Cornelius Van Til wanted to be a farmer. He was born in Holland and grew up on a farm in Indiana. As a young man, he preached at street-corner evangelistic services in Hammond. At Calvin College and then at Princeton, his extraordinary insights into complex issues were readily recognized. Van Til could never go back to the farm. Instead he became one of the foremost Christian apologists of our time.
Van Til has nonetheless kept very much down-to-earth. Like most great thinkers he is not easy to understand, but unlike them he goes the extra mile to reach a broad audience. At eighty-two, he still preaches occasionally. And a distinctive of his scholarly writings is his homespun exposition. For example, he compares the reliability of Scripture to a concrete bridge. The flaws in Bible translations he likens to water on a bridge—the water presenting no great problem unless it gets deep enough to kill the car’s engine.
In one major work Van Til structures his argument around the plight of a young pastor with a congregation challenged by modern skepticism. How will he guide his flock, Van Til asks. “He has no time to read many books. He lives too far from the centers of Christian learning to profit from personal conversation with others of like mind who have studied these matters in depth. He needs, therefore, a criterion by which he himself may be able to distinguish truth from error.” Van Til launches into an involved philosophical discussion, but repeatedly comes back to the young pastor and what it all means to him.
Outline Of The Van Til Apologetic
A. My problems with the “traditional method.”
1. This method compromises God himself by maintaining that his existence is only “possible” albeit “highly probable,” rather than ontologically and “rationally” necessary.
2. It compromises the counsel of God by not understanding it as the only all-inclusive, ultimate “cause” of whatsoever comes to pass.
3. It compromises the revelation of God by:
a. Compromising its necessity. It does so by not recognizing that even in Paradise man had to interpret the general (natural) revelation of God in terms of the covenantal obligations placed upon him by God through special revelation. Natural revelation, on the traditional view, can be understood “on its own.”
b. Compromising its clarity. Both the general and special revelation of God are said to be unclear to the point that man may say only that God’s existence is “probable.”
c. Compromising its sufficiency. It does this by allowing for an ultimate realm of “chance” out of which might come “facts” such as are wholly new for God and for man. Such “facts” would be uninterpreted and unexplainable in terms of the general or special revelation of God.
d. Compromising its authority. On the traditional position the Word of God’s self-attesting characteristic, and therewith its authority, is secondary to the authority of reason and experience. The Scriptures do not identify themselves, man identifies them and recognizes their “authority” only in terms of his own authority.
4. It compromises man’s creation as the image of God by thinking of man’s creation and knowledge as independent of the Being and knowledge of God. On the traditional approach man need not “think God’s thoughts after him.”
5. It compromises man’s covenantal relationship with God by not understanding Adam’s representative action as absolutely determinative of the future.
6. It compromises the sinfulness of mankind resulting from the sin of Adam by not understanding man’s ethical depravity as extending to the whole of his life, even to his thoughts and attitudes.
7. It compromises the grace of God by not understanding it as the necessary prerequisite for “renewal unto knowledge.” On the traditional view man can and must renew himself unto knowledge by the “right use of reason.”
B. My understanding of the relationship between Christian and non-Christian, philosophically speaking.
1. Both have presuppositions about the nature of reality:
a. The Christian presupposes the triune God and his redemptive plan for the universe as set forth once for all in Scripture.
b. The non-Christian presupposes a dialectic between “chance” and “regularity,” the former accounting for the origin of matter and life, the latter accounting for the current success of the scientific enterprise.
2. Neither can, as finite beings, by means of logic as such, say what reality must be or cannot be.
a. The Christian, therefore, attempts to understand his world through the observation and logical ordering of facts in self-conscious subjection to the plan of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture.
b. The non-Christian, while attempting an enterprise similar to the Christian’s, attempts nevertheless to use “logic” to destroy the Christian position. On the one hand, appealing to the non-rationality of “matter,” he says that the chance-character of “facts” is conclusive evidence against the Christian position. Then, on the other hand, he maintains like Parmenides that the Christian story cannot possibly be true. Man must be autonomous, “logic” must be legislative as to the field of “possibility” and possibility must be above God.
