Cornelius Van Til is known
principally as the father of presuppositional apologetics. Some have described
his approach as transcendental apologetics, while others have preferred
Reformed or covenantal apologetics. A presupposition is a question of ultimate
commitment. The Apostle Peter reminds us that in apologetic arguments we should
‘set apart Christ as Lord’ in our hearts (1 Peter 3:15). In other words, Christ
should reign as Lord of our hearts and minds in our philosophy and apologetic
as much as he does in our view of theology and Biblical studies. The apologist
should ‘bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ (2 Corinthians
10:5). A truly Christian philosophy of life will emphasise the idea of loving
God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength as the Lord Christ summarises
the moral law of God (Matthew 22:37). This idea of loving God with the mind
means the Christian should ‘presuppose the truth of God’s word from start to
finish in his apologetic witness’.[1]
The writer of proverbs reminds us that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom’ (Proverbs 1:7). Our apologetic, according to Van Til, should be
epistemologically self-conscious. In other words, ‘we ought not to espouse one
thing theologically and then practice something else [or non-Christian] in our
general scholarship’.[2]
We should be conscious of our Christianity in every domain of our intellectual
and spiritual life – especially in our apologetic witness and philosophy of
life.
Van Til’s Life and Ministry
Van Til (also known informally to
family and friends as Kees) was born in Grootegast in Holland in 1895 – the son
of a reasonably wealthy and prosperous farming community. At ten years old, he
moved to Highland, Indiana. His family originally belonged to the Christian
Reformed Church (CRC) and Van Til pursued studies within that denomination for
a time, studying at Calvin Theological Seminary for at least one year. Van Til
transferred to Princeton Theological Seminary to finish his theological
education and was awarded his ThM in 1925. He was also awarded a PhD in 1927 by
Princeton University for his dissertation on ‘God and the Absolute’ – a
comparative study of Reformed theology and philosophical idealism. He married
Rena Klooster in 1925 and the couple had one child together who died in 1978.
Van Til was the pastor of a Christian Reformed congregation in Spring Lake,
Michigan, but took a leave of absence to teach philosophy and Christian
apologetics at Princeton University during the academic year 1928–1929. Van Til
was concerned about a trend towards theological liberalism within Princeton
University and his denomination and eventually decided to support J. Gresham
Machen (1881–1937), the author of a blistering critique of liberal theology in Christianity
and Liberalism (1923), in the founding of a new theological seminary in
Philadelphia which became known as Westminster Theological Seminary. Van Til
reluctantly left the pastoral ministry to teach philosophy and apologetics at Westminster
until his retirement in 1972. Machen founded with the help of colleagues from
Westminster a theologically conservative denomination which became known as the
Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) and Van Til would remain a member of this
denomination for the rest of his life.
Van
Til was influenced by a number of Dutch Reformed theologians in the
neo-Calvinist school including Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) and Herman Bavinck
(1854–1921), though he would disagree with them on the importance of Christian
apologetics which Van Til believed was a crucial part of Christian education as
B. B. Warfield (1851–1921) and Charles Hodge (1797–1878) had argued at
Princeton. Van Til, though greatly sympathetic to the old Princeton divinity,
would nonetheless point out the philosophical and apologetic inconsistences of
the classical and evidential approaches to apologetics. There is a distinction
in Reformed apologetics between the approach of B. B. Warfield and the “Old
Princeton School” and the approach of the Dutch Reformed theologians in the
tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Warfield believed that a
rational defence of Christianity was not only possible but was itself the basis
or foundation for Christian theology. In other words, Warfield put reason
before faith and assumed that systematic theology builds upon apologetics.
Kuyper and Bavinck by way of contrast argued that there was a limited place for
apologetics in the Christian syllabus. They often put faith before reason and
developed a kind of Christian fideism in the Reformed tradition. Van Til sits
somewhat uncomfortably in the middle of these Christian stalwarts. He argued
that the Christian faith was not only rationally defensible as Warfield had
perceived but was itself the very basis for reason and intelligibility within
the cosmos as Kuyper and Bavinck also expressed the matter. Van Til correctly
sets the apologetic task on the basis of ‘faith seeking understanding’. This is
an idea that stretches as far back as St. Anselm of Canterbury's notion of ‘I believe so
that I may understand’ (credo ut intelligam). A viewpoint also taught by
St. Augustine of Hippo. In this way, Van Til mediated between the rival
approaches of Warfield and Kuyper leading to what some have described as
Kuyper-Warfield synthesis.
Van Til would disparage
traditional, classical, and evidential approaches to apologetics by developing
his own transcendental or presuppositional approach to the discipline. This is
not to say that Van Til rejected Christian theistic evidences in toto,
but that he would develop them within a Reformed or covenantal framework. In
many ways, Van Til was trying to be a consistent Calvinist by applying the
doctrines of Reformed theology to Christian apologetics and the formation of a
consistently Reformed or Calvinistic worldview. Van Til’s argument involved
showing the paucity of non-Christian worldviews to explain reality, knowledge,
and ethics by reducing their arguments to the absurd – a method known in
philosophy as reductio ad absurdum – and by showing that the Christian
worldview alone made sense of each of these philosophical domains. He argued
that only the doctrine of the ontological Trinity could be used to explain the
philosophical problem of the ‘one and the many’ since there exists one God in
three coequal and coeternal persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). God is both
one and many within his own being. The universe, according to Van Til, is a
reflection of its Creator and the problem of the one and the many finds its
resolution in the mystery of the ontological Trinity. Some critics have argued
that Van Til’s apologetic is a case of begging the question or of circular
reasoning, but Van Til was careful to point out that all reasoning about
ultimate commitments or presuppositions is ultimately circular. For example, a
rationalist would appeal to reason and intellect to explain his view of the world,
while an empiricist would point to sense experience as justification for his
beliefs – what difference, Van Til asked, is there between this and a Christian
who appeals to his Bible in defence of theism? The noetic effects of sin on the
human mind mean that the unbeliever, though aware of the existence of God to
some extent, nonetheless resists and supresses this belief as the Apostle Paul
teaches in his epistle to the Romans (1:18; 21–32). There is therefore an
antithesis between Christian belief and non-Christian worldview. There is no
neutrality. Unbelievers in their paucity to explain reality must often ‘borrow
capital’ from the Christian view of the world in order to make sense of the
world they live in. The point of contact (anknüpfungspunkt) between
Christianity and unbelief lies in the fact that human beings were originally
created in the image and likeness of a Holy God and live, breathe, and
philosophise within God’s universe under God’s laws whether they recognise it
or not.
