marginalizing them. And so, they wanted a political messiah. They wanted power. And so, Jesus Christ comes in and completely overthrows their expectations for a political messiah. Jesus Christ came in weakness, not in strength. And Jesus Christ was crucified. So, they expected political power, but in fact, they were given weakness, but that weakness is the power of God to save not from political oppression, but from the oppressive powers of sin and death.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, Jesus in is in fact a powerful sign from God, but not the sort of power that the Jews had expected. And the Greeks wanted wisdom and Jesus Christ looks foolish because again, why would a God become human? And why would this God ah become subject to these political powers? And again, become himself crucified in a shameful fashion that looks incredibly weak to the Greeks too. But in fact, In Christ's crucifixion, we see the plan of God come into fruition to save sinners in the fullness of time. So, Paul characterizes Christ's crucifixion, death, and resurrection there, not simply as forgiveness, as he did in a Romans, not simply to cleanse our conscience, as maybe the author of the book of Hebrews would in Hebrews but as power and wisdom because that's exactly the kind of term that the Jews and Greeks would understand. So, he's addressing them very specifically and he's showing us that the Christian gospel and the Christian narrative is pliable enough and in fact, full ordered enough to address any sort of desire or objection that comes its way.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you for that scripture-based definition. I think that's very helpful for our Christian listeners as well. And when Christians are thinking about apologetics, oftentimes, you know, like you said, it's defense of the faith. Where does that intersect with evangelism, if at all? And is evangelism biblical?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah, that's a great question again. I do you think that there are perhaps some authors out there that will want to make a strong distinction between apologetics and evangelism. Some people might say apologetics gets us to believe that there is a God. And then evangelism shows us that Jesus Christ is in fact God and that God has offered us forgiveness and reconciliation, the death and resurrection of Christ. But I don't want to make that distinction. I want to say that apologetics is merely premeditated evangelism. That what we see about Jesus Christ and the scripture should inform the way in which we do apologetics. Because the Christian story is so unique and so powerful and so filled with resources, we can deploy it even and as we defend the faith. And it is, in fact, again, biblical because Jesus Christ, again, commands us to not be ashamed of him, to go out and disciple the nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. And so, we're supposed to proclaim the good news, as Paul says in Romans, right? So how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. so, and how would people. convert to Christianity or have faith in Christ without hearing the gospel. And so, proclamation of the gospel in line with anticipating objections and being able to defend the gospel with reason of reason arguments. That's incredibly important as part of the Christian witness.

Kathleen Noller: That makes sense. And so, in terms of defending the Christian faith, one can imagine defending against heresies. Any sort of study of church history is going to show you that heresies will pop up from time to time and that you've had famous church fathers who have defended against that. Could you give our listeners, perhaps our non-Christian listeners or or listeners who are less familiar with church history, an example of how apologetics could be important just within the church itself and defending against heretical beliefs?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah, the very beginning of, again, the letter to Jude, Jude there argues that Christians are called to contend for the faith. So yeah, you're exactly right that apologetics isn't just about vindicating the Christian faith to non-believers or responding to objections ah from outside the church, but it's also about getting clear on what the Bible teaches and that what we believe the church has taught about the Bible is in fact in line with the Bible itself. So, I think a good example of reasoned theological argumentation, let's just put it that way in a broader sense, right? It's necessary for us to get the Bible right as in fact in combating heresies, especially as we see this in the early church. I think you asked about an example of a heresy, right? So, I think a typical example of a heresy is Arianism, which is a belief in the early church in the second and third centuries that basically said that Jesus Christ is the greatest among creatures but is still only a creature. And so, Jesus Christ and the Logos were before the world was created, but there was a time in which the Son was not. And if there was a time in which the son if not is not, then therefore, you know, the father is first and the son is subordinate in some way to the father because he's still a creature, though the first among creatures. And basically, what we see. throughout the scriptures is that this is not the sort of status that the apostles ascribed to Christ in the gospels or in the letters of Paul, for instance. So, Paul very clearly in Philippians two would say that the son was in the very form of God and that he did not count equality with God, a thing to hold onto unduly, but rather he emptied himself into the form of a servant. And so, this is teaching us very high Christology.

That's what the New Testament commentators would say about the passage. this This is a very high Christology because it teaches us about the pre-existence of the Son who is in fact equal with God or we see in the book of John, the very opening lines that the Word was with God and the Word was God. And this word was ah manifest to us in the flesh, John, He came down to dwell with us in the flesh. And so, what we see in the Bible is that the Son of God was with the Father in eternity past and shares a singular substance with God, but in due time entered and assumed a human nature for us. And so, the Son was in fact equal with God and therefore the Son was eternal with God. There was no time in which the son was not. And, you know, the church father, Athanasius, had a very interesting argument about this effect. He argued, well, the Arians would argue that the father is really what's primary and the son is secondary, right? But he argued that if the son was secondary and that there was a time at which the son came to be, then this would also make the father contingent on the son. Namely, there was a time in which the father became father.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And so, the father was never eternal. So, in other words, if the son came to be, then it follows that there was a moment at which the father came to be because there is no father without son. And Athanasius argued, therefore, if Arianism is true, it doesn't just compromise the divinity of the son, it also compromises the divinity of the father.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: You would be positing that the father came to exist, was contingent, and was in fact mutable. It changed into fatherhood. But he argued that the father and the son are co-equal. And therefore, if the father's eternal father follows that the son is eternally son. And so that's an amazing argument. And I think it's really applying the Bible to this nascent heresy, as you were talking about. And the heresy was a misreading of the Bible. And we and through reasoning, in line with the Bible, can encounter that. And I do I do think that's a form of apologetics. Absolutely.

Kathleen Noller: That's a fantastic example. And I think sometimes nonbelievers will look at church history if they're familiar with it and oftentimes can see different heresies and schisms and theological disagreements and get sort of ah turned off from that in a way in the sense of, well, if the Holy Spirit is guiding the development of the church and you have the Bible and the canon is established, why don't we have more agreement?

N. Gray Sutanto: right

Kathleen Noller: And so, what would you say to somebody who is sees the value of apologetics, but is wondering why the Holy Spirit wouldn't have, say, that the power that they think it should make a mere Christianity, so to speak?