3. Both claim that their position is “in accordance with the facts.”
a. The Christian claims this because he interprets the facts and his experience in the light of the revelation of the self-attesting Christ in Scripture. Both the uniformity and the diversity of facts have at their foundation the all-embracing plan of God.
b. The non-Christian claims this because he interprets the facts and his experience in the light of the autonomy of human personality, the ultimate “givenness” of the world and the amenability of matter to mind. There can be no fact that denies man’s autonomy or attests to the world’s and man’s divine origin.
4. Both claim that their position is “rational.”
a. The Christian does so by claiming not only that his position is self-consistent but that he can explain both the seemingly “inexplicable” amenability of fact to logic and the necessity and usefulness of rationality itself in terms of Scripture.
b. The non-Christian may or may not make this same claim. If he does, the Christian maintains that he cannot make it good. If the non-Christian attempts to account for the amenability of fact to logic in terms of the ultimate rationality of the cosmos, then he will be crippled when it comes to explaining the “evolution” of men and things. If he attempts to do so in terms of pure “chance” and ultimate “irrationality” as being the well out of which both rational man and a rationally amenable world sprang, then we shall point out that such an explanation is in fact no explanation at all and that it destroys predication.
C. My proposal, therefore, for a consistently Christian methodology of apologetics is this:
1. That we use the same principle in apologetics that we use in theology: the self-attesting, self-explanatory Christ of Scripture.
2. That we no longer make an appeal to “common notions” which Christian and non-Christian agree on, but to the “common ground” which they actually have because man and his world are what Scripture says they are.
3. That we appeal to man as man, God’s image. We do so only if we set the non-Christian principle of the rational autonomy of man against the Christian principle of the dependence of man’s knowledge on God’s knowledge as revealed in the person and by the Spirit of Christ.
4. That we claim, therefore, that Christianity alone is reasonable for men to hold. It is wholly irrational to hold any other position than that of Christianity. Christianity alone does not slay reason on the altar of “chance.”
5. That we argue, therefore, by “presupposition.” The Christian, as did Tertullian, must contest the very principles of his opponent’s position. The only “proof” of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no possibility of “proving” anything at all. The actual state of affairs as preached by Christianity is the necessary foundation of “proof’ itself.
6. That we preach with the understanding that the acceptance of the Christ of Scripture by sinners who, being alienated from God, seek to flee his face, comes about when the Holy Spirit, in the presence of inescapably clear evidence, opens their eyes so that they see things as they truly are.
7. That we present the message and evidence for the Christian position as clearly as possible, knowing that because man is what the Christian says he is, the non-Christian will be able to understand in an intellectual sense the issues involved. In so doing, we shall, to a large extent, be telling him what he “already knows” but seeks to suppress. This “reminding” process provides a fertile ground for the Holy Spirit, who in sovereign grace may grant the non-Christian repentance so that he may know him who is life eternal (The Reformed Pastor and the Defense of Christianity & My Credo, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Box 185, Nutley, New Jersey. 07110).
People who know Van Til admire not only his mind but also his heart. As a clergyman he has conducted many funerals before a crowd of unbelievers. Even if given only five or ten minutes to speak he invariably presents the Gospel and urges his audience to believe in Christ. Van Til and his wife of fifty-two years have also had an extensive ministry in comforting the bereaved and visiting sick people.
Van Til has been perhaps the most controversial of the really great evangelical thinkers of the twentieth century. Person to person he is gracious, gentlemanly, humble, and considerate. On paper, too, he is respectful of others’ views and highly charitable toward those with whom he disagrees. But in Christian academic circles Van Til has a host of critics—people who vigorously challenge his system while recognizing and respecting his profundity. One such opponent is Gordon H. Clark, who like Van Til ranks at the top of the list of influential evangelical apologists and yet who with Van Til is sometimes labeled an ultra-Calvinist, an appellation rejected by both men.
Van Til taught at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, for more than forty years. He has written numerous books on philosophy, theology, and ethics. He lives in the historic Pennsylvania community of Chestnut Hill on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He was interviewed in his home there on three occasions, and the following questions and answers represent an edited version of the conversations with him.
