Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986)
Article: The Transcendental Perspective of Westminster’s Apologetic
Author: Robert D. Knudsen

WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986) p. 223

The Transcendental Perspective of Westminster’s Apologetic*

Robert D. Knudsen

Westminster Theological Seminary has a full-scale department of apologetics. This makes it stand out among major theological seminaries. In most of the main line seminaries apologetics waned in proportion to the growth of liberal theology. In liberal seminaries, apologetics suffered because of theological liberalism’s understanding of the Christian faith, and it finally disappeared.

Theological liberalism focused on spiritual life, as it understood it. Especially in its Ritschlian form, it placed at the center an overwhelming spiritual experience of the, person of Jesus. For the faith of the church, it said, Jesus has the value of God. But both this faith and the Christ it confesses lie beyond the pale of doctrinal formulation. Of itself doctrine was regarded as rigid and dogmatic, an ossified expression of the dynamics of the spirit. Doctrine was given second place, as a symbolic expression of the life found in Jesus Christ. The tactic then was to penetrate beyond doctrinal formulations, with their particularity and rigidity, to the dynamics of the life of spirit. Within this climate of thought, apologetics, as a defense of a doctrinal formulation of Christian faith, was downgraded and finally eliminated. It was replaced by comparative religion, the philosophy of religion, the psychology of religion, and now even by the phenomenology of religion.

In response, the founder of Westminster Seminary, Dr. J. Gresham Machen, said that Christianity is not first a life but a doctrine. If one is to give himself to Jesus Christ, Machen said, he must know the one to whom he’s committing himself.

* Slightly revised version of an address delivered by the author on the occasion of his inauguration as Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, 4 March 1986.

WTJ 48:2 (Fall 1986) p. 224

One cannot have faith unless he possesses the assurance that the object of his faith is worthy of his confidence. If one wishes to know what Christianity is, furthermore, he should not refer to a modern idea of spiritual life but to what Christianity meant as it was established by Christ himself. On its part, Machen said, liberalism has departed from historic Christianity and is no true Christianity at all. True Christianity is historic Christianity. Historic Christianity is such that it confesses truths to which it must hold and which it must defend when attacked. Thus, in view of Machen’s adherence to historic Christianity, it is not surprising that Westminster Seminary retained apologetics as an independent discipline within its curriculum. It agreed with Machen that historic Christianity is capable of rational defense. ...