Central to Van
Til’s apologetic and philosophy of life was his understanding of the
Creator-creature distinction in Reformed theology. All forms of
pantheistic theology teach that God and the world are essentially one and the
same entity – much in the same way as Spinoza expressed the relationship
between God and nature as being interchangeable terminology for the same thing:
deus sive natura. This was the position of the liberalism against which
J. Gresham Machen had identified his own theology and was the basis upon which
he founded Westminster Theological Seminary. Orthodox theism, by way of
contrast, maintained that God and the world were separate entities and distinct
from one another. According to Van Til, the only worldview that makes sense of
all reality is the theistic position in which God and the world are distinct
entities. Van Til would often illustrate this separation between God and
creation by drawing two distinct circles on the chalkboard at Westminster. One
circle, much larger, would represent God as the ontological Trinity; the other
circle, much smaller, would represent humanity and the world. The anti-theistic
position was represented by a single circle which confused God and the world as
if they were the same thing. Even though God pervades the world entirely by his
omnipresence, he nonetheless made the world out of nothing (ex nihilo),
rather than out of his own being or preexisting materials as with a Platonic
demiurge. In a sense, Van Til was doing nothing new in his formulation of
presuppositional apologetics. He was simply applying the truths of Reformed
confessional theology to the practice of philosophy and Christian apologetics.
Van Til would cross swords with two major thinkers during the twentieth
century: Karl Barth (for his neo-orthodoxy) and Gordon-Clark (for his view of
God’s incomprehensibility). His rejection of Barth’s principles influenced many
Reformed theologians towards a rejection of Barth’s thought which Van Til
described as being the new modernism. His definitive study on Karl Barth’s
thought was published with the title Christianity and Barthianism and
was deliberately designed to reflect the title of J. Gresham Machen study Christianity
and Liberalism. Gordon Clark argued against Van Til’s view of divine incomprehensibility
in that Van Til believed that ultimately God is incomprehensible to the human
mind and that there is a qualitative difference between our knowledge and God’s
knowledge, an epistemological distinction reflecting the Creator-creature
distinction. Clark by way of contrast argued that God’s understanding of the
laws of logic was fundamentally the same as human comprehension of the same concepts.
The difference between our knowledge and God’s knowledge was merely quantitative
– God knows more, infinitely more, stuff than we do about reality, but he does
not know in a fundamentally different way to us. Though Karl Barth has remained
highly influential in Reformed and evangelical circles to this day, Gordon
Clark has descended into relative obscurity despite being an outstanding
philosopher and theologian – a better academic in many ways than Van Til
himself. The Clark-Van Til debate represented neither theologian at their best.
This essay will explore the salient features of Van Til’s theology, philosophy,
and apologetic method. We will take as our example Van Til’s syllabus on Christian
Apologetics published originally in book format in 1976 and offer
commentary on the unfolding narrative. This syllabus was republished in 2003 in
a second edition edited and introduced by William Edgar. All page numbers refer
to this second edition.
The System of
Christian Truth
Van Til begins
his study of Christian apologetics with a consideration of the system of
Christian truth. In other words, he begins with theology. This should not
surprise readers of Van Til since his purpose is to state philosophically what
is believed theologically. Theology and philosophy, for Van Til, are two
different ways of stating the same thing. The discipline of systematic theology
divides into six major areas of thought: theology proper (the study of God),
anthropology (the study of humanity), Christology (the study of Christ),
ecclesiology (the study of the Church), and eschatology (the study of last
things). Van Til upholds the view of classical theism with respect to God. He insists
upon such doctrines as the aseity of God or his absolute independence, his
immutability or the fact that God cannot change, and his unity both of
singularity (there is only one God) and simplicity (God has no body or parts).
The philosophical problem of the one and the many or of the relation between
unity and diversity is given a definitive answer by the unity of God. God is
both One and Many. He is One with respect to his being, and three with respect
to his persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). God not only knows himself with
one simple act of knowing, but he also knows all created reality analytically
in one act of knowing: ‘God knows or interprets the facts before they are
facts. It is God’s plan, God’s comprehensive interpretation of the facts that
makes the facts what they are’.[3]
There can be no brute facts in God’s universe. They are already pre-interpreted
by God himself and understood and known fully and exhaustively to him. According
to Van Til, ‘God’s being is self-sufficient, his knowledge is analytical, and
his will is self-referential. In his being, knowledge, and will God is
self-contained. There is nothing correlative to him. He does not depend in his
being, knowledge, or will upon the being, knowledge, or will of his creatures.
God is absolute. He is autonomous’.[4]
This will be important when Van Til contrasts God with humanity. Human beings,
by way of contrast, are entirely dependent upon God – his being, knowledge, and
will.
Not only is God absolute, but he is also personal: ‘The Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost are each a personality and together constitute the
exhaustively personal God’.[5]
In other words, God is an infinite personal being or an absolute personality.
Strictly speaking, God is tri-personal, though we may speak of him as an
absolute person in the singular. Ontologically, the three persons of the
Godhead are coequal and coeternal. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the
Holy Spirit is God, and these three are one God equal in power and in glory.
‘The diversity and the unity in the Godhead are therefore equally ultimate; they
are exhaustively correlative to one another and not correlative to anything
else’.[6]
The Father is unbegotten and the eternal fount of deity, the Son is eternally
begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and
the Son. What has been said so far concerns the ontological Trinity or God as
he is within his own being. Van Til distinguishes this from the economic
Trinity or God as he relates to the world. ‘The Father is centrally active in
the creation and sustaining of the universe. The Son is centrally active in the
objective work of salvation. The Spirit is centrally active in the subjective
work of salvation’. [7]
We might also say that the Father elects a people for his own glory, the Son
redeems them by his cross, and the Spirit sanctifies them through the washing
of regeneration – such are the economic relations between the members of the
Holy Trinity as they relate to the world.
