Bahnsen Quotes & Sayings

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

Since the fall of man was ethical in character (not metaphysical) the unregenerate and regenerate share the facts of the world and the rules of thought, but their interpretation and use of them are far from neutral. — Greg L. Bahnsen

We must not be satisfied to present Christianity as the most reliable position to hold among the competing options available. Rather, the Christian faith is the only reasonable outlook available to men. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Without faith, there is no proper understanding by which a man can judge. As Augustine well said, 'I believe in order to understand'. — Greg L. Bahnsen

In the nature of the case, the best witness to God's existence, the truth of His revelation, and the basis of a genuinely sound defense of the Christian faith would be God Himself. — Greg L. Bahnsen

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

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

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

Faith in the self-attesting Christ of Scripture is the beginning, not the end result of wisdom. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Paul sets forth the attitude to which the defender of the faith must be committed: Let God be found true, but every man a liar. — Greg L. Bahnsen

There is no environment where man can flee to escape the revelational presence of God (Ps. 139:8). — Greg L. Bahnsen

Christianity is reasonable in virtue of the impossibility of the contrary. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in.
Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts. — Greg L. Bahnsen

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

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

When someone's paradigm changes, the world itself changes with it. So "facts" are only facts *for a system* or paradigm. — Greg L. Bahnsen

The teaching of Colossians 2:3-8 is unambiguous. ALL knowledge (note: not simply knowledge of "religious" matters is to be found in Christ. — Greg L. Bahnsen

A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless. — Greg L. Bahnsen

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a "spiritualized" form of situational ethics and a "Christianly submissive" statism. — Greg L. Bahnsen

When revealed theology is reduced to an autonomous study of man, when biblical authority is replaced by an unstable human wisdom, when behavior is directed by the descriptions of social science instead of the prescriptions of God's Word, then we have returned to the situation prevailing at the time of the Book of Judges: every man will do what is right in his own eyes. — Greg L. Bahnsen

If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes
there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism. — Greg L. Bahnsen

When an apologist attempts to be autonomous in his reasoned argumentation he indicates that he considers God to be less certain than his own existence and that he places greater credence in his independent reasoning than in God's Word. — Greg L. Bahnsen

God either rules as sovereign in interpretation over *all* areas of life or none. — Greg L. Bahnsen

Those who follow Christ are distinct from the world and the ways of the flesh. As Christ says in John 17:17, they are consecrated or "set apart" from the world, and the distinctive thing about Christians is that they have the truth. Being not of this world, believers are "set apart" by the truth. And Jesus asserts in the same verse that "God's Word is truth."
As we walk before the unbeliever then, the thing that makes us different is our submission to the Word of God. Our lives and thinking are founded on Scripture, while the essence of the unbeliever's life is rejection of the revelation of God. Our presupposition of Scripture's truth is at diametric odds with that of the world, and because we have been given the Word of God, the world hates us. From the outset, the focus of the world's opposition to the faith is the Word of God itself. — Greg L. Bahnsen

It is important for the apologist who desires to be obedient to the Word of God in defending the faith to pay special attention to the fact that throughout Scripture, God's veracity is not defended, but accepted from the outset on His authority. Unless we have more wisdom than that contained in the revelation of God, we should take the same attitude. — Greg L. Bahnsen

To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology. — Greg L. Bahnsen

There is no way to use non-Christian language and logic to arrive at Christian utterances, conclusions, and behavior. — Greg L. Bahnsen