Question: Dr. Van Til, how do you know that what you believe is true?
Answer: I am sure of my faith because its source is the Bible, the revealed Word of God.
Q: But doesn’t it then become necessary to establish that the Scriptures are true, and that they are as we know them indeed the Word of God?
A: The problem with that question is that it shifts the starting point. I concede that the truth of the Bible is a presupposition. My argument is simply that this presupposition is the only one from which a Christian can begin without surrendering the sovereignty of God.
Q: Are you saying that any kind of human test applied to God and his Word violates the concept of God?
A: That is my basic position.
Q: I might note here that your supporters see you as a great defender of the faith, and even in a recent major critique of your thought it was pointed out that your apologetic represents a position that is now encountered with increasing frequency. On the other hand, isn’t it true that you have been accused by your opponents of substituting proclamation for argument, of championing the idea that the Christian faith is its own best defense?
A: I believe in proclamation. I also believe in the need of defending the faith; Scripture enjoins me to be always ready to give an account of my faith. But there are two ways of defending the faith. One of these begins from man as self-sufficient and works up to God, while the other begins from the triune God of the Scriptures and relates all things to him.
Q: Evangelicals, then, who from your way of thinking should know better, are inadvertently diluting their view of God. Is this it? Don’t you assign such exclusive epistemological authority to Scripture that you part company even with fellow Calvinists?
A: Yes, my good friend Gordon Clark believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, but he builds his philosophical outlook not simply on the Scriptures as such but on the law of contradiction, which has its classic statement in Aristotle and which to my way of thinking has turned out to be an eternally static turnpike in the sky.
Q: What has been your goal in life?
A: When I got my Th.M. from Princeton Seminary and the master’s and doctorate from Princeton University I was questioned by my ecclesiastical superiors as to why I had spent so much time on education. My reply was that the time being what it is we faced the necessity of meeting unbelief on its own ground and meeting not only the man on the street but also the philosophical person. Study was not easy for me. Having grown up on the farm I was used to weeding onions and carrots and cabbages. It was hard to adjust to classroom work; I had labored physically and my body was aching for that.
Van Til served briefly as pastor of a Christian Reformed church at Spring Lake, Michigan, before being summoned back to Princeton to teach. He was told that he would be getting a full professorship. It was a time of great doctrinal turmoil. He taught a year at Princeton and then joined a group of conservatives who left the school to form Westminster Theological Seminary.
Q: Do you have any regrets about the move from Princeton? Wasn’t it a pivotal event that turned over ecclesiological momentum to liberalism for a half-century and left evangelicals struggling for a new start as “independents”?
A: In the spring of 1929 the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. reorganized Princeton Seminary by electing a new board containing in it two signers of the Auburn Affirmation. According to this document “a minister of the gospel may or may not believe such facts and doctrines as the inerrancy of the Scriptures, the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and the continuing life and supernatural power of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If two communists were elected to membership in the Supreme Court of my country I would think of it as a collapse not of verbal but of actual democracy. I felt this way when the assembly took my seminary away from me. The fall of Princeton was a tragedy not only for all who lived the Reformed faith but also for all who love the Lord Jesus Christ. In short, when Princeton fell, evangelical Christianity received a body blow.
A Tribute To Cornelius Van Til
Over the span of a career approaching fifty years Cornelius Van Til has attracted many students to Philadelphia. They have come, responsive to the radically faithful note struck by his reformed presup-positionalism. They wanted a defense of the faith that is methodologically consistent with the faith. His apologetic stands in stark contrast to the classic deductive and inductive rationalism that they had found religiously and scientifically dissatisfying.
Van Til, the pedagogical performer, proved as vigorous in lecture and discussion as the polemics of his writing would suggest. Every student of Van Til can instantly recall the characteristic Van Tillian blackboard graffiti: the foremost symbol being two circles, a big one for the creator, the other for creation with no ontological bridge between. The entire history of philosophy or Christian thought, including most heresy, would be strewn in names and phrases across the board. He scrawled Latin, Greek, German, and Dutch wherever there was room. By the time he finished lecturing his hands, his clothes, and even his face would be chalk-smudged.