In terms of Christian metaphysics, there is a distinction between the
being of God as infinite, eternal, and unchanging, and the being of the cosmos
as finite, temporal, and subject to change. Van Til would often explain this difference
by drawing two circles on the black board in chalk: a larger circle for the
being of God and a smaller circle for the being of creation and all created
reality. Christianity, in other words, is committed to a two-layer theory of
reality. There is the being of God as self-contained and eternal and separately
from him there is the being of the world as created and dependent.
Non-Christians would call this a dualistic theory of reality, while they
themselves are committed to a monistic theory of reality in which God and the
world are essentially made of the same stuff. This distinction between God and
the world also applies to epistemology. If God is distinct from the world in
his being, he is also distinct in terms of his knowledge. ‘As God has
self-contained being and all other being has created or derivative being, so
also God has self-contained [knowledge] and man has derivative knowledge’.[8]
There is not only a quantitative distinction between God’s thoughts and the
thoughts of the creature as Gordon Clark maintained, but also a difference in
quality – God’s thoughts are ‘wholly other’ to borrow a Barthian term. ‘For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the
LORD’ (Isaiah 55:8). In the same way that God is metaphysically and
epistemologically distinct from the world, so also is he ethically separate
from all created reality. This is encapsulated in the idea of God’s holiness.
God is set apart from creation. The will of God is therefore said to be the
ultimate rule of obedience for humankind. God himself is humanity’s summum
bonum or his supreme and highest good – this is the Christian view of
ethics – doing all things for the glory of God. ‘Over against this Christian
view of the will of God as ultimate is the non-Christian view of the will of
man as ultimate. Morality is assumed to be autonomous. Man is virtually said to
be a law unto himself’.[9]
The Christian is called to challenge this position of moral autonomy and remind
fallen humanity that without God as lawgiver and judge there could be no
meaning whatsoever to moral distinctions.
The second aspect of Christian
theology is anthropology or the doctrine of humanity. Human beings were
originally created after the image and likeness of a holy God. ‘Man is created
in God’s image. He is therefore like God in everything in which a creature can
be like God’.[10] Van Til
distinguishes between the image of God in the broader sense in which humanity
like God is considered as a personal and rational being, and the image in the
narrower sense in which humankind was originally created after true knowledge,
righteousness, and holiness. It was the image in this narrower and more
specific sense that was lost in the fall of humanity into sin, and which is
restored by the person and work of Christ and in the Holy Spirit’s application
of redemption. Though humanity was created after the image and likeness of God,
yet there remains a fundamental distinction between God and man. God is the
Creator and man is the creature. ‘Man was created in God’s image. Man
can never in any sense outgrow his creaturehood … He is like God, to be
sure, but always on a creaturely scale … God’s being and knowledge are
absolutely original; such being and knowledge is too wonderful for man; he
cannot attain unto it’.[11]
God is metaphysically distinct from
humanity as our Creator, whereas humanity can never escape from creaturehood. God
is epistemologically distinct from humanity as our Teacher, whereas human
beings will always remain students at his feet. And God is ethically distinct
from humanity as our Lawgiver, Sovereign, and Judge, to whom we must give an
account of our lives as his subjects.
The fall of mankind shattered the image of God in the narrower sense.
Humanity lost its true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness as originally
created and descended into rebellion and sin towards God. ‘When man fell, it
was therefore an attempt to do without God in every respect. Man sought his
ideas of truth, goodness, and beauty somewhere beyond God, either directly
within himself or indirectly within the universe about him. Originally man had
interpreted the universe under the direction of God, but now he sought to
interpret the universe without reference to God … Man made for himself a false
ideal of knowledge, the ideal of absolute inderivative comprehension. This he
could never have done if he had continued to recognise that he was a creature …
Man virtually occupies the place that the ontological Trinity occupies in
orthodox theology. He is self-sufficient and autonomous’.[12]
Humanity views the facts of creation apart from God’s revelation and attempts
to interpret the universe without and apart from the pre-interpretation of God.
In reality, there are no brute facts in the universe. Every fact, in order for
it to be a fact at all, it must first be interpreted by God. Though God has
already exhaustively interpreted every fact in creation in one simple act of
knowing, humanity lives as if God had never interpreted the facts and as though
his own interpretation were ultimate. Humanity seeks goodness, beauty, and
truth apart from God and in so doing brings upon himself no end of misery. He
becomes detached not only from creation, but also from communion with God. He
is left alone, isolated, and alienated in the universe without God and without
hope in the world.
The good news of the gospel however is that ‘Christ came to bring man back
to God’.[13] There
is a Saviour. There is a way of pardon for sin and peace with God. This Saviour
had to be truly God and truly man in one person in order to reconcile God to
man and man to God. It is for this reason that the Church has historically
taught that Jesus Christ was a divine person – the second person of the
ontological Trinity, namely God the Son. This same Son of God assumed a human
nature and became man of true body and reasonable soul. What had been torn
asunder by the fall was brought back together by the incarnation. This does not
mean that he laid aside his divinity. There was no subtraction of divinity in
the incarnation, only the addition of humanity. According to the Chalcedonian
Creed, the divine and human natures in the person of Christ are related without
confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. Not only
was Christ the true Son of God, he was also a Prophet like unto Moses, a Priest
in the order of Melchizedek, and a King after the line of David. These are
known as his offices or as the munus triplex, the threefold office of
Christ. As our Prophet, Christ teaches us the true way of wisdom and knowledge:
‘Man’, according to Van Til, ‘set for himself a false ideal of knowledge when
he became a sinner, that is he lost true wisdom. In Christ man was reinstated
to true knowledge and by Christ man realizes that he is a creature of God and
that he should not seek underived comprehensive knowledge. Christ is our
wisdom. He is our wisdom not only in the sense that he tells us how to get to
heaven, he is our wisdom too in teaching us true knowledge about everything’.[14]
Christ as our prophet restores us to true knowledge and leads us into all
truth. Christ as our priest offers himself up as a sacrifice to satisfy divine
justice and reconcile us to God. He ever lives to make continual intercession
for us before the throne of God. He deals with the debt of sin by his death
upon the cross and brings life by his resurrection. As our king, Christ subdues
us to his sovereign lordship, he rules over and defends his children, and
restrains and conquers all our and his enemies until they have been made a
footstool beneath his feet.