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. Yeah, a couple of points to that. I do think, in fact, that there is a mere Christianity that has been established and it's been established a long time ago. So, it did take a couple of generations for what we might call the rule of faith to emerge. Something like not only the Nicene Creed, but the Apostles' Creed, and then the Chalcedonian Creed, which basically summarizes something that all of us hold in common, whether Roman Catholic, Protestants, or the Eastern Orthodox, the three most historical branches of Christianity, let's say. So, we are all in agreement with the basic outlines of the creeds of the early church. So, there is, in fact, the rule of faith, but it did take a couple of generations because we got to remember that there was no printing press. There was no ease of communication, and the Bible was being transmitted across a diversity of different regions. And it was very rare for a particular church or a particular community to have the entirety of the Bible because these texts were expensive.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: These texts were disseminated piecemeal oftentimes. And it took a long time, therefore, for the church to really come together and come to an agreement about the rule of faith, as it were, because we're finite creatures. So, I think when people appeal to the Holy Spirit, I think they try to think of the Holy Spirit as kind of working automatically or working apart from what theologians would call secondary causes, right?

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. So, on the one hand, we can say the spirit of God is that which caused me to have faith in Christ. But on the other hand, we can also say by secondary causes, I needed to have been in touch with this pastor. I needed it to have gotten access to this book, or I needed to have had that conversation with my friend or my mother or whoever, right? So, the spirit works through all kinds of ordinary means to get the job done. And oftentimes that looks messy because the spirit works with messy people. And God has created us as full-orbed characters and full-orbed human beings and personalities and agents. And the Spirit doesn't bypass that. And so, I think we can expect, yes, unity to emerge. In fact, again, I would argue it did, in fact, emerge. But the Spirit works with finite people. And so, we should expect there to be always some form of theological diversity, given how rich the Bible is and how finite we are. And we are not only finite, but also sinful. And so, there are lots of things that perhaps we would always disagree with, not only because we don't have the capacity to see everything, but because there are some things that we don't want to believe in. And the spirit is constantly going to be working in us until the last day.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, very well said. So now that we have a good definition of apologetics and of evangelism, i think we should dive into some of the main objections to Christianity that apologists or just anyone should be prepared to answer. And so could you define for a sort of an umbrella of Holtzman, Capacity Collective, Overtime, objections that that you have heard or that you've seen and, in the literature, then we can dive into more specific focused questions from there.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes, great question. Broadly, I think, you know, there are what we might call the jure objections, de facto objections, and then perhaps a new species of objections that I think you're getting at is imaginative objections. So, de jure objections refer to objections that attack the rationality of the Christian faith. it's to the effect of the Christian faith doesn't seem to be coherent. The Christian faith seems to expose us to doctrines that don't make sense, logically speaking. So, I don't know whether Christianity is true per se, but I know that Christianity is an incoherent idea. Maybe they'll attack something like Trinity. Well, the Trinity confronts us with a paradox that God is three persons, one in essence. Like what in the world does that even mean? So, I don't know if the Trinity is true or not, but at face value, it seems to be an irrational concept, let's say. So that would be attacking the rationality of the Christian faith. and this is also the sort of objection that you might hear with respect to science and religion conversations. People would say, well, given what we know about the age of the earth and human death and the fact that nature seems to be violent, red tooth and claw from the very beginning, it seems.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: at face value, again, irreconcilable with the Christian faith. So, notice that that kind of claim is not saying Christianity is in fact not true, but it is saying that Christianity appears incompatible with what we know in each domain.

Kathleen Noller: who

N. Gray Sutanto: The second sort of objection is what we to call again a de facto objection, which attacks the fact of Christianity or the truth of Christianity. So, these are arguments to the effect of, well, the resurrection simply did not happen. It's not saying, well, the resurrection is just logically impossible. It's saying that the resurrection, given the historical accounts, given what we have, did not in fact happen.

Kathleen Noller: Sure.

N. Gray Sutanto: Or that the documents of the scriptures are in fact mistaken or in fact wrong. Those are the sorts of objections. So de facto objections are more dependent upon a kind of empirical way of reasoning.

Kathleen Noller: sure

N. Gray Sutanto: And the third form of objection is imaginative objections or imagine or objections that doesn't really attack the rationality of the Christian faith or the truth value of the Christian faith but attacks the Christian faith in terms of the kind of communities that it seems to form. I don't know whether Christianity is true or reasonable, but I do know that the Christian faith is not attractive or that the Christian faith is not beautiful or that the Christian faith creates communities that are not beautiful or attractive, that creates bigotry, intolerance, and so on.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, the imaginative attacks more so the values of the Christian faith, maybe it's bigoted, and the community of the Christian faith.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And I think that's become a very popular form of objections, though I do think Given some recent conversations about the rise of conservatism among Gen Z and even younger than that, the first two forms of objections are beginning to emerge once again. But I think for about seven or eight years, the imaginative objections had been center stage.

Kathleen Noller: what would you say are maybe the strongest objections from each category if you had to pick one

N. Gray Sutanto: Man, the strongest objections from each category. That's a difficult one. I don't know about the strongest, but in terms of the jury objections, something to the effect of the problem of evil, right? And there's harder forms of the problem of evil versus softer forms of the problem of evil. The hardest form of the problem of evil is a de facto argument. So, it's saying, given how much evil there is in the world, it is logically impossible for there to be a good benevolent, all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And that was, I believe, propound by a philosopher by the name of J.L. Mackey, if I'm not mistaken. And that's been responded to by Alvin Plantinga and many other philosophers. And so, people now try to make it softer. And they would say, well, given how much evil and suffering there is in the world, it is improbable to or unreasonable to believe that there is a good, powerful and all-knowing God. So that now has become a de jure sort of objection.

Kathleen Noller: okay

N. Gray Sutanto: Arguments against ah Christianity from the de facto, I think, still has to do with the possibility of miracles, especially the resurrection. The imaginative objections, especially in the West, have to do with our treatment of marginalized community groups, whether it is in those wrestling with different sexual identities or sexual proclivities or ah different racial ethnic groups, especially in the context of America, perhaps.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. Absolutely.

N. Gray Sutanto: They would argue that Christianity is essentially a white heteronormative patriarchal religion that seems to be incompatible with the diverse values that we have around us here today. And I say that that's particularly potent in the West or something that we face in the West, but it's not something that we face in the same form in the East or where I came from, from Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance.

Kathleen Noller: absolutely

N. Gray Sutanto: And that's the thing about the imaginative and why cultural apologetics is so important is because if the imaginative is about attacking the values of the Christian faith, well, that actually already presupposes a certain set of values that you take for granted, and you're showing some kind of incompatibility between your values and what the Christian faith seems to say, at least you know and an initial read of the Christian faith, whether right or wrong.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And in Jakarta, Indonesia, the Christian faith is not seen as an intolerant or bigoted or heteronormative faith because everyone is quote-unquote heteronormative given the preponderance of Islam and Confucianism in Asia, right? So, the Christian faith is scandalous, not because of its sexual morality. It's scandalous there because it is a very forgiving faith.

Kathleen Noller: Oh, interesting.

