On my long drive home from a preaching gig this past weekend, I put in some old Greg Bahnsen mp3s. His Centennial Celebration of Van Til is excellent.
The second lecture in that series is on self-deception, and I appreciated it because the concept is fairly difficult. If all men believe in God, and the unbelievers reject Him, how is it that they don’t know God? How is an unbeliever really a believer? Is he simply lying? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Yet how can we affirm that on some level he does know God?
Bahnsen’s answer is that the unbeliever does believe in the existence of God, but he does not believe that he believes in the existence of God. He affirms one thing about God, but another about himself.
I’d never quite thought of it that way before, but it seems a helpful way to think of it.
I wrote this long enough ago that it probably should be categorized as “juvenalia,” but here’s a critique I wrote of Bahnsen on self-deception:
http://www.joelgarver.com/writ/phil/bahnsen.htm
Some of it still seems right to me.
“Bahnsen’s answer is that the unbeliever does believe in the existence of God, but he does not believe that he believes in the existence of God. He affirms one thing about God, but another about himself.”
I’m pretty sure I just don’t believe in God.
I miss listening to and reading Bahnsen. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, simply rejecting secular pluralism or claiming that presuppositional apologetics was more reformed than classical was enough to get one brought up on charges in the PCA. Yep, things were simpler then.
Steven, part of my conversion to the reformed faith was listening to the “Great Debate” on real-audio on dial-up. It took 2 and a half hours (and some more “buffering”), but it was all worth it. I agree with Bahnsen on self-deception because I presuppositionally accept the authority of Romans 1.18-32. Bahnsen’s doctoral thesis on the phenomenology of self-deception is a beautiful recapitualtion of this text, not to mention a time of sitting at CVT’s feet . . .
I love how you talk about preaching like you just played a kick-ass show in a seedy bar.
Well Rebecca, these are, after all, FV CHURCHES.
What else would expect it to be like?
You guys still call yourselves FV? Shouldn’t you be Post-FV by now or something?