The work of Christ, if it is to be effective in any way, must be applied effectually
by the Holy Spirit to our hearts. ‘In as much as we are dead in trespasses and
sins, it would do us no good to have a wonderful life-giving potion laid next
to us in our coffin. It would do us good only if someone actually administered
the potion to us’.[15]
The work of the Holy Spirit is vital to soteriology. He actually administers
the potion to us and revives us from a state of deadness in sin. Suppose Christ
had merely made salvation possible for all as the Arminian theologian contends,
then he would have made it effectual for none and Christ would have died in
vain. The fact of the matter is: Christ’s salvation actually saves us through
the effectual application of the Holy Spirit. Christ died to save his people
from their sin, and not merely to make salvation possible. ‘If we say that man
can of himself accept or reject the gospel as he pleases, we have made the
eternal God dependent upon man’.[16]
This is the whole problem with Arminianism. It makes the immortal God dependent
upon the choices of mortal man – and this we find to be both intolerable and
unscriptural. ‘Salvation belongs to the Lord’ (Psalm 3:8).
With respect to ecclesiology, it is God who brings his elect people into Christian
fellowship within the church – the church itself being the whole company of
God’s elect people in Christ. There is a distinction in theology between the
Church visible as a mixed body of sinners and saints, and the Church invisible
as the whole company of God’s elect people in heaven and earth. We may also
distinguish between the Church militant in her progress against the world, the
flesh, and the devil, and the church triumphant as she exists in heaven and the
world to come. This point leads us naturally to eschatology – the doctrine of
end times and last things. ‘Every Christian who commits his future to God
believes that God controls the future. He believes that God has already interpreted
the future; he believes that the future will come to pass as God has planned
it. Prophecy illustrates this point. Belief in the promises of God with respect
to our eternal salvation is meaningless unless God controls the future’.[17]
God has already interpreted the facts ahead of time. Indeed, the facts unfold
exactly as God intends them to unfold. History – its development, maturation,
and final end – is wholly and entirely in the hands of God. The Christian has a
great hope in a new heaven and new earth wherein righteousness dwells. The
reprobate will be eternally excluded from the kingdom of God, but the Christian
believer will go onwards to life eternal with God himself in Christ. He has a
great hope, a great future, and a great expectation.
The Christian
Philosophy of Life
There are three
main areas of philosophical enquiry broadly speaking. They are metaphysics
(theory of being), epistemology (theory of knowing), and ethics (a way of
living). These three disciplines are perspectivally related to one another and
form the basis of a Christian view of the world: ‘Philosophy, as usually defined,
deals with a theory of reality, with a theory of knowledge, and with a theory
of ethics. That is to say, philosophies usually undertake to present a
life-and-world view’.[18]
This idea of ‘worldview’, or weltanschauung as it is often referred to
in German, is central to Van Til’s apologetic for the Christian faith. He
builds upon the previous work of the Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper
in this regard. Van Til argues that what may be said about the Christian
philosophy of life in general may also be said about the Christian philosophy
of science in particular: ‘The Christian religion … has a definite bearing on
the scientific enterprise. Christianity claims to furnish the presuppositions
without which a true scientific procedure is unintelligible’.[19]
Every fact of creation in order for it to be an intelligible fact at all, it
must be a God-given fact – a fact established and interpreted by the Triune God
and worked out by the hidden hand of divine providence. There are no brute
facts in God’s universe. Every fact comes readily interpreted by God as Creator
and Sustainer. Van Til is highly critical of the Kantian distinction between
the phenomenal and the noumenal in the philosophy of science. The noumenal, for
Kant, refers to the reality as it exists in itself – the world of space, time,
causation, and even the being of God himself. The phenomenal is reality as experienced
by the human subject through the senses and interpreted by human reason: the
world of weights, times, measures, and observation. Science, it is said,
operates in the latter field and regards the former as essentially unknowable –
the domain of metaphysics and theologians. On a popular level, this distinction
is seen in the separation of science from religion, reason from faith, and the
secular from the sacred. Van Til argues that these disciplines are in fact
collectively governed by the sovereignty of God. He is Lord of both the
phenomenal and the noumenal, just as he is Lord of both science and religion.
No field of work is ultimately secular or outside of his sovereign control
on such a view, since all work should be done to the glory and honour of God. There
is no secular occupation so to speak. All honourable work is God-given: ‘To see
the face of God everywhere and to do all things, whether we eat or drink or do
anything else, to the glory of God – that is the heart of the covenant idea’.[20]
Van Til introduces this idea of a covenant here between God and humanity as
essential to good theology and philosophy – including the philosophy of
science. He argues for an antithesis between covenant keepers and covenant
breakers: ‘There are two and only two classes of men. There are those who
worship and serve the creature, and there are those who worship and serve the Creator.
There are covenant breakers and covenant keepers. In all of men’s activities,
in their philosophical and scientific enterprises, as well as in their worship,
men are either covenant breakers or covenant keepers’.[21]
Van Til’s point is that there are two different kinds of people in the world.
There are those who worship and serve God; and there are those who worship and
serve themselves. There is an invisible line drawn through humanity itself. On
the one hand, there are those who trust and obey God and, on the other hand,
there are those who trust and obey themselves. There are those who are
God-centred and Christ-centred; and there are those who man-centred and self-centred.
Those who are God-centred build their lives on the Lord Jesus Christ and are
not like the foolish man in the Sermon on the Mount who built his house upon
sand and which was ultimately destroyed when hit by the storms and trials of
life. Van Til does not obscure the place of natural revelation in Christian
theology. Unlike Barth who sees almost no place for natural revelation in
dogmatics, Van Til argues that natural revelation carries the same
distinguishing marks as Holy Scripture. Nature, as with Scripture, is
necessary, authoritative, sufficient, and perspicuous. Nature prepares the way
for the exceptional and the miraculous. If there was no such thing as nature,
there would be no such thing as miracle. Miracles are miraculous precisely
because they are not natural but gracious. Nature is the ordinary course of the
human environment and unfolding history of the world, but this is not to the
exclusion of divine power. Even providence is miraculous after its own fashion.