N. Gray Sutanto: because we allow those who had sexually tabooed sins to come to our churches and worship together, in even in fact be in front singing in the choir, let's say, because we allow the young to participate fully in worship and not just venerate those with older age, for instance. It becomes scandalous for those reasons. And if you take a look at the early church, you also see the same thing where the Christian faith is scandalous because it was atheistic, they argue, because the Christianity did not endorse the idea that there is ah an idol in a temple that you've got to visit every season or that there is a pilgrimage that you've got to follow. But rather, we now worship God in spirit and in truth, and there are no more sacrifices to be given to this God because Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. So, we were scandalous because we were socially awkward because we were disrupting the religious ecosystem of the day because we were saying to people, stop doing these things to these different idols. So, we were atheists. So, I think it's good to zoom out and the imaginative objections are very local to each specific place. And it gives you hope because, hey, even though these objections, these imaginative ones have been so big in our purview, they’re not actually universal objections, and that's useful to point out.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that is so useful to point out. And that's such an interesting difference between, of course, the West and the East. What are some other differences, if you don't mind me asking, from your experience that you've seen from, let's say, Jakarta to D.C. that might be help people understand that, like you said, the Western objections to Christianity are not the end-all, be-all, and perhaps some part of their imaginative objections might be actually revealing their own worldview or their own presuppositions.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes, that's a great question. I think, yeah, so I think a basic difference between the West and the East is the way in which they view merit and authority. So, I think in the West, what you see is an individualized understanding of merit and authority, right? So, someone has authority if you've proved yourself individually, you've achieved certain goods, and therefore everybody should be judged based on their own individuality. That rarely exists in that sort of way in in the East, especially in in the context of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Kathleen Noller: Still there.

N. Gray Sutanto: There's a very corporate understanding of authority. So, you don't get to decide what you do with your life, but rather your elders decide for you. So, in fact, you know, one of the biggest pastoral challenges I faced when I was a church planner in Jakarta were parental and authority related issues. Like, okay, I'm still living with my great grandfather who is near age, but he's still calling the shots on where my kids are going to school.

Kathleen Noller: store

N. Gray Sutanto: And I'm a year-old man, let's say, i you know what I mean? So that's,

Kathleen Noller: Very foreign to Americans.

N. Gray Sutanto: Completely. Yes. So, you can't imagine even having that sort of conversation in the context of America.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, when, you know, Americans are so sensitive to, you know, the abuse of power, so sensitive to when, you know, when you're older enough, you shouldn't be pastoring or preaching or else you might be abusing your power or you've got accept your limitations.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah. In the context of Jakarta, you know you would hear stories about preachers who are still preaching in their late days.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: They're clearly facing cognitive decline. And yet the congregants don't see that as weakness but see that as strength. And in fact, this is exactly the sort of person that we should look up to because he's barely resting even in his late s, for instance. Whereas in the context of the States, you know if somebody's obviously facing. cognitive limitations from the pulpit, there would be a member meeting right that night, right? Okay, we've got to think about succession and all that.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And so, in the context of Jakarta, what I would wish is that we would become more sensitive to the abuse of power by the authorities, just because you're older doesn't mean that you get de facto authority in every case, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: But in the context of the United States, I do think that we think that the whole world is and individualistic. We think that the whole world is about diversity. We think that the whole world is about toleration. It's not.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: We think that we tend to think, in the context of America particularly, we tend to think that American values just are universal values. But it's not. And so those objections come our way with the sense of like, obviously, everyone must come to come to our point of view. And that's simply not the case. So, one of the things that that I like to say when somebody says, well, Christianity is just a, again, white heteronormative patriarchal faith, I would say that's the most Western way of putting it.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: Because to tether a view to ethnicity and class, it's not something that you would find in that way in the context of Jakarta, in the context of Hong Kong or Singapore. We don't just say, well, you know you only believe that because you're of your ethnicity. like that that would be

Kathleen Noller: and

N. Gray Sutanto: That would be a misunderstanding because in the context of Asia, there is still a high belief in universal truth. like Confucianists argue there is a right way of doing this versus a wrong way of doing things. It's not just for Chinese people. Muslims argue that there is one way and it's not just for Arabic people, right? So, I think the sensitivity that beliefs are merely reducible to, you know, the kind of socioeconomic origins of a particular person is really a postmodern Western individualistic kind of worldview that you don't get elsewhere.

Kathleen Noller: That's very helpful context for Christians and nonbelievers to have as well. I don't want to get us too far down the problem of evil objection because I think we could spend a long time there. But just since we brought it up, how should a Christian start to engage with somebody who says, i do acknowledge that there is good and evil.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right.

Kathleen Noller: However, i don't assent to the fact that if you are defining your God as a good God, as a powerful God, that there would be the presence of evil, natural evil, what not moral evil in the world.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah, so I think my first response to those who endorse the problem of evil is, i would argue that if you don't believe in God, then you've got the problem of the good. In other words, you've got to account for what this goodness is and how you define this goodness. Because in fact, that there is no God. Your intuitions about the good are in fact reducible to your emotive preferences or your own individual intuitions.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And when you're having a moral disagreement with someone else, all you're doing there is just reducible to a kind of shouting match where my intuitions are better than yours with no arbitrating objective third party, as it were, to settle the objective state of matters, to settle the debate.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: So that's what I would say. So, unless you believe in God, you can't really account for the existence of an objective moral standard by which. you evaluate the world and by which you say, man, there's so much evil here and the good doesn't seem to be winning out. If you've got that kind of standard already, then you've got to account for it.

N. Gray Sutanto: And I think the best way to account for that is to believe that there is ah highest good, namely God himself.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

N. Gray Sutanto: The second thing I would say is that we are all evil in some way or other. I think, you know, especially in the West, we tend to think that the individual is basically good, but sometimes we make mistakes a Christian anthropology that takes seriously the effects of what we might call the fall, that we're all corrupted fallen creatures ever since the first sin. We would argue that now in this present condition, even though we were made good, we're now basically quite morally inept and quite morally evil even. You know, we've got this doctrine of total depravity that we talk about in the Presbyterian circles.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And in the doctrine of total depravity, we argue that sin has corrupted every part of our being. So, we think in a fallen way. We think in a corrupted way. We feel in a corrupted way. Right. So we would argue, therefore, that if if we're demanding, OK, God, let's eradicate all evil. Well, we got to ask the question, why doesn't he just eradicate us? Because we are evil. In fact, the fact that there is a lot of evil in the world does not showcase God's incapacity, but rather his patience. He is patient with us. He's giving us a lot of grace in allowing us to be and to give us an opportunity, therefore, to repent and believe in the gospel, for we to get exposed to the gospel.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, the fact that there's so much evil in the world means that God is patient with unbelief and God wants us to come find him. and so, i think a lot of the iterations of the problem of evil out there presuppose from the outset that the Christian story is not true. They presuppose from the outset that we are basically good creatures who innocents and God owe us something because we are good.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And that the corruption that we see in the world has always been there. And therefore, God is either inept because he didn't make a good world or God is not good because he doesn't want to make the world good or something like that. But then the Christian story, we see in Genesis and that God did make everything good, but we were the ones that introduced evil into it. And God is in fact patient with us. So, a multiple prong response there, I suppose.

