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The Biblical Divide Between The World and Christian Belief Runs Deep
From the very beginning, Scripture presents a deep and God-ordained divide between belief and unbelief. In Genesis 3:15, God places “enmity” between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.
This enmity isn’t merely social or political… it’s intellectual and spiritual. It defines human history and undergirds the gospel itself. If you read your Bible carefully, you’ll see this division is not just a possibility, nor is it something that can be ignored. The truth is… it’s the starting point or framework within which Christian thought must begin and then operate.
Think about this for a second… Christ said, “he who is not with me is against me.” That said, being “with Christ” has a lot of ramifications. The very nature of reality is at stake. So is the starting point for our use of reason as well as all our ethical decisions.
It’s then important that we face up to this fact: the mind that submits to Christ and the mind that is against Christ do not simply disagree at a few points on the philosophical periphery. Instead, they operate from entirely different foundations or beginning assumptions about everything.
Antithesis in the Bible
Listen, the Bible clearly depicts the division between those aligned with God and those who are not. Cain murders Abel. Noah is rescued while the rest perish. Abraham is chosen while others are passed over. I don’t claim to know why this is; it’s just the way the Bible portrays reality.
Early on, the law commands God’s people to be holy… to be set apart from surrounding paganism. Again, Jesus speaks in rather stark terms: “He who is not with me is against me.” Paul calls unbelievers “enemies in their minds” (Col. 1:21), and John warns that loving the world is incompatible with loving God (1 John 2:15).
This antithesis is apparent throughout the Psalms, the prophets, the New Testament epistles, and Revelation’s final separation of the sheep and the goats. The message is consistent: there is no neutral ground. All of life… thought, ethics, science, society… is a battleground between two opposed worldviews.
Antithesis Shapes Worldview
Years ago, Cornelius Van Til argued that worldviews must begin with this antithesis, especially apologetics and evangelism. The Christian and the unbeliever do not share a neutral intellectual playing field. The most basic assumptions of believing and unbelieving thought… about truth, reason, and human purpose… differ radically at the starting point of all predication.
The Christian believes that all truth begins with God and that human knowledge depends on God’s self-revelation. The unbeliever assumes human autonomy: that man can reason and understand himself and the world without the plumbline of divine authority.
This clash leads to two distinct systems of thought. The Christian worldview is based on the authority of Scripture. The non-Christian worldview, even when claiming to pursue logic or science, ultimately relies on human opinion and includes suppressing the truth about God (Romans 1).
A good doctor will diagnose and then point out what’s wrong to a patient. Likewise, the Christian must point out to the unbeliever what’s wrong. That involves exposing his suppression of the truth and demonstrating that only the Christian worldview makes sense of anything… himself, science, logic, morality, or any meaning whatsoever.
The Folly of Modern Thought
Modern culture, and most of Christianity, for that matter, denies this antithesis. It promotes religious pluralism, relativism, and the idea that all beliefs are equally valid. Thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris argue that there’s no absolute truth in religion, only perspectives shaped by one’s culture or situation. But this stance is itself contradictory.
Most atheist thinkers today claim there is no final truth, yet they make that claim as a final truth. They want science and natural theology to merge but insist that Christian belief must never contradict “natural reason.” They dismiss the uniqueness of the Christian message while relying on basic assumptions that only Christianity can justify.
By rejecting God’s authority, they embrace intellectual chaos. When the Word of God is rejected, human language, logic, and meaning begin to collapse. This is especially clear in movements like Deconstructionism, as articulated by men like Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, where even the possibility of stable meaning in words is denied. Think how absurd that is: Using words to deny that words have any meaning or propositional truth.
Why Presuppositional Thinking Is Necessary
Given this deep divide, how should Christians share or defend their faith? Not by offering isolated evidences or appealing to some shared reason. And yep, there’s plenty of evidence all around us. Every atom is evidence since God has brought all things to pass. But we have to remember, unbelievers are using a different filter to interpret what evidence you share with them.
The Great Physician’s diagnosis would point out that it’s the filter that’s broken. So it’s not a debate about evidence per se. We have to go deeper. Until the “worldview filter” is healed, any evidence you share is “water off a duck,” as we say down here by the river.
So we must challenge the unbeliever’s entire worldview. His filter. Van Til called this method of sharing (dialoguing) “presuppositional.”
Human Autonomy Always Leads to Absurdity
The Christian must first show that the unbeliever’s autonomous worldview leads to absurdity… it cannot account for truth, logic, science, or morality. This doesn’t mean the unbeliever can’t count, for example. It simply demonstrates that he can’t account for counting. If the world is governed by chance, one plus one could equal two or six… since the world is random.
The goal then must point to the only foundation that makes sense of all things: the triune God revealed in Scripture.
This is what Paul did in Acts 17. He didn’t argue from common ground. He confronted the idolatry of Athens and called its thinkers to repentance. He told them there would be judgment. He told them they were a superstitious lot, which was the ultimate insult to the Greeks who thought they were the wisest people on the planet.
Even when he quoted pagan poets, it wasn’t to agree with them, but to show that their words unintentionally revealed the very truth they were suppressing. Paul’s goal wasn’t dialogue but transformation… turning minds from darkness to light.
The War Against God’s Word
Ultimately, the unbeliever is not just indifferent to God’s Word… he is at war with it. Further, this war isn’t confined to “religious” topics. It extends to every field: science, ethics, politics, and education. The world resists not only the Word of God but also the very concepts of truth, meaning, and rationality. In rejecting Christ, who is the Logos, the world falls into intellectual and moral ruin.
Unfortunately, even some professing Christians like William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas and Lee Strobel end up erasing the antithesis as they appeal to some mythical common ground. They blend biblical truth with human philosophy, hoping to make the gospel more palatable. But in doing so, they compromise the faith.
Van Til argued that we shouldn’t seek worldly approval by agreeing with unbelievers’ autonomous worldview filters and adopting their secular assumptions. Instead, we must present the gospel as what it truly is: the only basis for intelligible thought and life.
Humbly Pressing this Antithesis
A faithful defense of the faith, faithful evangelism and even faithful education must press the antithesis, as Greg Bahnsen famously argued. Christianity is not one option among many. It is the only worldview that accounts for reality. The presuppositional method doesn’t merely defend Christian truth… it exposes the bankruptcy of unbelief.
In a culture that insists all beliefs are equal and no truth is absolute, the Christians must, humbly but boldly, declare that Christ is Lord of all… including the mind.
After all, we’re not just defending doctrines but proclaiming the only foundation for truth itself. Any attempt to find common ground without addressing worldview “filters” and the antithesis is not engaging culture at all… it’s surrender.
Bottom line: Focus on the filters.