According to Van Til, ‘Christ walks a cosmic road. Far as the curse is found,
so far is his grace given. The Biblical miracles of healing point to the
regeneration of all things. The healed souls of men require and will eventually
receive healed bodies and a healed environment’.[22]
The Christian hope is fundamentally eschatological. It looks to a future
renewal of nature in which all created reality brings glory to God. It is also
this-worldly. ‘While [Christians] actually expect Christ to return visibly on
the clouds of heaven, they [nonetheless] thank God for every sunny day … To the
believer the natural or regular with all its complexity always appears as the
playground for the process of differentiation that leads ever onward to the
fullness of the glory of God’.[23]
Grace restores nature. Without natural revelation, there would be no
theatre for the drama of redemption, the agony of the cross, the empty tomb, and
the salvation of lost humanity. God's revelation in nature is just as
authoritative as his revelation in Scripture. ‘God speaks with authority wherever
and whenever he speaks’.[24]
If God speaks through nature, or the human conscience, he speaks
authoritatively. Not even the worst of men can escape the accusations of
conscience. ‘The prodigal son can never forget the father’s voice. It is the
albatross forever about his neck’.[25]
Nature is also sufficient to render humanity without excuse before God. Those
who abuse nature, abuse their Creator. ‘When nature is abused by man, it cries
out to its Creator for vengeance and through it, for redemption’.[26]
One day all creation will be restored to the glory of the paradise in Eden. The
Christian hope for nature is principally eschatological, though all believers
are called to a careful this-worldly stewardship of that which God originally
entrusted to Adam. God’s revelation in creation is also perspicuous. In other
words, it clearly reveals the existence and attributes of God. The beauty and
glory of creation is a reflection of the beauty and glory of God himself. There
is a certain teleology and purpose in nature which reveals the hand of its
artificer and sustainer. This is not to say that nature exhaustively reveals
God or that humanity is capable of fully understanding God. On the contrary, as
Van Til argues, ‘Man normally thinks in analogical fashion. He realizes that
God’s thoughts are self-contained. He knows that his own interpretation of
nature must therefore be a reinterpretation of what is already fully
interpreted by God’. [27]
God already knows all the facts of creation both quantitively and
qualitatively. In order for a fact of creation to be a fact at all, it must be
a God-interpreted fact. Humanity must ‘think God’s thoughts after him’ or
analogically in the technical Van Tillian terminology. God’s thoughts are
archetypal; man’s thoughts are ectypal. There is a qualitative difference
between God’s thoughts and humanity’s thoughts. God not only knows more stuff
than we do as an omniscient being, but he also understands things from a
fundamentally different perspective to us. He sees things as the Creator of
all. We see things as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. Ours is
an image-theology. When humanity fell, he attempted to do away with this
distinction between Creator and creature and to think autonomously – or as if
God did not exist and could not see what humanity was doing or planning. ‘When
man fell, he denied the naturally revelatory character of every fact, including
that of his own consciousness. He assumed that he was autonomous; he assumed
that his consciousness was not revelational of God but only of himself. He
assumed to be non-created … He would not think God’s thoughts after him; he
would instead think only his own original thoughts’.[28]
Humanity thought to hide itself from God, yet all the time God’s eye was ever
upon Adam and his posterity and with sorrow he saw humanity fall into sin and
degradation. Humanity was cursed with blindness of mind and hardness of heart. However,
God was gracious to lost humanity and through the testimony of the Holy Spirit
receives a new power of sight by the work of regeneration enabling him to see
the light of Christ as given in Holy Scripture. Christians can say with the hymnwriter that 'something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen'.
The Point of
Contact
Granted the
points made above, Van Til now raises the question as to whether there is a point
of contact between a Christian believer and a non-Christian. Since the
Christian view of the world can sometimes seem counterintuitive to the
unbeliever because of the blindness caused by sin, we should prepare them for a
radical diagnosis of human depravity. Van Til illustrates the task of the
Christian with a medical analogy: ‘A good doctor will not prescribe medicines
according to the diagnosis that his patient has made of himself. The patient
may think that he needs nothing more than a bottle of medicine while the doctor
knows that an immediate operation is required’.[29]
The unbeliever does not merely require medicine, he needs a heart transplant.
God must take out the sin-hardened and stony heart to replace it with a heart
of flesh that beats with love towards a Holy God. Nothing less than an
operation is required for sinners of lost humanity. A different analogy, as
already mentioned above, would be that of a dead person in a coffin. You might
put the life-giving potion next to him in a bottle, hoping that it might make a
difference to him, but until someone actually unscrews the bottle and
administers the life-giving potion, the dead person will remain dead. This is
exactly the case of lost humanity. It requires nothing less than resurrection
power to undo what has gone wrong with humanity in the fall. Van Til uses the
illustration of a buzz saw for the sinner attempting to cut straight boards by
practising religion and good works. He doesn’t know that the set has been
tampered with by another person and so every board comes out shorter than
intended. The same is true with the sinner, even his best attempts at religion
and skill with the buzz saw come to nothing – the boards are always too short.