Kathleen Noller: So, I was going to ask you from that, how can we reconcile this innate sinfulness that we all have with our own moral agency we're carrying out the consequences of the fall, which is not our individual quote unquote doing. But nonetheless, we carry those consequences of original sin, but we are all creatures that were given free will. And so how much evil is fair and that's again, a very morally charged word, to blame on the sinful individual versus on God who presumably could he have created creatures with free will that were capable of sinlessness before the fall?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes. So, well, I'll take that that latter question first. So that's the easier one. Yes, Adam could have remained sinless before the fall. So, I think in in the Christian story, you know, what we see in Genesis, and especially after the creation of Adam, was that God had made everything very good. And so, Ecclesiastes, says that God had made man upright, but man was the one who searched for his own way.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, Adam had everything that he needed to remain upright. And yet, He abuses freedom to disobey God and in fact, listen to the serpent instead who lied to Adam. Right? So, in that story, what we see is that again, mankind was created innocently that could have remained upright forever. And in fact, it could have entered glory and eternal life forever. Had he not listened to the temptation of the serpent there. So yes, God could have made a world where Adam did not fall, but in fact, God did foresee that he would fall. And in fact, God, permitted it to happen for the greater good And I think what is the greater good here? And this is, I think, the heart of a response to the question of why is it just for God to allow this much suffering? Why is God so patient with us? Well, God has allowed this suffering to enter human history because there is the greater good of the whole story of redemption that we see in Christ Jesus, I would argue. So, there's an analogy here with respect to great works of fiction like Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings that becomes. really prevalent in Christian apologetics literature. So, if you look at my colleague's recent essay, a four-case defense of the authorial model of divine providence that just came out this earlier this year in the Journal of Analytic Theology.

Where he argues for the authorial model of divine providence, where he's basically saying, just as Tolkien would write into existence creatures like Golland the orcs, for the greater good of the whole story of The Lord of the Rings, which is beautiful, where ultimately good wins out, and the good that wins out over evil is now seen to be a greater good, rather than a good that did not go through the sufferings of evil is analogous to the way in which God has made the world where if there was no suffering and evil, then we would not see the great stories of forgiveness and redemption that we now have in Jesus Christ. So, you know, Makoto Fujimura, who's a great Japanese reformed artist, he would argue that this is where the concept of Kintsugi comes into place, where a vase is broken. And then now it's woven together and repaired by using gold vessels that make the vase even more beautiful now after it's been repaired rather than before, before it was broken. And I think that's the sort of analogy that we see in Holy Scripture, that God in his patience allowed humanity to go in their way and yet would send his only son and show this love and self-sacrifice so that we might be reconciled and forgiven in him. And I think at a deep level, you see this in the greatest of our Hollywood movies, the greatest literature in human history, where self-sacrifice is the motif for the great story of redemption. And I think those are just echoes of the greater Christian story.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, the truest myth manifested in multiple ways.

N. Gray Sutanto: That's right.

Kathleen Noller: I want to draw out the Lord of the Rings analogy a little bit. So, for a creature like Gollum, what exactly is the exact analogy to our current world? Would an evil person that God created and is somehow used as a pawn in this greater scheme for greater good?

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but I'm not going to predict what exactly Tolkien means when he when he put Gollin his story.

Kathleen Noller: sure.

N. Gray Sutanto: But I think, you know, we have got to remember, at least from the story itself, that was once a good creature, right? And before he broke up, before he became embittered, he was a peaceful creature, hobbit, I believe, right, who was enjoying himself before he became Gollum.

Kathleen Noller: Yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And so, I think there's a sense in which Gollis in and every one of us can choose to nurture that, or we can choose not to nurse that bitterness that we could feel when something bad comes our way or when we feel snubbed or when we feel wronged.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: We can either nurse bitterness and become increasingly like Gollor we can resist bitterness and therefore become increasingly redeemed. And you see that kind of analogy with the ring itself, right? The ring can make Gollmore bitter and destroyed. And the ring was trying to make Frodo in the same way. And Frodo had it to resist the urge of the ring to become more autonomous, to become more self-centered and so on. So, I think in that respect, God allows us to experience sinfulness, not because God is the author of sin, because again, like Gollum, we were all created good. We fell away from God. But so that through this, we can be given the opportunity to be redeemed.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. and through that story of redemption, we see the greater glory of God being manifested in it. So, I wouldn't say that Gollis is one specific creature. I'm not going to say, well, you know, like the old dispensationalist books. Oh, it's Russia or something. But I will say it's kind of a warning to every human being that this is what you could become.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And through forgiveness, you could resist that altogether.

Kathleen Noller: So, for that resisting of sin, right, the Goll versus Frodo example, i think Christians would typically say that we can resist sin through the grace of God, through the Holy Spirit. How does free will versus the influence of God have an interplay there?

