Defending the faith—the method I was trained in, what Mormonism and the Watchtower actually teach, whether the Bible can be trusted, and a few popular proofs that don’t hold up.
The method here is presuppositional: the unbeliever is never neutral, so an argument that begins as though he were has already conceded the point. The long paper on Van Til works that out—his life, his thought, and the controversies he left behind—and the blog posts follow the debates that came out of the same school. The rest is the work itself: what the cults teach and where it departs from Scripture, what archaeology and textual criticism can and cannot establish, and the discipline of giving up an argument that fails even when the doctrine it was meant to defend is true.
Method 4
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Cornelius Van Til: His Life and Thought
Paper · 2003
A full study of the man and the thought: the biography, the influences, the distinctive emphases, the controversies, and the students who carried it forward—with my own credo appended at the end.
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Van Til on Barth—and Doctrinal Sins
Post · July 2008
Van Til called Barth’s theology modernism in a new key. But when Richard Mouw put the obvious inference to him—that Barth was therefore no Christian—Van Til cut him off. What that refusal implies about judging anyone’s standing.
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Greg Bahnsen Lectures and Debates on YouTube
Post · April 2010
Bahnsen’s five-part Basic Training for Defending the Faith, plus the Stein and Smith debates—the recordings I’ve gone back to more than any others.
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Post · June 2007
Douglas Wilson against Christopher Hitchens over six emails at Christianity Today, mostly on whether atheism can account for morality. If I ever teach apologetics, this is assigned.
Mormonism and the Watchtower 3
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Paper · 2004
The history and the teaching side by side—revelation, God, man, salvation, church, last things—and then a biblical response to each of them.
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A Rebuttal to the Watchtower Publication Should You Believe in the Trinity?
Paper · 2008
Philippians 2:6 is the battleground. What ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ and ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο actually say, and how the tract reaches its conclusion by quoting Trinitarians against themselves.
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Genesis 50 in Three Texts: From Joseph Smith’s Bible to the Inspired Version
Subject Study · 2026
What the Joseph Smith Translation actually changed in Genesis 50—traced through the 1828 KJV Smith worked from and the 1831 manuscript, because comparing it to a modern KJV invents changes nobody made.
Can the Bible Be Trusted? 4
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Problems of the Old Testament in Relation to Its Inspiration
Paper · 2001
The critics’ compromise—inspired in doctrine, fallible in history and science—and why the apparent contradictions of the Old Testament don’t require it.
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Archaeology and the New Testament
Paper · 2002
Manuscripts, inscriptions, and cities: the archaeological evidence for the New Testament world, and the limits of what any of it proves.
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The Value of Archaeology for Old Testament Studies
Paper · 2001
What archaeology is worth to an Old Testament reader—genuinely useful, frequently overclaimed in both directions.
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Wallace vs. Ehrman on the Textual Reliability of the NT
Post · April 2008
Daniel Wallace against Bart Ehrman at the Greer-Heard forum on the textual reliability of the New Testament—noted here the day it began.
Arguments That Don’t Work 3
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Publication · 2011
Andy Naselli and I take apart a grammatical proof used by an impressive list of people: the masculine pronouns in John 14–16 do not establish the Spirit’s personality. The doctrine is true; this argument for it isn’t.
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Did John Use Bad Grammar to Teach the Holy Spirit’s Personality?
Post · January 2015
The short version of that article—the outline, and the reason it was worth writing: a true doctrine deserves better arguments than the ones it usually gets.
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What Is the Most Convincing Proof of the Deity of Christ?
Post · April 2011
Warfield’s answer—“just Christianity,” the world Christ has visibly remade—set beside the one I’d give first, which is Scripture itself.
Creation, Evil, and Unbelief 3
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Creation, Evolution, and the Age of the Earth
Post · February 2010
Erickson’s five views on the age of creation and three on development within it, where I’ve landed, and why “that would make God a deceiver” is weaker as an objection than it sounds.
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Resources on the Problem of Evil
Post · August 2008
Frame, Naselli, Patton, and MacArthur on the logical and the emotional problem of evil—four treatments gathered the week the blogs all took it up at once.
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Peter Hitchens: The Rage Against God
Post · March 2010
The other Hitchens on his way back to faith, and his claim that educated atheists are far likelier to be ambushed by poetry than argued out of anything.