In the same way, the Apostle Paul tells us, that ‘all have sinned and come
short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23). The set of the buzz saw must first be
changed and only then will the sinner cut boards aright. No matter how hard the
sinner tries to please God, he will always fall short until his set is changed
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The problem with sinners of lost humanity is their warped view of themselves
(as basically good, rather than totally depraved) and an incorrect view of God
(as basically benevolent, and not also wrathful). According to Van Til, ‘When
man became a sinner, he made of himself instead of God the ultimate or final
reference point’.[30]
This is the problem with humanity – it assumes an ultimacy that belongs only to
God. Humanity should look to God as the final reference point of predication
and intelligible meaning in the universe. Instead, humanity substitutes itself
for God and assumes ultimacy. Man becomes the measure of all things. ‘The
sinner has cemented colour glasses to his eyes, which he cannot remove. And all
is yellow to the jaundiced eye’.[31]
The unbeliever sees everything in the wrong light. To quote the hymnwriter
again, it is only when the Holy Spirit chisels away the sin cemented glasses
that sinners at last begin to see that ‘something lives in every hue which
Christless have never seen’. This makes arguments for the existence of God or the
so-called theistic proofs unnecessary at best. Such arguments fall short of
proving the existence of the self-contained ontological Trinity. They may prove
that ‘a god’ or ‘gods’ possibly exist, but they fall short of proving that the
Triune God of Holy Scripture exists. Such proofs were originally developed
during the Middle Ages at the height of Roman Catholic theology. Notable among
them was Anslem of Canterbury’s ontological proof and the cosmological proofs
of Thomas Aquinas. While such arguments may indicate that Christianity is a
reasonable faith and give confidence to believers, they are not watertight
arguments for the existence of God and subsequent philosophers, particularly
Immanuel Kant, would subject them to radical critique. Van Til was not saying
there should no place for such theistic proofs in Christianity, but only that
they should not be taken without the wider framework of the Christian life and
worldview. Indeed, it is only in such a presupposed context that the proofs
themselves make any sense. Van Til argues that not only are Roman Catholics
guilty of assuming such ‘neutral ground’ between Christian believers and
non-believers, but so also are Arminian theologians like Bishop Joseph Butler (whom
Van Til frequently refers to as an illustration of faulty apologetics), and
also less consistent Calvinists such as B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge who
assume a classical model of apologetics rather than a more consistently
Reformed presuppositional or transcendental approach. Such theologians forget
when they come to apologetics that these human beings before them are totally
fallen and lost in sin. This includes a depravity in the powers to reason and
assess arguments or what Reformed theologians traditionally describe as the noetic
effects of sin. There is no neutrality between light and darkness. In Van Til’s
words, unbelievers ‘have an axe to grind’.[32]
There is however a point of contact in the fact that humanity was
originally created by God after his own image and likeness. The human mind is
derivative, rather than autonomous. In order to know anything at all, human
beings must ‘borrow capital’ from a theistic view of the world. The human mind
as God-given is naturally in connection with divine revelation at every point.
In effect, everything in creation becomes an argument for the existence of God.
The human mind is ‘surrounded by nothing but revelation. It is itself
inherently revelational. It cannot be conscious of itself without being
conscious of its creatureliness’.[33]
In a very real sense, humanity cannot escape God. As the Psalmist reminds us,
God is everywhere revealed about us in creation and providence (Psalm 139:
7–12). The revelation of God himself is even stamped on the human heart. ‘No
man can escape knowing God. It is indelibly involved in his awareness of
anything whatsoever. Man ought therefore, as Calvin puts it, to recognise God.
There is no excuse for him if he does not. The reason for his failure to
recognize God lies exclusively in him. It is due to his wilful transgression of
the very law of his being’.[34]
The Apostle Paul speaks as though fallen humanity has genuine knowledge of God,
and yet is supressing this truth in unrighteousness – ‘when they knew God, they
glorified him not as God … They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and
worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever
praised’ (See Romans 1:19–25). The point of contact then is to be sought deep
within the psychology of lost humanity. Deep down inside, every human being
knows that their covenantal relationship with God is broken by sin and
rebellion toward God. A good doctor will get to the bottom of this issue and
recommend an immediate heart transplant. Just as a good gardener will not be
content to merely cut the weeds off at the surface but will pull them up by the
roots. A point of contact is assured by the fact that every human being is a
creature made after the image and likeness of God and has impressed upon his
mind the law of God. He cannot escape from the wrath of God – not even in the
deepest recesses of his mind. He is a covenant breaker through and through. It
is in the very act of breaking the covenant that man knows the judgement of God
and becomes aware that the wrath of God resides upon him. It is only Jesus
Christ who can remedy the plight of humanity with the power of God. He is
divine gardener who pulls up the weeds at the root and the heavenly physician
who takes out the heart of stone and gives a heart that beats with love toward
God and lost humanity.
The Problem of
Method
The basic
contention of Van Til with respect to methodology in apologetics is that a
Reformed theology requires a Reformed apologetic. It would be of no use to have
a Reformed theology with a Roman Catholic or Arminian apologetic. In the words
of Van Til, ‘A Reformed method of apologetics must seek to vindicate the
Reformed life-and-world view as Christianity come to its own’.[35]
It would also be of no use to capitulate to the fallen methodology of would-be
autonomous human beings. ‘The Reformed apologist cannot agree at all with the
methodology of the natural man. Disagreeing with the natural man’s
interpretation of himself as the ultimate reference point, the Reformed
apologist must seek his point of contact within the natural man in that which
is beneath the threshold of his working consciousness, in the sense of deity
that he seeks to supress’.[36]
The point of contact must be sought deep within the psychology of the sinner in
his constant efforts to supress the knowledge of God as his Creator and Judge. The
Christian apologist should reason with the unbeliever by way of presupposition.
According to Van Til, ‘To argue by presupposition is to indicate what are the
epistemological and metaphysical principles that underline and control one’s
method’.[37] William
Edgar comments in the footnote on this passage: ‘This is a famous sentence. The
school of apologetics that developed around Van Til takes the name presuppositionalism
from this idea. Worldview and method are implied in one another. To be
consistently Reformed one cannot leave the Christian worldview at the door in
order to gain credibility with an unbeliever’.[38]
If the goal of apologetics is to see sinners converted, and not merely
convinced, then we will not settle for merely winning an argument when we are actually
in the business of saving souls.
Van Til addresses the problem of circular reasoning simply by owing it: ‘To
admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others
is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case,
circular reasoning. The starting point, the method, and the conclusion are
always involved in one another’.[39]
This is not to capitulate to fideism as some critical commentators maintain,
but to recognise that all reasoning about ultimate commitments will inevitably
be circular. For example, the rationalist would defend his worldview by
appealing to reason, just as the empiricist would appeal to sense experience, or
the Muslim to the Koran – and so the Christian appeals to the Bible and to the
self-contained Triune God of Scripture. Van Til is not reducing Christianity to
simple tautologies such as, ‘the Bible is true because it says so’. Such
reasoning is narrowly circular and obviously fallacious. Some reasoning,
however, especially with respect to ultimate questions is inevitably circular.