N. Gray Sutanto: That's a great question. I think that's a false dilemma I think that is fully God's agency and fully our agency so the older scholastic way of putting it is that the power comes from God but the act remains yours the power comes from God but the act remains yours and so God is the primary cause of our salvation but we are fully the secondary and proximate cause of our salvation and So God, through the Holy Spirit, factualizes faith in us, but it is truly our faith. So at the end of the day, then, and we can ask the question because the objection is still going to be, well, okay, so if that's the case, if God can't enact us to have faith and it still remains our faith, you know, in the philosophical literature, this is what we call compatibilism, that divine sovereignty is compatible with human responsibility and human freedom. Well, why doesn't God just do that to everyone? Right? And I think here we've got to be careful because there's multiple ways to perhaps think about this, biblically speaking. On one level, we can say nobody deserves to be saved. Given that we're all fallen away from God and the wage of sin is death and we've all sinned, the fact that we're still alive an amazing grace of God. And so, God is not obligated to save anyone. So, the fact that he saves nobody at all is amazing.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Nobody has received injustice. People either receive wrath or mercy, and you cannot demand mercy to come your way. So yes, the very capacity for humans to even recognize the beauty of the gospel does come from God. But God is not obligated to give that what we call work of effectual calling and regeneration to every person. And God has, in fact, chosen to give it only to some. But at the same time, what we want to say is we don't know who God has chosen. And we cannot presume that we have been chosen in that respect. We must say, however, that if I feel and inclination to see Christ as beautiful and this work as redemptive and God is calling me, then that's probably a good sign that you are in fact being worked on by the Holy Spirit, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And we would also have to say that we cannot speculate about who God has saved and who God has not saved. All we are told to do is to be faithful to his commandments, namely, to preach the gospel to every single person. So, you know, what we're really talking about, ah Kathleen, is the doctrine of predestination. And I love what Francis Tureton says about the doctrine of predestination, where he says, predestination is helpful for us to investigate the past, but it doesn't help us in the present or the future. So if we think about God's predestining purposes, that God works all things according to counsel of his will, God his own plans, and God implements his plans perfectly, it's really amazing and assuring for us to know that and to look at the past and say, wow, I could have been elsewhere, but God preserved me. God has planned for me to be here. God is exactly putting me where I need to be and given what I see about the past, I'm grateful for that. I could have i could have been in a million different places, but God preserves me, right? And Had I have not met that pastor, and had I not been reading the Bible in that one night, I wouldn't have become a Christian or something like that. But it doesn't help me with the future. I cannot say, well, has God predestined this person to come to see the gospel today? But I, but you know, because God has not told us in Holy Scripture and God doesn't communicate that to us. So, rather we got to ask the question, okay, this person is from opposite of me asking me questions. Let's say what God does call me to do is to faithfully evangelize and to defend the faith in in the context of this conversation. So, I'm just going to faithfully do that and trust that God will work his own purposes to come to pass. So, there's many layers there. We can't speculate into divine will. We cannot speculate about who's saved and not saved. we do know that if we are saved, it is only because God was gracious to us, not only in offering us the gospel, but in allowing us to see the offer as attractive.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, predestination is something that I am very interested in and the relationship between predestination and free will is something that I have a lot of conversations, about what sort of the reformed understanding of the relationship between predestination and free will? Are there different understandings of that relationship that you think are biblical that might help make sense of it in different ways to different listeners?

N. Gray Sutanto: That's a great one; I could spend a long time on this one. I’m a Presbyterian. I'm a good Calvinist in that sense. So, I believe in, again, what we might call compatibilism, that God's sovereign control is maximally compatible with and concurrent with secondary causes like our agency.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, we've got to distinguish this view, the reform view of compatibilism with what we might call necessitarianism or fatalism or determinism, right? Which states that if God controls everything, then my agency means nothing.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: that I do not matter, that ah God eliminates secondary causes because he overrides it or something like that. And we don't believe that at all. In fact, you know the Reformed position is stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter. And, it’s very clearly saying there that we have freedom of spontaneity. That is, we're never coerced in doing whatever it is that we're doing. God does not coerce anyone. It is not true that when God causes us to have faith, God causes us to have faith kicking and screaming, as it were. Rather, God works in such a way where he concurs with and establishes and sweetly cherishes, the older Reformed theologians would argue, sweetly cherishes the freedom, agency, and responsibility of the human rational agent. So, and this is where Reformed theologians are very frank that this is a maximally paradoxical point. Now, there are, of course, analogies for this. I mentioned the authorial model of divine providence. So, you know, I say in class, why did Romeo do what he did at the end of the book? We can say, and the level of the narrative, Romeo had real stakes and secondary causes. I mean, he thought that Juliet had died. Spoiler alert. He thought.

Kathleen Noller: Oh, no.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah, well, sorry if you haven't read Romeo and Juliet or never watched many movies from that. Yeah, Romeo was scared to lose his family dignity. Maybe he thought that all that he was fighting for was lost. So those are real secondary reasons that if you ask Romeo, that's why he wanted to do what he did. But on another level, you know, Shakespeare wrote that into existence. So, but one notice doesn't override the other. It's not the case because Shakespeare wrote it, therefore Romeo's motivations in the story are not real. And there is a faint analogy there with respect to how the Reformed theologians thought about the relationship between the divine will and the human, that God is the primary cause over all things, but God has written it in such way where secondary causes are real And, in the incarnation, the author himself puts himself into the story. Right. That God became flesh and man, and therefore the author became a character in the narrative itself. So, he became subject to the very secondary causes that he wrote into existence. That's very different than the Molinist understanding. In the Molinist understanding, God chooses to actualize a set of circumstances that he foresaw in his middle knowledge. Now, this gets technical quickly. But i would argue that if that's the case, then then there is a possible world that is possible apart from the divine will or the divine decree, which therefore means that this possible world is grounded in something other than God's will or something other than God's power. So, God is foreseeing something that could come to pass apart from his activity. And I'm not sure what that is. This is an old reform objection. The reform would argue that there's only the necessary will or the free will of God. They don't need them. They don't see a need for this middle category of knowledge.

N. Gray Sutanto: Oh, sorry, necessary knowledge versus free knowledge, but no ah no need for this middle knowledge idea.

Kathleen Noller: Sure, sure. So, when somebody is thinking about this in terms of the timeline of action and when predestination occurs.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes.

Kathleen Noller: You know, what God is I've heard God is outside of space and time. And so, there's really no sense in discussing a timeline. But then, you know, we live on a timeline on earth.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes.

Kathleen Noller: So it has God predestined everything before it happens? is there Is there an influence of, right, when we pray, are we able to influence what he predestines, how much changeability is there or how much responsiveness is God capable of to his creature's free will or prayer as we go through this timeline here on earth.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. Wow, Kathleen, I'd love to have you in my seminary class again. And you're asking me to condense basically hours’ worth of material right now.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you. I know.

N. Gray Sutanto: Because those are massive questions. So. so here's another way to object to Molinism that is that comes up in the Reformed literature of the century quite often, which is that if we say that God predestines based on foreseen circumstances, that means that God is in some way dependent on something outside of himself for him to execute as well. And the Reformed would argue that in Scripture, what we see is that God is immutable and independent, and God is also simple, namely that God is not compossible into parts. So, which means therefore, that God and his knowledge are ultimately one thing. So, if we say that God foresees a future circumstance, and then based on that circumstance, decrees something. That would functionally mean that God is dependent on something outside of himself and that God learned something. And he decides to decree based on what he learned, which means that God in some way grew or that God's self-sufficiency was compromised. And so, because God is self-sufficient, the Reformed argue that God decrees all things only based on his own will and his own knowledge, not based on anything that he foresaw or anything that he took counsel from. So, let's table that.

