Who Created Who?

While attending Bible College, I encountered a type of “apologetic” or defense of Christianity which attempted to establish that all thoughts, beliefs, emotions, etc could be linked back to God because of basic, borrowed presuppositions. In other words, every non-Christian (regardless of their particular stripes) could be argued with on the basis that their system of beliefs depended at its very core upon the Christian’s Triune God. I believe this was referred to as Presuppositional Apologetics and was in large part attributed to Cornelius Van Til and a contemporary defender Greg Bahnsen.

I am not a scholar in any manner of speaking, and was not so well-versed in this method of defending the faith that I can readily recall all of the details. But I seem to recall that the idea was to take pretty much any statement resembling a belief from the non-Christian and show them that they were borrowing a presupposition from the Christian faith.

Here’s an example of how I imagine this playing out:

Non-Christian (NC): I love my wife.
Faithful Defender (FD): Good. Why?
NC: Because she’s x, y, z, and we’ve been together x number of years.
FD: Yes, but how do you know that you “love” her? Where did you get the concept of “love” and marriage.
NC: I don’t know, I guess I’ve always just been taught that a man and a woman fall in love and agree to limit their romantic love exclusively to one another and become united through marriage and stay together until one of them dies.
FD: Yes, most people are taught that, but the origin of those ideas is the Christian God who created us and designed us so that one man and one woman will love one another and become married. Marriage was also created by God as the institution through which this love should be morally expressed and through which procreation should happen. Love and marriage didn’t just come into being on their own through a process of evolution. They were ordained by God, but now other belief systems have borrowed these ideas and others from Christianity in order to suit their own desires.
NC: Oh really, well that makes sense, tell me more.

And so on until the non-Christian recognizes his utter dependence upon God for every thought he has, and he has “no choice” but to bend his knee in allegiance to the origin of all good things.

For a Christian, this all makes perfect sense, of course. The Christian’s God is an absolutely perfect fit with the Christian’s understanding of the world, “coincidentally”.

OR…the Bible and all Christian philosophy then and now works together to comprehensively create a God to suit the various worldviews of the Christians. Surely, this is self-evident by noting the literally tens of thousands of denominations worldwide, each of which offers a slightly different definition of who God is and/or what he requires of his creation.

Do you approve or disapprove of abortion? What about homosexuality? What about women leadership? What about clerical celibacy? What about divorce? What about creation vs. evolution? Alcohol? Dancing? Homeschooling? Was the Bible written by God through humans or was it a collection of simply human writings that help us understand God? Do you believe children should be baptized or just adults? Should children receive communion or just adults? Should women work outside the home or should they strictly stay home and take care of the house and children?

Whatever you decide to believe about these things, however firmly or loosely committed you are to any such notion, I guarantee that I can find you a group which will say that your beliefs are the true and purest expression of “real” Christianity and that you are definitely going to heaven. I can also find you a group claiming to be Christian who will say that you are likely going to burn in hell for eternity.

Now you tell me…is it us normal folks out here (normal = not religious) who are borrowing ideas and beliefs and making things up to suit our desires? Or are Christians just creating God in their own image?