This is not to say it is illogical, but rather such a method is ‘transcendental’
to borrow a Kantian term. Indeed, Van Til’s whole approach could be described
as a transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG). The sinner deep
within his heart knows that he belongs to God and exists under his sovereignty
and lordship, but he wilfully suppresses this knowledge about himself and his
relation to God. ‘He is the man with the iron mask. A true method of
apologetics must seek to tear off that mask’.[40]
The position of lost humanity is by definition a hopeless one. The argument of the
presocratic philosopher Thales that all is made of water is spelled out by Van
Til to illustrate this point: ‘Suppose we think of a man in an infinitely
extended ocean of water. Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of
water. He sets this ladder upon the water and against the water, and then
climbs out of the water only to fall into the water. So hopeless and senseless
a picture must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon
the assumption that time or chance is ultimate’.[41]
If everything is made of water as Thales suggested (or time plus chance and the
random collision of atoms as modern non-Christian philosophers contend) then
all of our thoughts are water, our loved ones are water, our interests and
vocations are water, all our purposes and intentions are water, our hopes and
dreams are water, and our way out of this predicament is water. This is what
the non-Christian view of the world as a product of matter, motion, time plus
chance and the random collision of atoms ultimately arrives at in the last
analysis: sheer nihilism and despair. This is where postmodernism finds us
today. Even the laws of logic which the atheist uses against the Christian
would be the product of accident and chance under such a scheme – the very
workings of the atheist’s brain would be the product of nothing more than time
plus chance. The best possible proof for the existence of God is that his
existence is required to explain the laws of rational thought, the uniformity
of nature, the coherence of all things in the world, and the existence of our ethical
obligations toward one another. Without such a God as Christianity presupposes,
there can be no ultimate basis for the laws of logic, the laws of physics and
chemistry, and the ethical laws that are universally believed and accepted by
humankind.
Reformed apologetics must be
committed to a Reformed view of Scripture as the holy, infallible, and inerrant
word of God to lost humanity. The Reformed Christian must be committed to the
defence of theism as a whole – to God as he is revealed in the gospel of Jesus
Christ. He is not committed to theism in general – nor to pantheism or deism –
but to Christian theism. According to Van Til, ‘The Protestant apologist cannot
be concerned to prove the existence of any other God than the one who has
spoken to man authoritatively and finally through Scripture’.[42]
Here Van Til is speaking of the only true God or the Triune God of Holy
Scripture. He is not concerned with vague notions of a prime mover or a deity
in general. He is concerned with the God of the Bible, the ontological Trinity
of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and these three being one God, the same in
power and equal in glory. ‘Protestants are required by the most basic
principles of their system to vindicate the existence of no other God than the
one who has spoken in the Scriptures’.[43]
The only acceptable way for the Reformed Christian to witness to the existence
of such a God is by way of a transcendental argument for the existence of God
(TAG), or to reason by way of presupposition and ultimate commitment. Van Til refers
to inconsistent forms of apologetic method such as those devised by Roman
Catholic or Arminian theologians as following a ‘block-house methodology’. Van
Til objects to the idea that Christianity can be apologetically established
block by block as if you were building a house. For example, defending theism
in general first (one block), then Trinitarianism (two blocks), then
Christology (three blocks) – and so on. According to Van Til, the Christian
world-and-life view should be defended as systematic and organic whole – a plan
of apologetics which concedes no ground to the unbeliever, but which defends
the Triune God of Scripture and his all-encompassing plan for the history of
redemption.
Authority and
Reason
The supreme
authority for Roman Catholicism is the pope speaking ex cathedra. This
is a technical term meaning ‘from the bishop’s seat’ or ‘infallibly and without
error’. By way of contrast, for Reformed Protestants the supreme authority is
Scripture alone which, according to Van Til, ‘stands above every statement of
the church and its teachers’.[44]
With respect to the problem of authority in non-Christian thought, Van Til
makes use of a dialectic between rationalism and irrationalism to explain the
checkered history of philosophy on the subject. In the philosophy of
Parmenides, for example, the rational is the one supreme and perfect being,
while the irrational is the world of sense experience and change. Another
example of rationalism would be the world of Platonic forms or ideas in
distinction to the world of sense experience which is fundamentally irrational
in Plato’s thought. Similarly in Kant, the irrational is the noumenal world,
while the rational is the world of phenomenological experience. There is this
tension or dialectic in the authorities of the non-Christian worldview between
the rational and irrational and this is true throughout the history of
philosophy, with both views representing two sides of the same coin. In the
words of John Frame:
Unbelief is rationalistic, because it insists on the autonomy of human
thought, and therefore insists that human thought is the ultimate criterion of
truth and falsity, of right and wrong. On the other hand, unbelief is also
irrationalistic, because it believes that the apparent order in the universe is
ultimately based on disorder, upon chance.[45]
In other words,
Van Til argues that non-believing thought is fundamentally self-contradictory –
caught in a hopeless tangle between the rational and the absurd. On the one
hand, the unbelieving philosopher claims that all reality is One (rational);
while on the other hand, he claims that all reality is Many (irrational). When
he attempts to account for the One, he must ignore the multiplicity of the
world of sense experience; and when he attempts to account for the Many, he
must ignore the basic unity at the back of reality. He is caught in a hopeless crisis
of authority between Reason (the One) and Sense (the Many). This is where Van
Til is more nuanced in his analysis of the history of philosophy than one of
his students Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer argues that philosophy has descended
from the basic rationalism of the Greeks to the absurdity and irrationalism of
postmodernism. While there is some superficial truth to this claim, Van Til is
actually closer to the mark when he hits upon the rational/irrational dialectic.
When the non-believer has exhausted reason and logical argument, he turns to
the irrational and absurd. When the absurd becomes impossible to maintain in
his life and worldview, he returns back again to the rational and the logical.