So that means, therefore, that divine ascetic or divine self-sufficiency informs how the Reformed theologians thought about the decree of God. that So that's one theological way of thinking about predestination. So, God predestines all things, yes, absolutely, before eternity passed. And so, history is merely the unfolding of the eternal divine decree. And I think we see this in scripture in passages like Ephesians where it says that God predestines all things according to the counsel of his own will. So, if you just want to love, and I think it's one of those texts that that unilaterally involves all events of history and it grounds it all in God's predestination. Now, you asked questions about prayer. Can our prayers influence God? Well, it really depends on what we mean by influence. If you mean by influence, changing God's mind, then no.

But if you mean by influence, God has ordained such that a particular end or event would only take place because of that person's prayer, then yes, God uses real secondary causes. So, in one way we can say, you know, I was converted into a Pentecostal church back in like. And I could say, you know, if my friend didn't invite me there, if the sermon was different, I probably would have been a Christian, right? So, I could say it was that sermon that really convicted me by the gospel, that it was not me who needs to be good, but rather God became good in my place. And so, I can thank that preacher and say, thank you. That that was the sermon that saved me, right? without any kind of Without any sense of contradiction that I am saying that that this is somehow something that makes God dependent on that sermon. No, but rather God wrote my story in such a way where this is exactly the moment at which I would understand the gospel through this sermon, through this preacher, through that church service, if that makes sense and maybe through the prayers of people who were praying for me that I didn't even know about. So, in that way, the secondary causes are real and, in a sense, remain, the older scholastics would call this hypothetically necessary. Hypothetically necessary and hypothetical there referring to, you know, etymologically to the will of God, right? So, in other words, given what God has decreed, that these things would become necessary, right? then I would be saved in that way. A very common example of hypothetical necessity is, you know, call upon the name of Jesus and call him Lord, and you will be saved, Romans. So can we ask the question, well, could God have saved us in any other way? Well, maybe, I don't know, right? Given God's omnipotent will but given what he has set up in history and given his sending of his son and so on, this is now necessary to be saved.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, it's not necessary, but it is hypothetically necessary given the plan of God. And in the same way, we can say your prayers might be necessary for that person to be saved. But it's necessary in this hypothetical sense, not in an absolute sense. Because if you say that your prayers are necessary, then that would make God dependent on you.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And that would compromise divine acidity once again.

Kathleen Noller: So, is it correct to say then that God's decree is decided or written independently of any of humanity's actions or creature events or anything that would happen on earth?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes, I would say that.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

N. Gray Sutanto: And I do think, again, this is in the scriptures. The psalmist says, all my days have been written in your book before I was born, right? Including Ephesians Of course, we could have talked about Romans. Lamentations. Is it not from God that both good and bad come? Many other passages. I recently had a discussion with a friend who, and I find this is common with a lot of, I'm a scientist with a lot of atheistic scientists that I encounter who are materialists and just believe that we are the compilation of atoms and we are products of an evolutionary trajectory.

Kathleen Noller: There is no such thing as good and evil. And all of the Christian, well, I shouldn't say all, but all of the Christian apologetics literature that I'm familiar with, like Mere Christianity, for example, which is something that you know you give to every everybody who's considering the faith, starts off with the presupposition that good and evil exist, or at least good. Someone's going to acknowledge that there's good in the world and there's evil, you might differ on the definition of exactly what evil is. Is it its own entity? Is it just the negation of good? And what do you do with this new, let's say, breed of objections that might be coming from naturalism, from you know evolutionary science that are saying that good and evil are just illusions and they don't exist. We're just animals. We have no human dignity. Is there any grounds to have a discussion with that?

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes, great question. And you know I do think there's lots of examples of of folks who argue for that, especially recently Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens or Daniel Dennett on consciousness. So, we got to really follow the line of reasoning, right? It's not only that good doesn't exist, but rather. you know Human dignity doesn't exist.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Cultures don't really exist. These are all fictions.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And consciousness is illusory. We may think we are conscious. We may think that we're talking intelligibly right now, but we're not. We're just making a lot of different sounds and there's no such thing as reason or ah reasoning well or reasoning not well. you know ah no such thing as irrationality per se. Well, to me, i think that this sort of perspective has emerged in the past and they quickly die. Because they they really maybe last a generation, at most maybe two, but they quickly die because it's self-defeating, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, if we say that our language or our consciousness is illusory, then the very argument we're making to say that consciousness is illusory is itself illusory. So might as well not do anything. So, nobody functions like that when we're making arguments that the immaterial entities on which we depend are not real. We are constantly using immaterial entities like concepts and propositions and the laws of logic. All of our discourse presupposes the laws of logic and rhetoric and propositions. And so, to argue that these things are not real is to argue against oneself. It's a self-defeating argument. And I think, you know, for those who deny that there is such a good, which is a more modest claim, I would argue that they certainly don't live that way.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: We might say that our notions are are of goodness come from a kind of naturalistic, biological, evolutionary origin. But all we can say, if that's the case, then, that our values of good are useful for survival. But to say that something is useful for survival is something other than to say that something is good, right? So something could be useful for survival, but it's not actually good for you. For instance, you know, in counseling circumstances, coping by self-deception, for instance. That could be good for survival, but it's not actually good to do that because you've got to live in truth, for instance, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, what I always want to say is that you may say that there's no such thing as good, but when someone cuts in line or when something terrible happens to you and you cry out for vindication,

Kathleen Noller: yeah

N. Gray Sutanto: you do in fact live as if there is good to be pursued. And in fact, what we see in the materialist, naturalistic, non-religious environments that we see right now is not a decline in moral conviction, but an uptick in, for instance, cancel culture. Because what Tom Holland would argue is to say, well, if Christianity comes in decline, then the virtues of toleration and forgiveness is also going to go in decline. So now all we have is a demand for vindication and rectification without any forgiveness. And so, we certainly live as if morality is true. We certainly see when someone is racially marginalized that this is a great injustice. We've got to do something about this. Political activism is on the uptick. So, we certainly live as if there's good values out there. Now the question is, how do you ground them and which values are true? And how do you argue about which values are true without being reduced to colonialism? Because if there is no God and you're saying that your values are true, well, you're saying that American values are true, let's say.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Or not just American values, DC values are true or New Yorkers values are true.

Kathleen Noller: yeah

N. Gray Sutanto: And you end up becoming, again, fighting in a relativistic game and and the only person that wins is winning through power and and force. And that's no good.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that's so well said.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yeah.

Kathleen Noller: And I think I have personally seen this line of argument only in a very privileged context. I think, you know, I have family in other parts of the world and I've never I've never really seen this outside of wealthy young people in America. and I'm not saying it doesn't exist elsewhere, but I think it comes from a certain type of privilege that hasn't encountered malevolence.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right.

Kathleen Noller: that can say that there's no evil in the world because they've never had that instinctual reaction.

