by Mark J. Farnham

From the time I was twelve years old I felt a strong burden to share the gospel with my unsaved neighbors and friends. Throughout my teen years, into college, during seminary, and my years as a pastor, I struggled to effectively defend and proclaim the good news of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. No matter how much evangelism training I received, my encounters with unbelievers were short, stressful, and ineffective. It wasn’t until I audited a class on apologetics during my first year as a doctoral student in New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary that I understood why.

In that class I learned that what had been missing from all my education up to that point was any kind of exploration of worldviews and epistemology. I was taught evangelism, but always in a way that consisted of a monologue—what is often called “the gospel burp”—that a Christian would try to blurt out as quickly as he could before the unbeliever cut him off. There was no intent to ask or answer questions. We were to share the good news of Jesus with the expectation that unbelievers would get saved right then and there if we were persuasive enough. In other words, there was no apologetic taught that enabled me to have a conversation in which I answered the questions and objections the unbeliever had.

My previous teachers had always (unintentionally) taught this assumed epistemology (which rests on a non-biblical anthropology): people don’t know God; they only have a capacity to know that a God exists if they are offered enough evidence. The burden was on the evangelist to somehow prove God’s existence, without ever being told how to do so. When I first heard Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic presented in class, it was like cold water to a weary soul (Prov. 25:25). I drank in his teaching about the sensus divinitatis, the suppressed knowledge of God, the self-contradictory nature of non-theistic worldviews, the antithesis between the Christian worldview and all non-Christian worldviews, and the idea of standing inside an unbeliever’s worldview and pointing out its internal inconsistencies and self-contradictory nature. Even though I found Van Til’s writing to be dense, repetitive, and over my head philosophically (at first), I saw a kernel of an imminently useful approach to gospel engagement with unbelievers. That first semester of learning Van Til’s apologetics was so life-changing for me that I switched my doctoral focus to apologetics and never looked back. All the worldview and epistemological questions I had been asking for years were answered, and clarity about the task of effectively engaging unbelievers shone through like the sun coming out on a cloudy day.

Every Believer Confident was written for ordinary Christians who want to defend their faith but may not know where to begin. Mark Farnham’s accessible guidebook simplifies apologetics and empowers Christians to effectively present the gospel in all its glory and rationality. This new edition includes practice case studies, chapter review questions, and a new chapter on engaging in gospel conversations over the long term.

Paperback | 200 Pages | 979-8-88779-137-1 | List: $17.99

The challenge, of course, was (and is) how to translate Van Til’s ideas into a vernacular that is accessible by ordinary Christians who don’t know philosophy and will never comprehend it. This need is rooted in the exposition of 1 Peter 3:15–16 that my professor, K. Scott Oliphint, taught week by week. Peter’s call to “give an answer” or “make a defense” is issued to every believer, not just to pastors and professors. Therefore, the apologetic methodology we use must be comprehensible to and usable by non-experts, that is, ordinary Christians. What little exposure I had to apologetics before learning Van Til was mostly the classical approach, and I struggled to grasp the concepts, even though I had gone to seminary. I found more affinity to the evidential approach with its concrete examples of the historicity of the Gospels, but I wondered if I could ever learn enough evidences to be prepared for a real discussion with an unbeliever. More to the point, how long would it take a Christian who hasn’t gone to seminary to learn and implement enough evidences to effectively share the gospel with an unbeliever who raised objections?

What I found in Van Til was a profound and refreshingly biblical explanation of the unbeliever’s heart and mind (Rom. 1:18–23)—a revelation (to me) of a fundamental aspect of biblical anthropology. Unbelievers are truth-suppressors. They know the true God, but they suppress that truth through their unrighteous behavior. Their thinking is futile, their hearts are darkened; they are foolish, not wise. Unbelievers are idol-makers. Rather than worship the true God, they worship self-made idols. Therefore, unbelievers experience God’s wrath—his righteous judgment (Rom. 1:24–31; 2:5)—in their lives, not his grace. Van Til emphasizes the dialectic of knowing and not knowing that is so evident in Scripture: unbelievers know God but stand under his wrath (Rom. 1:19–21, 32), while believers know God in a relationship of grace (Gal. 4:8; 1 Cor. 1:21; 1 Thess. 4:5; 2 Thess. 1:8). Ephesians 4:17–19 provides a succinct summary of sin’s noetic effects that so distort and corrupt the unbeliever’s knowledge:

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.

Surprisingly, those who critique Van Til often do not adequately address sin’s devastating noetic effects1 and instead treat unbelievers as if through philosophical arguments they can arrive at an accurate understanding of God, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit.

Van Til’s apologetic changed everything for me because I realized that I do not have to prove God’s existence to unbelievers. Rather, I can engage an unbeliever in conversation with biblical assurance about that he knows God (Rom. 1:19–21), knows God’s law (Rom. 2:14–15), knows that he is guilty before God (Rom. 1:32), knows that the penalty for his guilt is death (Rom. 1:32), and knows that he faces a day of divine judgment (Rom. 1:32). I know that this unbeliever is suppressing the truth in some way, and I can ask questions to reveal the details about his truth-suppression. Once I have the details, I can step into his worldview and provide an internal critique to reveal that it is irrational, self-contradictory, and unlivable. Then I can step into the Christian worldview and show that it is rational, self-consistent, and livable—that it succeeds where the unbeliever’s worldview fails. Finally, I can present the good news: Christ is the truth my unbeliever is seeking to avoid. The simplification of Van Til’s approach is accessible to ordinary Christians in ways that more philosophical approaches are not.

I have been presenting a simplified version of Van Til’s approach in churches for almost twenty years now. The number of stories I hear from ordinary Christians whose witness has been transformed by using it is overwhelming. Most Christians I meet and teach find it encouraging and accessible. They are relieved to know that they don’t have to learn philosophical arguments to be effective witnesses. They learn quickly how to perform an internal critique that exposes the unbeliever’s worldview as irrational, contradictory, or unlivable. This clears the way for them to present the Christian faith in all its glory as rational, consistent, and livable and to present Jesus as the one who can forgive their sins, transform their hearts, and renew their minds. For me and many others, Van Til’s thought has enabled us to open our mouths more frequently and to engage unbelievers more fruitfully, to plant seeds of the gospel (1 Cor. 3:5–9), and to experience the joy of participating in God’s global work of salvation. Van Til’s insights enable effective gospel conversations that get right to the heart of the unbeliever’s problem: what will he do with Jesus?

Every Believer Confident is intended to equip ordinary Christians with powerful, biblical apologetic tools and with the confidence that they can effectively engage any person they meet, anywhere in the world, answer objections, and present the good news of Jesus Christ in a biblically-faithful and compelling fashion.


1One example is Keith Mathison’s critique of Van Til in Toward a Reformed Apologetics: A Critique of the Thought of Cornelius Van Til (Ross-Shire, Great Britain: Mentor, 2024). Mathison hardly addresses the noetic effects of sin and never references Ephesians 4:17–19, despite its importance in the consideration of the unbeliever’s ability to know God accurately. While Mathison may offer helpful correctives to aspects of Van Til’s thought later in the book, this key element in Van Til’s apologetic method must be answered if a critique of the whole is to stand.