Van Til composed complete syllabi for his courses that were virtual textbooks, in many cases en route to publication. His students treasured those syllabi and quoted from them as if they had already been published. Few of his students could easily digest his running critique of the different historical forms of apostate thought, the unfortunate wedding of Christian theology to the apostate system, and his own constructive “theontology” based on the ontological trinity, the creator, and the creator’s analogue, man.
The consumption of chalk and the whir of ideas were symptomatic of an excitement generated not from brilliant eruditions, though some of his skyrocketing digressions could be called that, but from the strong and systematic emphasis on the antithesis between a biblical world and life view and the several intellectual and scientific versions of the carnal mind. Students began to see how far-reaching were the differences between believer and non-believer. For example, the problem of finding a common ground for discussion with non-Christians became a matter of making clear what God has freely given to all of us. Students felt that their minds were freed from a twentieth-century way of thinking. Van Til’s task was to make both despisers and defenders of the faith “epistemologically self-conscious.” For him the journey from philosophical apologetics to evangelism was a mere adjustment in style, not in basic content.
To a man of Van Til’s radical vision, there is much to deplore in the world and in the Church. Yet Van Til is magnanimous, hopeful, and ecumenical; sometimes these qualities come through when he is most polemic. I recall his debating liberal and neo-orthodox champions at Boston University. He graciously, respectfully, but incisively told them that they were going to hell. Van Til lives what he believes.—T. GRADY SPIRES, former student of Van Til and associate professor of philosophy, Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.
Q: Your radical reliance on the Bible makes you have more at stake in the current debate over inerrancy. How crucial is the issue? Granted that doctrines are interdependent, wouldn’t you still agree that there are times in history requiring a focus on certain ones?
A: The biblical teaching about the inerrancy of Scripture is a good deal more important than the present discussion indicates. In the final analysis, I cannot discuss what I believe about Scripture unless at the same time I discuss the content of Scripture. No doctrine of Scripture can stand by itself. I wish that my evangelical brethren would face up to this fact more than they appear to do. To be sure, there have been individual teachings of Scripture that stood in need of special defense. Remember, for example, the old question of whether Christ is a man like God or whether he is God.
Q: As I understand it, you reject all the traditional attempts to prove the existence of God because from the first chapter of Romans we learn that every human being has the idea of God already planted in him.
A: Yes. The traditional ideas of trying to find some neutral, common ground on which the believer and unbeliever can stand are based on the notion that man is autonomous. The ancient Greeks began from man as self-sufficient; they took for granted that all being is one. There was for them no distinction between the creator and his creatures. Holding this view, Plato said that man participated in the being of God as absolutely good; but he found it impossible to say anything by way of conceptual reasoning about the good. It was Diotema the inspired who pointed him to it. This rationalization based on the assumption that man is ultimate found itself absorbed into irrationalism. Aristotle sought to improve on this position by saying that potential being develops into fully actualized being, that is, into thought thinking itself. The god of Aristotle, any more than the god of Plato, does not have a personality, does not know itself, and does not create. No one can prove anything when there is nothing from which to begin. To have faith in faith is blind faith. It is meaningless. It is wicked because, as Paul says, all men, knowing God, hold down this knowledge in unrighteousness. Again, in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul says, “And you he made alive, when you were dead through your trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be bom again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Shall I join blind men to see whether Jesus is right when he says, “I am the light of the world”? Shall the surgeon rely exclusively on the diagnosis the dying patient gives of himself? Did Jesus say to Lazarus that if he did his best he would give him a lift so that together they would get him out of his grave? To be sure, I must be all things to all men, but I establish men in their way unto death if I do not say to them, on the authority of Christ, that only if they repent of their sin will they have eternal life in him. Is this blind faith? On the contrary, it is the only basis man has on which he can stand, to know himself, to find the facts of his world and learn how to relate them to one another. Without the Creator-God-Redeemer of Scripture the universe would resemble an infinite number of beads with no holes in any of them, yet which must all be strung by an infinitely long string. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not by its wisdom know God through wisdom.