N. Gray Sutanto: right

Kathleen Noller: They've never seen death. They've never, i mean, it's, it's, it's an incredibly, you know, instinctual human reaction towards good and evil. And I think if you just haven't experienced that, you're not gonna, you just have the privilege of saying that no good and evil exists because you've, you've never, you've never seen it.

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. and maybe it comes from a place where they haven't really been been forced to encounter substantial moral disagreement. Right.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So maybe they haven't really met anyone who really believes that the caste system is a good thing. Right. And you're going to say, well, obviously it's bad. Well, why is it obviously bad? You've got to give it a reason for that.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: Well, it's obviously bad because, you know, enlightened people don't live that way. And you're saying, OK, so only Western people are enlightened. You know what I mean? So, you've got you got to you got to come to grips with, as you were saying there, very wisely, suffering, real suffering, and you've got to know how to console people in their suffering and with real hope, but also real substantive moral disagreements and how you handle that.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that's a very good point. Stepping back from that sort of almost kind of nihilism or a moralism into just the popular sort of atheism that we see with the Dawkins or a Hitchens, is the atheist correct in saying that they have no burden of proof because they're not asserting a positive belief? This is something I see again debates. Is that a true statement and how should the Christian respond to that?

N. Gray Sutanto: It's not a true statement because when they're arguing that there is no God, there are there they're tacitly assuming that there's lots of things in the world that we can account for without God.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, the burden of proof is on them to say, okay, how do we account for immaterial entities like, again, consciousness, propositions, moral intuitions, moral norms, laws of logic without God. So it's one thing to say, you know, I don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster. That's what they say all the time. Right. And, um, I don't have to prove to you that flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist because I'm not making that claim. You are something like that.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: No, To say that God doesn't exist is not the same as saying that there is no flying spaghetti monster because no real metaphysical truths are grounded by the flying spaghetti monster who would be in time, who would be material, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: A material thing doesn't ground any and any any normativity. So when you're saying, however, that there is no ultimate good, no ultimate truth, and no immaterial entities, especially if you're going with the new atheist sort of train of reasoning, then you've got to account for what we're doing when we're saying it's wrong for you to do that or it is irrational for you to say that. You've got to ground these things in real laws of logic. And the thing is, the laws of logic, like the law of non-contradiction, you can't kick, touch, feel, or sense it. You can't hug the laws of logic because they're not physical. And if you're consistent with the scientific approach, then you've got to say that there's no such thing as the laws of logic because you can't touch, feel, or hug it. You can't subject it under experimentation. Well, then you'd be against self-defeating because to argue against the laws of logic, you've got to presuppose the laws of logic.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. There is a lot of kinds of cutting off the branch that you're sitting on here with a lot of these views.

N. Gray Sutanto: Exactly. So for the lay person who wants to learn more about apologetics as a theological discipline. I'd love to go into just some of the most salient teachings that you think might be relevant for apologetics for the layperson from folks like Herman Bavink or Cornelius Van Til, Alvin Plantinga, you mentioned. Yes, thanks so much for this. Herman Boving, Cornelius Van Til, Alvin Plantinga, these are three names that are representative of the Dutch Reformed movement in the century called Neo-Calvinism. And, you know, Neo-Calvinism is not to be confused with American Neo-Calvinism. I've got to say that every time.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Now, when I was doing my PhD on Herman Boving in Edinburgh, somebody said, oh, I didn't know that he could write a PhD on Mark Driscoll or John Piper. Like, well, that's not what we're talking about. New Calvinism is a very recent American evangelical thing. This is about Dutch modern reform theology in the century. And Boving was the progenitor of that alongside Abraham Kuyper. And basically, they argued that Reformed theology can address modern questions and modern life, and we just got to contextualize it. And Van Til and Plantinga are kind of offshoots of Boving's and Kuyper's work. They each took Boving's work and kind of ran off in different directions with it.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, I want to just contextualize these three figures.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: They're related, they're connected, but they're also kind of doing different things, but they're all within the Neo-Calvinist project. And Bavinck, again, wrote in the late century, beginning of the century, and he wrote the four-volume tome, as you mentioned, The Reformed Dogmatics, which is really a presentation of Christian theology from the doctrine of scripture, revelation, all the way to the last things and ah the last judgment, for instance. And he's really trying to apply Reformed theology in the context of modern objections. And so I think it's fruitful to write, I'm sorry, to read Bavink and to read other works that he wrote that are very influential and in the American Christian context without Americans, I think, knowing it.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Because he was one of the authors who, really advanced the notion of a Christian worldview. We talk about worldview all the time. It's part of our ah Christian talk, I think, everywhere right now in the Anglophone world, but we don't really know the primary sources of it well.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: So, we just translated that back in. And Bavinck had argued that Christianity, therefore, isn't just about a set of theological propositions you happen to believe in for church, but rather it is a full-orbed worldview. But to get at that worldview, it takes a lot of research, investigation, and wisdom to get there. And that this worldview is so all-encompassing that when non-believers argue against the Christian faith, they inescapably will encounter the Christian faith in one way or another, unwittingly in their course of argumentation. And so Bavinck and Kuyper both took this idea of the worldview of the Christian faith and Van Til. and Plantinga applied it in different directions. Van Til would argue ah that the Christian faith is not just inescapable per Bavin, but it's also the necessary precondition to understand anything at all, especially rationality and morality.

So he developed what he called the transcendental argument for the Christian faith, that Christianity is the precondition for things that you take for granted. So, he was inspired by Bavinck, but he advanced that in a very particular and more focused direction. I mean, he probably needs no introduction to many listeners, but he was probably, alongside Nicholas Wolterstorff, single-handedly responsible for making Christian philosophy respectable and possible again in American mainstream academia. He started the Journal of Faith and Philosophy, the Society of Christian Philosophers. and basically, he was inspired by Kuyper and Bavink because he argued that when you do philosophy as a Christian, you can in fact do Christian philosophy. philosopher You're not just a Christian who happens to do philosophy, but rather your Christian faith and the doctrines that you espouse should inform your philosophizing. And in fact, you're perfectly warranted to begin with your Christian faith. You don't have to get stuck in apologetic argumentation. You can just go ahead and do constructive Christian philosophy. And in so doing, show that Christianity has an explanatory power that is more satisfying than non-theistic options. And I think for with respect to apologetics, one of the immediate starting points to read from Plantinga is where the conflict really lies. The conflict between science and religion, where he's trying to really dissect

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: where the conflict is, if there is such a conflict. And in fact, he argues there that the conflict is not in science and religion, but rather between science and naturalism.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: Because if naturalism is true, then science will be impossible. And there's this argument there because our cognitive faculties are not actually reliable, per earlier in our conversation.