He is forever caught in a dialectic between the One and the Many or between the
Rational and the Absurd. Only in the ontological Trinity – the God who is both One
and Many – is there an answer to this problem.
With respect to neo-orthodoxy,
Karl Barth and his colleague Emil Brunner reveal how modern theologians are
also caught in this dialectical conundrum. Barth is famous for his rejection of
nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism, a school of thought represented by Friedrich
Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl, which some evangelicals take as a sign of
his orthodoxy. Yet in rejecting the rational immanentism of liberal theology, Barth
merely put an irrational transcendentalism in its place. In liberal theology
God was wholly revealed (or immanent), while in Barthian theology God is wholly
other (or transcendent) and yet wholly revealed in the person of Christ. In
some respects, this is the problem of the One and the Many stated all over
again, but narrated in a different form. What is said about Barth holds true
for other neo-orthodox and dialectical theologians such as Emil Brunner,
Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Neibhur, Nels R. Ferré, John A. Mackay, and Elmer
George Homrighausen. Similarly, in modern Roman Catholicism, which is
essentially the theology of Thomas Aquinas redivivus, there is a dialectic
between the realm of faith and the realm of reason. However, this is a
distinction that rests upon Aristotelian philosophy, rather than Scripture. The
God of Aristotle was an unmoved mover, pure thought thinking of itself, but not
the self-contained Trinity of Christian theism in whom the One and the Many
cohere ontologically. Aristotle, despite the smooth rendering by Thomas
Aquinas, fits clumsily and awkwardly into the history of Christian theology. He
is a foreign element in the Christian tradition who makes reasoning autonomous
and non-derivative, rather than dependent wholly upon God as the ontological
Trinity. William Edgar correctly makes the point that Immanuel Kant ‘criticized
the theistic proofs because he could not see how beginning with autonomous
reason would lead to anything else but a “god” who is in the image of the human
bring, rather than the true God revealed from heaven’.[46]
In the last analysis, Roman Catholic theology makes the question of authority depend
upon the autonomous reason of fallen humanity, rather than on the ontological
Trinity speaking in Scripture and his eternal plan for the fullness of time.
‘The result is that the voice of God as the controller and governor of man and
the universe can never speak through the voice of the Pope’.[47]
The Pope in the final analysis is simply a fallen human being ‘teaching as
doctrines the commandments of men’ (Matthew 15:9).
In the same way, though without the sacerdotalism of Rome, Arminian
theologians teach that the doctrine of human responsibility ‘presupposes the
rejection of the idea of the plan of God as all-inclusive’.[48]
In other words, we arrive at the same position of assuming human autonomy over
and against the autonomy of God. In reality, human beings are fully responsible
creatures precisely because God is sovereign over all the affairs of human
history and the decision making of human beings. Human beings are responsible
to God precisely because he is Lord of space, time, and human history. There is
not a rouge atom in this vast universe outside of his sovereign control. God
does not merely probably exist as the Arminian contends. He is not merely a
possibility. God certainly exists, and the argument for his existence at least
theoretically conceived is watertight, since without him it is impossible to
make sense of human history governed as it is by the all-comprehensive and
eternal plan of God. Without the presupposition of God at the back of reality,
human history is utterly meaningless and nihilistic in the final analysis.
However, in reality, God stands behind human history guiding all things
according to his perfect will and providential rule. The Arminian behaves more
Scripturally than the Roman Catholic, but he still allows the natural man
autonomous reason with respect to accepting or rejecting the Scriptures.
According to Van Til, ‘The Arminian will speak to the unbeliever about the
Bible as the inspired and infallible revelation of God. He will argue that it
is the most wonderful book, that it is the best-seller, that all other books
lose their charm while the Bible does not. All of these things the unbeliever
may readily grant without doing any violence to his own position and without
feeling challenged to obey its voice … [His] position allows for sacred books
and even for a superior book. But the one thing that it does not allow for is
an absolutely authoritative book. Such a book presupposes the existence and
knowability of the self-contained God of Christianity’. Yet it is only in the
message of such a book, with such an authority, that there is any hope for lost
humanity. The message of this book is not merely probably true, it is
absolutely and certainly true. Jesus Christ himself says concerning this book,
‘Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth’ (John 17:17). ‘Unless one
accepts the Bible for what true Protestantism says it is, as the authoritative
interpretation of human life and experience as a while, it will be impossible
to find meaning in anything, it is only when this presupposition is constantly
kept in mind that a fruitful discussion of problems relating to the phenomena
of Scripture and what it teaches about God in his relation to man can be
discussed’.[49]
Ultimately, the non-Christian will resist this truth until his heart is
softened by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Only such a work of grace
will bring the sinner to accept the absolute and sovereign rule of a holy and
righteous God. As Jesus says to Nicodemus, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless
one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3:3).
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[1]
Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg,
NJ, 1998), p. 2.
[2]
Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, p. 3.
[3]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ, 2003), p. 27.
[4]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 28–29.
[5]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 29.
[6]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 29.
[7]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 29.
[8]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 31–32.
[9]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 36.
[10]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 40.
[11]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 40–41.
[12]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 42–43.
[13]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 46.
[14]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 49.
[15]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 51.
[16]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 52.
[17]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 53.
[18]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 55.
[19]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 57.
[20]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 62.
[21] Van
Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 62.
[22]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 71.
[23]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 71.
[24]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 73.
[25]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 74.
[26]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 75.
[27]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 77.
[28]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 79–80.
[29]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 85.
[30]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 98.
[31] Van
Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 98.
[32]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 107.
[33]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 115.
[34]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 117.
[35]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 124.
[36]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 127.
[37]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 128.
[38] Van
Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 128. See footnote.
[39]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 130.
[40]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 131.
[41]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, pp. 131–32.
[42]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 136.
[43]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 141.
[44]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 161.
[45] John
Frame, Van Til: A
Reassessment (frame-poythress.org) (accessed 23/07/2024).
[46]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 178. See footnote.
[47]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 182.
[48]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 183.
[49]
Van Til, Christian Apologetics, p. 197.