Q: But are you really satisfied that Calvinism has an adequate philosophical base, one which commends itself to the human mind in understandable fashion?
A: Calvin says that men take away from God “the chief thing: that he directs everything by his incomprehensible wisdom and disposes it to his own end” (Institutes I 16:4). On election he says: “And as He alone was predestined, as MAN, to be our HEAD, so many of us are also predestined to be His members” (Calvin’s Calvinism, p. 40). If I do not finally attribute my salvation to God’s electing grace, I detract from his glory.
Van Til has a much lighter side. In the classroom he has been enough of a wit to arouse gales of laughter among his students. He admits to throwing chalk at anyone who dared to doze. “One of these bullets drew blood,” he says. “The next class the victim of my violence wore a steel helmet.” Among his students have been such people as the late Edward John Carnell and Francis A. Schaeffer, who went on to important achievements of their own. His refusal to concede any common ground between Christians and non-Christians except that given in Romans 1:19 puts him at odds with most of his peers. He transcends those differences with a warm, kind spirit.
Q: How does conscience fit into your system?
A: I would not think of conscience as some definite entity within my personality. I would think of it as the indestructible consciousness within me that I am a creature of God and will die from my sins unless I repent.
Q: Dispensationalism seems to be the most popular theology today among rank-and-file evangelicals. How do you account for it?
A: I know too little about dispensationalism to make a fair judgment of it.
Q: You have been a little hard on Bill Bright and Campus Crusade. Why?
A: My problem is with the so-called four spiritual laws that are supposed to be the distilled essence of the Gospel. For Paul, the distilled essence of the Gospel is Christ and him crucified, Christ and his resurrection, and these are conspicuous by their absence in the four spiritual laws. I have a similar problem with Schaeffer.
Q: What do you mean?
A: I have not read Francis Schaeffer as warning his fellow evangelical pastors—as he quotes Ezekiel doing—to declare the wrath to come for those who reject God. And, again, with the best of will I cannot find in Schaeffer’s writings what Paul says is the heart of his preaching: Christ and him crucified, and Christ and the resurrection. When I read Matthew 25:46 I shudder at what Jesus says. I know Francis believes that as well as I do. Should he not express himself on these his own convictions?
Q: Your criticism of Clark is of a different character.
A: Yes. With Descartes man declares as clearly as did Adam his independence from God. It is his Fourth of July. One would think that as a believer in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, Clark would have called the attention of his philosophical colleages to the exclusiveness of the god of the Cartesian self and the God, world, self, and Satan of the Genesis account.
Q: This is an urgent question. Clark believes, doesn’t he, that the law of contradiction is implicit in Scripture? That is, he holds Christianity to be true because it is the most consistent system. He believes in logic and reason as an ally, and he contends that universally and necessarily we cannot affirm and deny the same thing at the same time and in the same way. What is wrong with that? Doesn’t it supply him with a common ground and a neutral access to the unbeliever? Doesn’t this aid evangelism?
A: My concern is that the demand for non-contradiction when carried to its logical conclusion reduces God’s truth to man’s truth. It is unscriptural to think of man as autonomous. The common ground we have with the unbeliever is our knowledge of God, and I refer repeatedly to Romans 1:19. All people unavoidably know God by hating God. After that they need to have true knowledge and righteousness restored to them in the second Adam. I deny common ground with the natural man, dead in trespasses and sins, who follows the god of this world. When these people, for whom my wife and I pray constantly, are born anew as Jesus tells Nicodemus they must to be able to see or enter the kingdom of heaven, then we have common ground and will together call other spiritually dead people to repentance and life. The primary task is always to win people to the triune God of the Scriptures. It is in this interest that it is every Christian’s duty to witness. The Christian ought to do this, “speaking the truth in love.”
Q: What did you mean earlier when you called the law of contradiction “an eternally static turnpike in the sky”?
A: I meant that there is no way to get on it.
Q: What would you like to be most remembered for?
A: I should like to be remembered as one who was faithful to him, “from whom, through whom, and unto whom are all things.”
David E. Kucharsky, former senior editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, is editor-designate of “Christian Herald” magazine. He has the M. A. from American.
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
