25 Tweets from the first chapter of Covenantal Apologetics

I am really enjoying Covenantal Apologetics by Scott Oliphint. I thought I would share some shorter quotes and excerpts from the first chapter of the book.

1. Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief (29).
2. The entrance of sin in the world was also the initiation of a cosmic war (30).
3. [Sin] marks the beginning of a radical and all-encompassing war (32).
4. ...every person on the face of the earth is defined, in part, by his relationship to a covenant head (32).
5. Suffering is clear evidence that Christ is Lord; it is not a testimony against that truth (34).
6. It is the clear and steadfast conviction that Christ, and Christ alone, is Lord that has to motivate our Christian defense (34).
7. We are to think about and live in the world according to what it really is, not according to how it might at times appear to us (35).
8. The lordship of Christ is the conclusion to, the end result of, his own suffering and humiliation (35).
9. So wherever you go, to whomever you speak, Christ is Lord there, and he is Lord over that person (35).
10. The power of sin in us makes us adept anosognosiacs (people unaware of, or denying, our own disease) (36).
11. Anyone who wants to argue that truth is relative betrays, by that argument, that it cannot be (36).
12. The Bible is authoritative not because we accept it as such, but because it is the word of the risen Lord (37).
13. ...we must base our defense of Christianity on reality, and reality is what God says it is (37).
14. We view our apologetic, and proceed in it, as in the rest of life, through the corrective lenses of Holy Scripture (37).
15. Since God is Totally Other from creation, our understanding of him and our communication and communion with him can take place only be his initiative (41).
16. ...part of what it means to be created in God's image is that man inescapably knows God (42).
17. The problem is not with the evidence, but with the "receptacle," (the sinful person) to which the evidence constantly comes (44).
18. Trying to make ourselves out to be gods, we distort both who we are and who God is (45).
19. Always and everywhere, in covenant relationship with God our Creator, we seek the utterly impossible and unobtainable; we seek autonomy (45).
20. Man's denial of God is not something done in ignorance (45).
21. ...it is incumbent on the apologist to ask the unbeliever to justify his own position (45).
22. Generic theism is no part of the Christian faith (48).
23. ...any defense that does not include the triune God is a defense of a false theism (48).
24. ...we cannot begin our discussion with the assumption that the intellectual, moral, or conversational ground on which we and the unbeliever are standing is the same (49).
25. ...all people, just because they are image of God, are responsible to God for everything they are, do, and think (49).