Quotes from K. Scott Oliphint

Like the woman of Samaria, we come to recognize the real need for living water only when Jesus brings it to our attention.

The Bible is authoritative not because we accept it as such, but because it is the word of the risen Lord. It has a claim on all people. Its truth is the truth for every person in every place.

So it is also that in the act of knowing, to the extent that we know something truly, we know it as created, that is, as having its origin and its sustaining existence in God. 7 To claim to know something while thinking it to be independent of God (or to deny that there is a God) is to fail to know it for what it really is. Whatever it is, it is created and sustained by God at every moment.

It would not be an overstatement to say that the way to a proper understanding of God and his character is given foremost in a proper understanding of the Son of God come in the flesh, Jesus Christ.3

Since, however, a covenantal apologetic affirms Scripture as foundational, it will be obvious to us that it is Scripture's content that must be highlighted as the primary and preeminent logos of persuasion. The content of our discourse and all of its arguments must have its genesis in Scripture. What we wish to communicate, in other words, as the logos of persuasion, is the logos, or Word, of God himself, and ultimately God's Word made flesh, who is the Lord Jesus Christ.

The lordship of Christ is basic to our defense of Christianity. Christ now reigns. He is Lord. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. That authority is the prerequisite to the command to make disciples. Without that authority, baptism and disciple making in and for the church are meaningless.

Just like Jesus's earthly father, his heavenly Father is a carpenter. He is building a footstool for his Son

In Adam we will, even if it kills us, do all that we can to avoid what is patently and clearly made obvious to us by God himself.

Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief.

Unbelief cannot sustain itself; it is unable to make sense of the facts, many of which are the most obvious facts of the world; it assumes, rather than shows, that there is no God, that the world is not created by him, that his character is not obvious in creation, and so on. Then it proceeds to argue its case not by attempting to support those assumptions, but simply by assuming them and then arguing as if the assumptions themselves are, or must be, universal if one is to be "rational.

Scripture is clear that without holiness no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). In wanting to be "relevant" to those who are not in Christ, we may be displaying more of a life "in Adam" than we might think. This bodes ill for the art of persuasion in covenantal apologetics. If Christianity makes little difference in the way we walk and talk on a day-to-day basis, we should not think that there will be any obvious reason for others to want to consider a life in Christ.23