Kathleen Noller: I think readers might be ah familiar with Bavinck, in a recent Christianity Today article talking about, you know, what lessons can we pull from these older theologians for living in our very polarized, politically polarized world sort of post-Christian Western climate. And so, my understanding of him, and you can please do correct to me, is he seems to state that when humans stop worshiping God as they should, they will then substitute, they will still recognize the good, true, and beautiful. But they won't recognize it in God anymore. They'll recognize it in something that's created. But because the creature is always changing, they'll recognize it in a particular race or a particular era and things like that how does that teach us something about cultural apologetics in our world today and give us sort of wisdom for how to act there?

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. So, the basic idea there, and I was trying to really distill that in that Christianity Today article, is that take Christianity away and humanity, because it's made in image of God, will not stop being religious. So if you take one religion away, religiosity will still bubble up, but it's just going to be located and identified in different spaces.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, if you say, okay, I don't want to have faith in the Bible, you're going to have faith in something else. Yes. And if you take God away, what happened in the enlightenment, that this was Bawing's argument that foreshadowed German nationalism was, philosophers started to say, well, God is not the source of our authority or morality, we are.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And then the obvious question is, okay, when you say we, what do you mean by us? Like us as in the entire human race, well, we all disagree about these things all the time. So what do you mean by us, who are we here?

Kathleen Noller: Who

N. Gray Sutanto: And usually it's, well, our culture will determine what's good.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: all cultures will determine who gets to adjudicate the good.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: And the philosophers at the forefront of that in the century were German philosophers. And Bawing was observing that they were saying, you know, crazy things like, you know, the German spirit shall heal the world. And if Jesus is of any value, then he must be considered an Aryan person, not as a Jewish person. And so, you know, this is where the era of global travel began to emerge and the discipline of anthropology was beginning to emerge.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And this is where a lot of these surveyors and travelers were starting to say, well, we have civilization and these are the uncivilized peoples and it's our job to civilize them. And they were not trying to say, here's the truth and let me teach you some things and you can develop that and advance that in your own way. Rather, they were saying, no, German culture must be uniformly implemented in the rest of society.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: Right. And so, if you take God away, humanity is a source of the norm, but not just humanity, our humanity, our culture,

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And so, to God away, nationalism emerges and racism emerges usually. So, you know, this is what we see as well in the pre-Christian era where, so the empires were warring among one another because they were concerned about spreading the culture. And I think this is one of the great tragic of Christendom was that it allied itself with that Roman or emperor mindset.

Kathleen Noller: yes

N. Gray Sutanto: So rather than arguing that Christianity is distinct from and transcends any one human culture, right? So, it's a powerful argument and therefore in apologetics, you can say, okay, these people do not believe in God, but they are placing ultimate value in something other than God.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: And we've got to have conversations to start to identify where they're locating it in. And again, as we were saying, you know, if somebody disagrees with the caste system thing, well, no enlightened people will believe in the caste system. Well, you're saying, well, you mean they're not enlightened and only Western people are enlightened then, right? That's a form of nationalism, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Ironically, even though, of course, we wouldn't want to be nationalists. And so. When we take away God, we still make ultimate judgments. And we've got to, if we don't consider our worldview and theology, we will be unaware that we're making those assumptions. And that's where apologetics are helpful.

Kathleen Noller: Do you think it's possible, given the fallen state of man, for us to transcend that sort of tribalism? You know you mentioned you know given church history, given you know crusades, given you know the political divides and polarization that we have in America right now and the attachment to some sort of pseudo-Christianity of certain political views is something like that possible? And what's the best that we've seen of that happening in Church history?

N. Gray Sutanto: Wow, that's a massive question. First, is it possible? I think you have to say it's possible because we see this in the early church.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Ephesians, to is a key text for this where it says that God has broken down the wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles. In other words, any cultural barriers that were there that separated Jews and Gentiles are now broken. And now suddenly there are Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles. And the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord overrides those cultural differences. So, I think we see in the early church, the reason why, again, the Christians were considered social outcasts and social disruptors is because they were breaking down those ethnic and racial boundaries that were there suddenly, they were saying, that okay yeah, you can marry a Gentile as a Jewish Christian. and suddenly you were saying, you know, Gentile people, you can't worship the Jewish God. You know, that's incredibly disruptive. And what we see in the early churches in the context of much persecution, the Christians were bound together by a common confession and a common hospitality that, created a hodgepodge group of communities made up of mostly women and slaves and people who are not naturally bound together suddenly live together in peace and harmony and sharing meals and so on. Rich and poor, Greek and Gentile. and slave or free. And so, I think we got to, you know, when people were interested in reestablishing Christendom, say, I got to retrieve, you know, the century. I'm no, I want to retrieve all the way back to the century. Not necessarily all the persecution. You know, we pray against that, obviously.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: Yes. But, you know, the sort of early Christianity that understood that the kingdom of God is not of this earth and that it, you don't have to become Jewish to be Christian, and you don't have to become Greek to be Christian. Jews remain Jews and Greeks remain Greeks, but now there's an overriding theological identity that, um, that unifies everyone. So, what I say to folks is, you know, when you go to a, a Chinese church in Hong Kong, you shouldn't expect it to be different in one level because they're all confessing Christ.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: But you shouldn't expect it to be the same as yours either. And you shouldn't judge it just because it's not the same because you have a different language, different customs, different intuitions about its hospitality, about time and space, right? And even about whether you should bow during service and things like that. But that's okay because this is a Christian church in China versus a Christian church in America or in Iowa or Ohio from Manhattan and D.C. those are very different.

Kathleen Noller: yes

Gray Sutanto: So, on one level, in any church, you can say, I feel at home here. In another level, you could say, wow, this is different. and but that's okay. And I fear sometimes as the church, you ask, you know, how do we overcome that? We've got to stop confusing cultural preferences with theological essentials. And therefore, I think knowing your neighbor is different from you is important. And in global cities, we see that it's very possible to do. But also knowing church history is important that the Christian church has never been uniform and it was never intended to be uniform.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

N. Gray Sutanto: So, what I say to students is Christianity gives us communities that are diverse, but what we see as a unity and diversity, not uniformity.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, back to the mere Christianity. I think that's a wonderful place to conclude. Thank you so, so much for sharing your expertise with us and bearing with me as I let you down the rabbit hole predestination. I think it'll be very edifying. I really appreciate it.

N. Gray Sutanto: I hope so. This was a very far-ranging conversation. Thanks so much for having me on.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, thank you so much for listening to the Kathleen Noller podcast with the C.S. Lewis Institute. We'll see you next time.