Defending Christianity requires acknowledging God’s complete sovereignty, according to Rev. Everett Henes, pastor of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

On Feb. 12, Henes, who is pursuing a second doctorate in the history of Reformed apologetics, gave a lecture for the campus Reformed Student Fellowship titled “Why I’m Reformed: Reformed Apologetics.”

Before digging into apologetics or explaining why he is reformed, Henes shared the start of his faith journey.

“I was not born into a Christian home,” Henes said. “Sometime in my junior high years I became friends with a young man who’d recently moved into town and he wrote weird things on his shoes — ­like ‘Jesus Rocks.’ He invited me to youth group.”

It was at that first youth group that he became acquainted with the Christian faith.

“I was confronted with the gospel that very night — that I was a sinner, that I had no hope of salvation outside of myself, and that I needed Jesus,” Henes explained. “I continued to go back and to visit that youth group and eventually would respond to the gospel call.”

After coming to faith, Henes said he readily became interested in apologetics.

“I loved to talk to other people about Jesus, and I began to study other religions as well,” Henes explained. “This was always a part of my story, loving to not just share Christ with people, but then also to ask and answer difficult questions and challenge other people.”

Henes originally encountered God in charismatic churches. But years later, a friend introduced him to the Dutch Reformed theologian Cornelius van Til.

“I had a friend who said, ‘I read this really hard apologetics book that I just didn’t understand. It’s called “The Defense of the Faith” by Cornelius van Til,’” Henes recalled. “So I begin to dive into van Til’s apologetic method.”

Henes found van Til’s presuppositional approach to apologetics especially persuasive.

“I became convinced as I was studying van Til and the argument from the impossibility of the contrary,” Henes said. “If God doesn’t exist, then intelligibility, science, logic, and morality have no foundation.”

However, Henes reasoned, this required him to acknowledge God’s absolute sovereignty over human choice.

“I realized this will only defend a sovereign God — a God who is over everything,” he concluded. “The way that they would say it in youth group altar calls was, ‘God has cast his vote. Satan has cast his vote. You get the deciding vote: Will you side with God or Satan?’ All of that sort of power that that gives the individual in the moment fell away for me.”

This completely changed Henes’s approach to Christian apologetics: now, apologetics is about revealing how unbelievers are unconsciously relying on God.

“If God is sovereign and he has made all things, then all reasoning already presupposes God. In other words, there’s no common ground or neutral territory between the believer and the unbeliever,” Henes argued. “The unbeliever can reason, do science, make moral judgments only because he lives in God’s world and uses God-given faculties.”

This, according to Henes, reveals the real issue in every apologetic conversation: a lack of faith.

“Apologetic argument on this view then is not merely logical, but it’s actually an evangelistic confrontation,” he reasoned. “It is showing someone that what they’re missing isn’t evidence ­— but faith.”

Henes believes that this insight makes apologetics substantially simpler.

“Our apologetic burden is lightened. We are not trying to convince somebody,” Henes said. “It is God who changes hearts. It is our task to point them to the truth.”

This meant, for instance, that answering genuine questions with evidence could still be helpful.

“I think of apologetics like a tool bag. Presuppositional apologetics is my sharpest knife,” Henes said. “I’m happy to use that, but if somebody’s sitting down and asking a legitimate, honest question, we should give them an answer — and that includes knowing the evidence.”

Sophomore Laura Talcott, president of RSF, found Henes’s apologetics a fresh perspective.

“I’d never heard of presuppositional apologetics before,” Talcott said. “You don’t get love, you don’t get beauty, you don’t get friendship, you don’t get reason, logic, the sun coming up every morning without a presupposition of God being somebody who loves us and God being somebody who brought a fundamental rationality and order and creation to the world.”

Junior Joe Peshek wondered how Henes’s rejection of a neutral basis for conclusions about God reconciled with acknowledging that human reason is a gift from God.

“The claim that there is no neutral ground ­— I think I want to dig into more what that means,” Peshek said. “We’re all beings created by God. We’re in the image of God. We are endowed with reason, though it’s fallen.”