Christocentric Philosophy

As human beings, we are wired to think in generalities. To know particular things, we usually place them in broader, more general contexts. We try and see the qualities a thing shares with other things, and through a process of abstraction, we create classes and general categories. Abstraction is an integral part of human thought. So it is no surprise that when it comes to the question of the existence of God, philosophers have applied the process of abstraction. Van Til taught that abstract reasoning is the hallmark of non-Christian thought. What he meant by this was that unbelievers would always think in general terms so as to avoid dealing with the concrete claims of Christian Theism. So, for example, they will speak and argue about God in abstraction. Not the Christian God in particular - not Yahweh - but some vague sense of “god”. A lot of philosophy of religion is done in abstract. “Naturalism” and “Theism” are conceived in abstraction. By reasoning abstractly, the unbeliever nev...

One of the most important philosophical and theological questions we can ask is about God’s relation to the world. There are various ways to think of God’s relation to the world, and the way we prefer would have an impact on our view of God. The Bible itself is fond of the use of analogies to help us understand God’s relation to the world. So there is biblical warrant for the use of analogies. The analogy I think is the best is the authorial analogy. The authorial analogy frames God’s relation to the world as the relation between an author and his story. So God is the author of this story called history. I won’t go into the reasons why this analogy best explains God’s relation to the world in this article (there’s a really good article explaining that here ). That’s because in this article I want to highlight the authorial analogy’s strength in dealing with objections to Christianity - specifically, the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil has been a topic of debate in philosophy of re...